I was on the verge of dismissing this article until the moment it became apparent to me that the women writing it and myself were actually the same age. What would have been nothing more than a just another bit of digital pulp suddenly became a curiosity to me. I know women younger than me, on the precipice of adulthood. Each and every one of them has a significant other by her side, flanked by a legion of men praying for her lover's funeral desperate for the opportunity to take his place. I know women older than myself, grandmothers and middle-aged aunts trying to find some joy in the existence of their grandchildren despite the fact the children of their children or the offspring of their siblings are afflicted with autism, learning disabilities, or any number of other frailties.
So the women I know have either just taken their first step toward the stage of Nature's passion play or have resigned themselves to finding some solace, as the curtain has started to fall, in the fact that they played some role in the grand drama. The women my own age I once considered friends have fallen conspicuously silent, having fallen in love for the third or fourth time or having conceived their third or fourth child. Still young enough to be carried forward by Life's hectic current, they have little time for the things who, unable to tread water, have been dragged below to drown. As it should be, I suppose. Mothers and fathers have their children to offer up their dreams to, grandmothers and grandfathers have their grandchildren to imagine some future for, and the parodies of humanity who have neither can attempt to pray for themselves knowing all too well no one will listen and, even were it otherwise, there would be no one who cares enough to answer.
Given that, it's a very strange thing to read an article written by a woman my own age, purportedly single as I'm single. Neither of us have children, nor grandchildren. She watched the summer of her youth fade to autumn's golden dusk in the inferno of Hell's Kitchen while I did the same in the suicide forest of Arbor Hill.
Well, according to this not-so-young lady's account, she eventually slipped Satan's concrete Pandemonium and escaped into something akin to Paradise. Perhaps her Heaven was lit by the cheapest neon lights, but it was infinitely preferable to the sulfur bulbs hanging from the trees that illumine the Garden of the Dead. She was wined and dined by beautiful men, only to be fucked and cast aside. She may never have been and will never be anything more than a cum rag but perhaps she can find some solace knowing she was one woven from the finest silk. Her dating articles, all that she had to offer to the world other than her cunt, were nothing more than lies by her very own admission. She sold fantasies to the desperate, the unloved, the unwanted...the very same she herself naively bought so very long ago when she was desperate, unloved and unwanted.
Lord Mephistopheles, to his own chagrin, becomes irrelevant when Faust eagerly takes his place. Men lie to the sons they'll never have, women to the daughters impossible for them, and the Devil shrugs his shoulders and returns to the solitude of Arbor Hill having at long last realized that human beings are willing to believe they've attained Heaven just so long as they descend no deeper than the second circle of Hell.
