I Will Find You

Scrolling had become habitual for Jamie. He knew it was a problem, but then everything was a problem since Alice left. His mind wandered and meandered and whichever path it took there Alice was. She haunted him day and night. Nights were another problem. He struggled to get to sleep. Stared at his phone until it was a blur and even then he found no release. Exhausted but not tired. Trapped under a rock of despondency that he couldn’t budge.

Everything seemed to conspire against him. His mind was scrolling even after he had put his phone away. Twenty minutes of fidgeting and he’d find the phone in his hand again. When he lay there in the dark he was so utterly alone, but at the same time he was in the midst of a crowd. A throng of noisy thoughts assailing him.

When he got to a more peaceful state he would drop towards sleep only to experience a strange itching sensation. He could swear there was a ghost with a feather tasked with preventing his descent into much needed oblivion. He could have cried as he scratched those itches. Temporary respite from one of many tortures. His life was now a hell on Earth.

He lived in hope and that hope was as false as it came. The promise of Alice had never come to fruition. Her sales pitch had been excellent. Her execution had been sublime. Only, she’d executed Jamie and he now dwelt in a grey area between life and death. He didn’t want this life of his. Not anymore. Alice had spread like a bramble throughout his existence and when she walked out on him she tore everything to pieces.

The scrolling was a search for meaning. Jamie wanted to find the real her. He knew she was out there somewhere and someone was getting the best of her. He felt cheated. There was a hole in his life that he needed to fill. There was an urgency to this task. Every day that passed he leaked further into that hole. He didn’t know how long he could last out. There wasn’t much of him left.

A stranger looked back at him in the mirror. That stranger would then sit on the sofa and hop from one app to another. Hours went by in seconds image after image was analysed. Somewhere in this infinite haystack was a needle. His needle. He’d sew himself back up with it and find a way forward in this world that become alien in the blink of an eye.

She had waved at him as she walked away for that last time. He’d waved back and smiled. Oblivious to the significance of the moment. The meaning of it would swing gracelessly up and away and come back to meet with the subtlety of a wrecking ball.

The letter was sitting on the mat that evening. Later, having read it, he wondered how long it had been there. Infecting the foundations of his home so that they crumbled around him as he read her final farewell.

There was no sentiment in her words. Nor could Jamie find any between their ranks. His fingers became numb with the coldness conveyed by the finality contained on the pages. She’d typed the note and printed it. The only word that was hand written was his name on the envelope. There were a couple of lines confirming her departure and the rest were the details that must be addressed as a result of her bringing their arrangement to a close.

There was a list of the possessions that he was required to pack for her and leave in the garage to be collected at the weekend. A friend would come at the allotted time to remove all evidence of her having been in his company. He could barely read the items she had claimed for her own, but got the gist all the same. She had over extended herself here. Grabbing more than her fair share.

In a daze, he staggered around the house. Thought he would throw up. Turned out he was too weak and dizzy to do anything of the sort. Already the atmosphere had changed in what once was their home. The air had been sucked out of the place and his breath was laboured, muscles aching and seizing.

Her absence hit home with all she had already taken. The barbs of these losses raked his heart and brutalised his mind with myriad questions filled to the brim with recriminations. This army of doubt, confusion and pain led with a vanguard of how could I be so stupid? He’d not noticed her piecemeal withdrawal. Drawers half empty. Anything of value to Alice was already gone.

In time, he would fail to discover possessions that meant something to him and were all his. Always his. Silly things really. An item of stationary. A screwdriver that had been his Grandpa’s. Vinyl records missing from their sleeves. His favourite shirt. These clever depth charges blew holes in his hull every time he thought he was sailing away from the warzone that had once been his life. As he resurrected his tortured corpse he would reach for a talisman of meaning only to find that it had been lost in a battle fought while he was away with the fairies. A deserter in his own life. Punished after the fact. And he knew these sentimental items were lost in the most tragic of ways. Burnt and buried. No one would appreciate them again. Not even as an echo of the love that Jamie had imbued them with.

And so as the real world burnt down around him, Jamie turned to the unreal in order to find some meaning to tether his frantic and ashamed soul to a rock that he might one day build upon.

