ForNever

Your opinion of forever, as an abstract and improbable concept, ranges from wounded disbelief to abject disgust. The word exists only for those without your particular and discerning chromosome. The gentler sex has tried to hand you the ominous gift before, fair fingers shoving a pretty package at you with a card emblazoned with 'mine.' The prospect of eternity, stuffed into a box of dedication topped with the garish bow of commitment, is a hollow weight that suggests it's as empty as the guillotine is sharp. And your neck tends to ache at the thought of a one night stand cattle prodding you into a relationship.

The nuns used to talk about the Antichrist and forever sounds a lot like him. The Father of Lies, the embodiment of prolonged torture, has a face that looks suspiciously like every girlfriend who's ever expected you to make an everlasting vow before God and a wisely disapproving family. Weddings are the culminated symbol of the promise but 'til death do you part' is the terrifying reality. Satan invented matrimony as a thank you to Adam for falling so easily.

When it all began, you were a mirror to your predecessor.

At seven years old all of the boys in your play circle had pinky sworn to never kiss a girl and you were the first to break it. At nine each of your pals shook hands on the plan to never date a girl and though witnesses will testify that you'd even spit on your palm, your first girlfriend kissed you in front of them days later. At thirteen you couldn't recognize your friends and the strangers wearing lip gloss hurled you into the fiery world of intimacy.

You've long blamed that initial effort to emulate maturity for snuffing the instinct to seek a lasting mate. She'd been slow, painfully so in an attempt to savor like you were a stolen lollipop. The imagery disturbs you now, shiny lips too small around a piece of you that begged for something else. Anything else. It took… forever. And the wait hadn't been worth it. That moment ruined your already strained hope in love. The act was neither an emotion nor a substitute for one. It was a function akin to brushing teeth; good for the body but in no way connected to the heart.

Eventually the experts told you that you're from Mars and this explains why the Venus-bred females pulling at you for sustenance walk away hungry. They want you to fulfill their primitive needs but you didn't sign up to be anyone's buffet. The trick, you've discovered, is exiting the menu before the line gets unmanageable. If machismo originates from Mars, then vanity springs from Venus as the ones you give away are hardly pleased with the re-gifting. And the only explanation for your colossally prickly luck is that every woman you've scorned is a reincarnated voodoo priestess.

The version of you that is supposed to carry on in some adult fashion oozes back to the familiar crevices of youth by engaging in activities not approved for public inspection. Of course that was always a particular favorite, turning outings into a naughty performance. But never, never slowly and always with an inappropriate finger signaling to the watchers what they can do with their mate-for-life notions.

You like other people's discomfort.

There's no longer just a principal's office when caught and your rap sheet is labeled 'interesting' by its viewers. But the quicker the incident, the swifter the escape, the further from forever you fly. Everything must proceed at the speed of thought because only by racing through the journey can you stay ahead of claws trying to scratch the freedom out of you. Subdued is a design style, not a lifestyle.

There's no satisfaction in any arrangement involving a stark white picket fence and childbearing hips wrapped in a polka-dot apron. Thus as time advances and you're well past the age of settlement, you jab a still-defiant fist at the abomination called domesticity. It can't touch you with its slow, sinister savorings orchestrated by the prince of darkness. And though this one whispers of something else, anything else, your chromosomes remind you that she's Venusian and you hand her back the box of eternity with a vow of fornever.

You tell her the Antichrist of Forever is real and he's not invited to Mars.