RUNNER-UP
Endlessly I scanned through the monotonous sea of online dating profiles, my soul sinking further and further with every swipe left. Was it really this difficult to find a decent, loving man these days? One who treated me like a normal human and knew how to hold an intelligent conversation?
The current profile displayed – one belonging to yet another overly groomed but unsmiling 20-something – answered my question for me. Groaning, I tossed my phone aside and put my head into my hands. Crushingly, this was the world of dating now. Gone were the days of meeting someone in a coffee shop or bookstore, catching their eye from across the room. The vapidity of it all incensed me, and it did all sorts of horrible things to my self-esteem and blood pressure.
I took a deep breath, and turned back to my desktop and what I should have been doing before I got distracted: writing. My magnum opus shone out at me from the screen, the cursor blinking impatiently. I read through what I had written earlier, and my thoughts became wistful. Why couldn’t men be like the heroes in novels and stories? Why couldn’t they learn a thing or two from Mr Darcy?
Maybe I wasn’t being fair; after all, I wasn’t exactly a Disney princess myself. But was a little gentlemanly behaviour really too much to ask for? At this point, I really was going to die alone, crushed to death by my everexpanding book collection. It was either that, or start acquiring a multitude of cats, pronto.
I decided to go for death by books. Don’t get me wrong, cats are cute, but books smell better and don’t require feeding.
I ambled aimlessly around Waterstones, but in the immortal words of Tolkien: not all those who wander are lost. In reality, here was the only place I could escape from the hearts, flowers and the various other saccharine sentiments of the day: Valentine’s Day. It’s not that I hate the occasion, but there’s more to love than the kind that eluded me, including self-love, and for me, that came in the shape of a hot new bestseller.
My heart beat faster as I drank in the pristine pages and smooth spines. One day, my work will be on these shelves. It was a giddying thought. Could these tantalising tomes really have started out as something similar to what was sat on my hard drive at home, filled with mistakes and plot holes? It seemed highly unlikely, and yet I’d read enough about the writer’s craft to know that must be the case.
A new release from my favourite author suddenly caught my attention, and I grabbed it, scanning the back and perusing the pages.
Someone passed by behind me. I didn’t look up, but I knew by the soft cough that accompanied his reaching for a book that my fellow browser was a man. I expected him to move on pretty quickly, but he didn’t.