The dating apps were a revelation. He entered that land speculatively. Decided to do so before he could suffer the anticipation of what lay before him for too long. He hoped to defeat the failure of never beginning before it took a hold of him with it’s poisonous teeth. Delirium and delusion stalked all his days as it was.

Uploading his profile was a chore that grated upon him. More so as he researched the apps that were best suited to him. He didn’t want to pay. This he knew was a prejudice that ran in accord with his never wanting to send a child of his to private school. The schooling principle had yet to be tested. There was a growing chance it never would be. As he ticked box after box, he wondered whether he might meet a woman whose children were already at a posh school and whether this would be a deal breaker. Self-denial as a result of one’s principles was a bridge too far for most. One way or another, people could be bought. He was conscious of his market value as he created a profile to be pored over by disinterested and desensitised women.

He was familiar with some of the dynamics at play as he opened the profiles of would-be matches. He’d done his research. A quick online search confirmed the war stories friends had shared. Not that he didn’t believe them. More that he wished it were otherwise.

The course of love doesn’t always run true and so Jamie took a deep breath and began a thankless journey that was seemingly without end. Initially he would be discerning, so that the success of any meeting and subsequent union would be optimised. He resented the formulaic approach he was lulled into, but this was how things were. There were no alternatives.

Elimination was easy and Jamie was relieved that he seldom rejected a woman on looks alone. The bios sealed the deal, or rather created a lack of cohesion that he felt was insurmountable. Many of the profiles were combative. Telling the reader off for past sins that they had no hand in. Later, he would discern an honesty in this. People were a walking punishment. They held onto the sins of others and made of them a weapon to even the score. Better to see the blow coming than to awake to a discomfort of wounds that were on the verge of becoming fatal.

Often, he hid his frustration and disappointment with amusement. He found entertainment where he could. The profiles demanding good communication were a case in point. Telling someone that they must give good communication was idiotically self-defeating. Don’t ask me how my day is going! Jamie was once tempted to call a lady called Jane out on the ridiculousness of the defences she had created. He decided to withdraw instead. Winning that battle may be a feint that led him into a never ending series of battles. A good relationship relied upon great communication, but also the humility not to pursue victory over the other. Winning arguments would always lose you the person you loved, and quite rightly because by then you had lost sight of that person and what counted.

As he scrolled through the profiles of women who had been disappointed in love, Jamie learnt a lot about this cross-section of the population. Mostly he grew to understand that they had been hurt and that online dating perpetuated this hurt. Those who stipulated no baggage in their male suitors were deluded he knew. They may have owned their shit, but they didn’t own themselves. By this stage in life, there were wounds that didn’t heal. The trick was to build the courage to allow the inner light to shine through those wounds. To be conspicuous in the way you lived so that you were seen. Because only by being seen could you be heard.

All these lessons were hard won and although Jamie may have appreciated them, the frustration of the process threw everything into shadow. He didn’t have to see the stats to know that a man on a dating app had to swipe right hundreds of times in order to get just one hit. And it was a hit. A dopamine hit to feed a growing addiction.

Hits weren’t a guarantee of anything though. Right from the start, Jamie was ghosted more often than not. The dater was there, but she wasn’t. He guessed that her inbox was jam packed with blokes and she had her pick.

Subsequent conversations could be very stilted. He was a bright bloke and articulate, but he needed to be thrown a bone in order to kick start the chat. He wasn’t a performer and he wasn’t a marketeer. Deep down, he was a romantic and he wanted things to be right from the outset. For someone to like him for who he really was and maybe grow to love him on that basis.

One app threw in a free daily match. Again there was the buzz of success. But invariably these matches were with women who lived five thousand miles away. Why five thousand miles he couldn’t quite figure, other than the distance encompassed destinations that were a mecca for a certain kind of man of a certain age. He wondered whether holiday companies had a commercial deal with this app. After all, it was all about money. Gamify the process and monetise it to the hilt.

The investment of thousands of right swipes in order to stand the chance of a decent online chat came at an addictive cost and Jamie was increasingly aware that this somehow plugged into Alice wounds. Wounds of validation and worth that had pre-existed Alice but become more pronounced thanks to her concerted ministrations.

