Unnecessarily Virgin

Bored as fuck. No work. Independence day, apparently. So starting this. Anyway, here I go.

I am twenty-nine years old, and I have been unnecessarily virgin this entire time. A vast, echoing, ridiculous monument to my own staggering stupidity, sitting right here in this chair. Twenty-nine years of a physical body wasting away in a bell jar of my own construction, waiting for some cosmic permission slip that apparently everyone else just forged for themselves.

And now? Now my phone lights up like a cheap slot machine. Over the last three months alone, three separate women have told me this. Two juniors, and one from my own batch. In a batch where the gender ratio was already scraping the bottom of the barrel, where there were barely any girls to begin with. All of them from those two wasted years in Trichy. Two agonizing years of going into twenty lakhs of grinding educational debt for absolutely nothing, just to have them message me out of the blue saying, “Oh, I had such a crush on you.”

WTF.

Really? You had a crush on me? Then why didn’t you open your goddamn mouth before? Why did you sit there, watching me sweat through my shirts in complete, humiliating, feverish isolation? I would have bled for you. No, that’s a lie. I was too awkward to even cross the room. I was too busy dissecting the microscopic failures of my own existence to notice anyone looking at me.

Now I look back, dragging the corpse of my memory through the mud, and the signs are everywhere. The lingering glances. The entirely unnecessary touches on the arm. A sickening, visceral catalog of hints I completely, spectacularly missed. I was so wrapped up in my own neurotic, spinning mind that I didn’t see the glaring red neon signs right in front of my face. I was dumb. Just profoundly, aggressively, clinically dumb. And apparently blind to the physical world, too.

Then I hear similar shit from UG mates, old colleagues, ghost-faces from past offices. They all come crawling out of the woodwork now to tell me how much they liked me. As if it’s a compliment . Like I’m supposed to feel good about this retrospective affection, this phantom adoration from people who are now entirely unreachable, living in different cities, speaking different languages of domesticity.

Darn. “Darn,” I say, because I don’t even have the energy for real profanity right now. Just a scraping, hollow sound in the back of my throat.

I could have been living. God, I could have been flesh and blood instead of this… this over-analyzing ghost haunting my own life. I am drowning in the realization of my own idiocy. Twenty-nine years. All for absolutely nothing.