The “What If” Situation

Sometimes I wonder who the fuck I am, word to Mac Miller.

But not you. You know who the fuck you are.

You are what they refer to as a “wave monster”.

You’re out partying on a Friday night at a local nightclub. The mixture of eclectic lights, ravenous music, and consistent shots of tequila, is enough to put any seizure-prone individual in a coffin that same minute. You are also there on a mission: take the baddest girl you meet back home. All your friends say you’re a ladies man, but you tire of the constant praise, because you haven’t been in a worthwhile relationship in YEARS. You gave love a shot plenty of times in the past, but things never worked in your favor, so you just said fuck it. Honestly, are you really a ladies man? Or just a thot?

What if the mission fails? Well, there’s always next weekend.

No matter, because the DJ just put on that one song with the trumpet in the background. A quick check into your personal Shazam reveals that this song is called “Baila Conmigo”. Besides the point, this clusterfuck of noise has brought more randoms together than Tinder, and you intend on participating in this spectacle.

Not a second passes until you pull up on a bodacious woman with more curves than a college class. She’s feeling you, and you’re feeling her. She’s drunk and high on hookah; you’re drunk and high on molly and a dash of coke. Her friends are giving you the judgmental stares that are to be expected from a scenario like this, and your solution is to send an armada of soldiers (AKA your friends) to keep them at bay.

It works like magic.

Bottle service is ordered at the behest of the group, and the night stretches on. Before long, everyone is coupled up and dancing with one another, more drugs are consumed, and the idea of an afterparty is introduced.

After squeezing everyone in 2 Uber XL’s, you really get to kick things off with the bodacious woman. She understand your confidence through body language on the dance floor, and now she’s being exposed to your charismatic persona through intimate conversation in the back seat. Sparks begin to fly as you give her remnants of your stash in the backseat.

Arriving at the function, you two can’t keep your clammy hands off of each other, and before you know it, she flat out invites you to her place. Thank goodness, because you just realized you didn’t clean up your place before you left to the club. Also, you were growing weary of the alcohol consumption. Not to mention it was close to 5am.

Arriving at hers, she ragdolls you all over her studio. You think it’s hot that she has her own place, because that must mean she has her shit together. It’s a nicely-composed setting, with a minimalist approach to living. She must be an artist of some type, you think to yourself. The walls stop moving as the drugs fizzle out of your system. Clothes start to disappear, condoms start to appear, and the night reaches its climax.

The next day, you wake up, head pounding, sun shining right on your dehydrated face, and the smell of… bacon? She’s cooking you breakfast! As you rise out of bed, you go to the bathroom to freshen up, and you line up some more drugs to wake you up. You consider the possibility that you may have a problem, but simply chalk it up it to the territory.

As soon as you finish eating breakfast, she insists on a round 2. You go for it, seeing how her scrambled eggs were incredible, and you had to thank her somehow. Afterwards, you share a beer with her, and call your Uber. As it arrives, you give her an awkward hug, and she hands off her social media accounts. Not her phone number though, which you find weird, but whatever.

“Another meaningless hookup”, you think to yourself as you look out the window of your Uber. “At least I got her Instagram”.

5 years pass, and you’re expecting your first child with her. The marriage a year prior went smoothly as ever. About 70% of the people present that night that you met her weren’t at the wedding, but that’s just because they were stuck in their ways, while you found something worthwhile. You don’t ever intend on telling your child of the wild hookup you went through to meet the mother. Leaving that degenerate aspect of your life behind was something you looked forward to all your life. You never thought you’d make it into the dating scene, as commitment scared the fuck out of you, but you took a leap, and landed the jump.

At long last, you weren’t delegated to a state of being a “what if”.

FUCK.

The “what if” is best characterized as an archetype of sorts. To be denoted as a “what if”, you must be seen as a person that has potential in someone else’s life, but is always set aside for someone else, no matter the circumstance.

“Oh, but Poe, isn’t that what a side piece is?”

The crucial difference between the two is that a side piece chooses to be one. while a “what if” doesn’t want to be one. The side piece’s voluntary inclusion in someone’s relationship via means of an affair means that they understand the consequence of simply fucking. The person that is cheating will undoubtedly set ground rules for the side piece to abide by, and most of the time, everything will go smoothly for adultery.

But when the side piece catches feelings like a fucking idiot, that’s when they are officially promoted to a state of “what if”.

Once you want something bigger… something exclusive, then that’s when your transformation from SP to WI is complete. Don’t do it to yourself.

Another approach is the fuck buddy perspective. Imagine you become really cool with someone, and for the sake of lust, you both agree to fuck each other to keep the juices flowing (physically and metaphorically). Once again, ground rules are established, such as no feelings, and no exclusivity to one another. But then, inevitably, you catch feelings, while he starts dating around. At that point, you’re fucked. You just don’t know it yet.

“What if we dated? What would change? I really like you, and I don’t see why we can’t take this to the next level,” You ask your friends with benefits during dinner at a local Italian restaurant one day.

Shit gets awkward REAL quick. He looks down, plays with his food, and goes for a bite. Then, he almost chokes on his pasta. You ask if he’s okay, and he doesn’t respond until he clears his airway.