Any prospect of healing faltered as he attempted to find the connection he had been deprived of. Connection was important. Essential even. He was right when he came to this, but his search was damaging him all over again. He could see this in the brokenness he scrolled through over and over again But there were no alternatives. This was what life had become. A desperate sausage grinder that kept on turning. A pain-filled journey that Jamie could only hope spat him out with someone who he could bond with. Someone who would risk everything they had left to climb over their pain and meet him in a no man’s land in which they would try to make things work.

He met three women during his quest. All of them nice enough. He was ashamed of his hypocrisy when it came to why it couldn’t work. He wouldn’t live with their brokenness. He told himself it wasn’t their wounds that appalled him. He described their sticking points as blind spots. Places where they had failed to grow and perhaps would always fail.

The possibility that he was projecting his faults upon them was too strong to deny. The quandary of his future pained him. Any partner may be a constant reminder of how badly he’d failed in life. Not only his originating sin, but also his inability to learn from it. His lack of mastery of himself. A sinking ship floating off course. Destination unknown. Always further and further away from where he should be. His better self-watched on and bemoaned the squandering of a life that could have held so much more.

Jamie had been cast adrift and alone for over two years when he met his match. Annie was a breath of fresh air in a room gone stale and stagnant with desperation. Everything fell into place as per expectations that he’d furtively held all along. The normalcy of their budding relationship was a tonic to the dating purgatory that he had endured. And she said the same. The relief was palpable and in this state of mutuality their relationship blossomed.

There were those who could have questioned this state of affairs, but Jamie didn’t ask his own questions and hadn’t developed the habit of asking them of others. He protected bubbles in the vain hope that they wouldn’t burst. Such was the impermanence of his existence. He sought a familiarity that he had made unassailable. A fallen god that he sacrificed himself to again and again. Hoping against hope that his pure heart would be enough. Disconnected as it was from his brain and his gut.

And all the while Annie smiled her sweet smile and played along. Because life was merely a game and she had been taught how to bend the rules and play an entirely different game. A game that she could never lose.

As Jamie relaxed into a new life with Annie, his addiction to scrolling diminished and was replaced by his devotion to her. Annie however didn’t share this transformation. Her phone was as much a part of the game as Jamie was, and she got off on his unwitting participation in a menage-a-trois.

The screen of Annie’s phone was of more interest to her than Jamie ever was. He was a means to an end whereas her phone was a portal to many more means to far more ends. Of particular interest to her was a group that had formed in a hidden parallel to the dating apps. A pack of predators gathering at the edge of the herd and watching intently for those they could pick off. Observing. Mirroring patterns. Evolving beyond mere survival. This was the worthy pursuit of an exquisite pleasure that few would ever discover let alone understand.

Annie fed upon energy. The energy produced by people. There was so much of it all around her and so much of it was wasted. Annie was a final receiver and she was a connoisseur. The vintage of the energy she took had to be just so. She had developed her tastes within the pack she had joined from an early age. Learnt that her specific tastes matched the dynamic she most enjoyed. Picking up the wounded as they found their feet and enjoyed the renewal of a hope that she then drained from them.

Right now, as she sat on the closed seat of the toilet in Jamie’s house, she messaged Alice and congratulated her on a job well done. Alice was a breaker. She found new meat and took her fill. Once someone like Alice had completed her work, people like Jamie were marked. That had always been the case, but the internet had added a whole other dimension to the proceedings. The sharing of intel made things far easier and the feeding all the more sweet and fulfilling.

It were as though Alice had unzipped her skin and shed the pretence of her life with Jamie and Annie had come along and put the costume on to pick up where Alice had left off. Only it wasn’t the skin that was possessed, it was the person who gazed adoringly upon that skin.

Annie smiled to herself as she closed the app dedicated to the predators in the midst of humanity. She licked her lips lasciviously in anticipation of her next feed as she flushed the toilet.

Jamie was sitting on the sofa. A film set up and ready to play. She sat next to him and used her phone for the first five minutes or so. Chatting to other meals. Lining them up for the coming days and weeks. She needed a balanced diet just like the best of them. That was what made her so good at this.

“Why has he pulled a gun on that man?” she asked Jamie. And she enjoyed his reaction. The suppression of frustration that she would stoke over the coming months. He missed the look of naked hunger she gave him.

Later, she stroked his head and eyed him like a pet. A willing lamb to the slaughter. Dwelling in the place of its execution and sleepwalking towards its annihilation. Annie always got her man and she knew exactly how to finish the job.