I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but sometime in the last year, my life started to feel like a movie I've seen before.
Like sitting with my childhood friend on a Saturday afternoon, telling her about a horrific date while she is breastfeeding her newborn and reading a book to her one-year-old and trying to stay focused by my story. And suddenly I had a flash of Carrie in Sex and the City talking to her friend whose a mom and has a million things happening at once and can't quite keep up with her single friend's dating tales.
Or feeling like I should really be in the smoking-buddies crowd at work, because apparently that's where all the important stuff happens and if you're in that crowd, then you're more likely to score more points with the boss. You know, like in that episode of Friends' when Rachel pretends she's a smoker so she can be in on all the important decisions.
Having a 'friend with benefits' but it never turning into what it was supposed to (they bother end up madly in love with each other), like in that film with Ashton Kutcher. Or was it Justin Timberlake? To be fair, I have seen the good ending of that actually happen in real life. But it never happens to you now does it?
What does happen to you is: Getting a booty-call at 2am from an ex-lover who thinks it's okay because, hey, you've already slept together and he just assumed that you're still completely single and not busy at 2am on Friday night (which is true, but that's completely besides the point). Getting stuck in snowstorm with the one man you always wished you could get stuck in a snowstorm with, only he doesn't touch you once and it's anything but the romantic story you played in your head for years. Getting stalked by a really, really weird guy at a bar to the point where you actually fear he might follow you home. Hearing your (adorable) American friend telling you the fortune teller says she will meet her king sometime in April, and actually holding on to that hope. All scenes that could be in a movie I've seen, I'm sure.
And of course, the classic that's basically been on repeat for the last year: sitting at the dinner table with only married-couples and being the only single one there, feeling like the seventh wheel. Right from that scene where Bridget Jones gets a zillion questions about "why is it that so many women in there thirties are now single, Bridget?" and realising that you are in fact, a real life Bridget.
All of it makes me laugh. Inwardly. Thinking that at least, someone else out there has experienced these things, that's why they wrote about them. We write what we know. I figure I should start writing those down again, for the some of us who need reassurance that we're not the only ones. That I'm not the only one.