“Everything would change. It would be weird. You’re my best friend. I told you I was just in it for the fun! Besides, I’m seeing this really awesome chick, and I would still like to be close, but we can’t keep hooking up anymore.”

He tells you this on your birthday. You used the make-up kit he copped for you just last week, got all pretty for him, and now he hits you with this bullshit?

But you should’ve known. He was in it for the pleasure, and you were too, but you’re unfortunately more incapable of suppressing emotions than he is. He offers to pay the tab in its entirety, and you tell the waitress to split the bill. As he rants on and on about how you should’ve known what it was, you sit there in silence and call your Lyft home. When it arrives, you storm out, and break into tears. The driver asks what’s wrong, and you politely respond, scared that if you say something rude (like mind your fucking business), he might kidnap you.

Feeling dejected, what can do you now but go home and binge-watch “You”?

Congratulations! You have now become a “what if”.

Let’s say everything is actually going perfect. You meet someone at a house party, and then you go on a few dates in order to get to know them better. The dates are amazing, unlike anything you’ve ever done before. You never knew you were this charming, as an endless barrage of jokes and adventures through metropolises in the area prove to her that you’re a dope individual. You enjoy each other’s companies, and as things are starting to pick up, you get the news.

Your job is sending you to fucking Arizona for 8 months to fill in for a branch manager that is going on leave to deal with unprecedented family issues. They will send you back home after that time expires, but it’s still a long time away from your established setting.

This is all in bad timing because things were going smooth with her, but you have no other option but to pack up and leave her behind.

You tell her not to hold her breath for you, and urge her to continue to live her life as is. You don’t feel obligated to hold her hostage, and you haven’t even done enough with her to consider a relationship, so you tell her you’ll pick back up where you left off once you come back.

You never do.

You should’ve known it wouldn’t have worked out. You do your best to keep up with her, but work gets in the way, and the phone calls became less frequent. Then, about halfway throughout your stay in Arizona, you find out she’s dating someone. And she only told you because she was drunk.

It sinks your heart, but it’s expected.

You don’t even have the guts to let her know how you still feel, so you stupidly cut her off. Out comes the Tinder app, and you begin to dabble in meaningless hookups in Arizona. The boys at the office are proud of you for breaking out of your comfort zone, but you never wanted to. You reach out to her after you’ve come to your senses, but she doesn’t respond back. Well deserved, you guess. You end up putting “Throw Away” by Future on repeat.

Fast forward to the day before you’re set to come home, and you get a call late night. It’s her.

She starts engaging in meaningless small talk, but you’re just confused because you weren’t expecting to talk to her at all, especially now. She begins to tell you all about her life since the last time you spoke, and then she says she’s glad you’re coming home. You don’t know how to react, so you say the same.

Touching down in your hometown, your phone is bombarded with texts from all your friends saying they want to see you. You end up seeing most of them that first weekend as you engage in nihilism and party until the sun’s up. She wasn’t present for that excursion.

The following week, you reach out to her, and invite her to grab a drink. She accepts, and you two find yourselves clinking glasses, and making fun of the idiots of the world like you used to do. After a round of shots, you tell her that you missed her, and you go for a kiss.

She rejects you.

You end up drunkenly pouring your soul out, and she subsequently explains that she’s still in a relationship with the fucker from before. Fucker, because you grew a great distaste for this mystery guy. You know, the one she would never talk about.

She goes on a tirade on how everything she sees in you, she doesn’t see in the mystery guy. You gaze at her, confused, because why would she remain with someone that doesn’t make her happy the way you do, according to her own words?

You tell her you still have feelings, and she tells you it’s just not gonna happen, because she can’t fuck over a nice guy like the mystery guy. In a sense, you’re weirdly happy she rejected you, because that means she won’t ever cheat. But everything at the forefront hurts, and then she hits you with the KO punch.

“You’re like the best boyfriend I never had,” she says. Those words… a chasm of potential, a symbolism for hope in an alternate future, finish you off. You chug your beer, and exit the bar.

Congratulations! You have now become a “what if”.

You wished she never called you in the first place before you came home, because things would’ve been easier if you just forgot about her, and vice versa. Your friends end up cheering you up in the weeks that follow, and you dissolve all sentiment thereafter. As the degenerate ventures add up, your social circles place upon you the moniker “wave monster”, due to your ability to party like a madman. They bring you out to a local nightclub one Friday night, and that’s when you meet a bodacious woman…

Men are trash, but women are garbage. The inconsistencies of the dating arena are just too stringent to avoid being a “what if” at some point, but these are the cards we have been dealt, so fucking deal with it. The end of the world won’t be your inability to find the soulmate of your dreams. Fact of the matter is, they don’t exist. You’ll just have to accept the next best thing; someone that truly cares about your physical and spiritual well-being. It’s a lot of pressure to place on any single being, but with growth, MOSTLY anything is feasible.

It could be much worse. The world may be rapidly accelerating in temperature, severe forest fires could be killing off millions, if not, billions of animals, as well as costing us our environment to a staggering degree, or we could have a bimbo of a president who makes the United States the laughing stock of the world, and who has the potential to knock over the first domino towards a large scale conflict in the Middle East once more. There could even be a viral disease spreading amongst the masses, catapulting the human species into disarray.

Oh, wait…