On top of the world and flying higher than ever on the drive back to my place after dropping Piper off that morning, I put my Eminem Party Songs playlist on with glee and cranked the volume in celebration. In no time at all I had lost myself in the ill beats and funky hooks of infectious up-tempo bangers from every era of Slim’s discography, like “Just Lose It,” “Berzerk,” “Cum on Everybody,” “Drug Ballad,” “WTP,” “Encore/Curtains Down,” “‘Till I Collapse,” and “Never Enough,” as I cut loose and got down with my bad self… until I reached my city’s limits, when something started to change. It was clear something real and magical was beginning to form between me and Piper, and right in the middle of one of my all-time favorite bops, “Remember the Name” by Ed Sheeran and featuring Eminem and 50 Cent, my jubilation turned into terror after realizing just how much we both had to lose at this point.

 

It was easy before I meant anything to Piper, when all I had to worry about was my own inconsequentially mundane, singular existence, but now that we shared something that was so extraordinarily special, the stakes had been raised astronomically. Piper had skin in the game now too, and as I pulled into the parking lot of my apartment building, my mind took me, once again, down the endless rabbit hole of hypotheticals and what-ifs, where I got hung up on the thought of how easily we could both lose everything just as quickly as we’d gotten it. Everything I said to or did with Piper now carried a massive amount of weight behind it for both parties, and the repercussions of any misstep could be fatal.

 

As I pulled into my usual spot, suddenly I could hardly breathe from under all the pressure that came with the blossoming of my first-ever relationship, and by the time I got back to my apartment, it had become too much to bear. My confidence gave way, my psyche buckled, and I lost myself in all the ways I might mess up and lose what was forming between me and Piper forever in a deep-seated moment of hysteria that I can only assume was rooted in my lifetime of inadequacies, both actual and perceived. It was a harrowing, ugly few hours, but in the end I persevered in another tiny victory over my brain, and by the time I went to bed the fearful fervor I felt for my future with Piper had turned back into pure excitement.

 

 

The Proposition

When I woke up the next morning, there was only one thing on my mind: how I would secure my future with Piper. I knew she liked me as a friend, but I was growing older by the day, the tide was getting high, and it was time for me to reel in this catch of a lifetime and officially make us a couple once and for all. The answer was as clear as it was simple: I needed more time with her, another grand slam of a date to show her I was the guy worth opening herself up to and getting serious with. The only question was, what was the best possible stage for our third date, something that would help me not only maintain the momentum I’d built up with the first two but surpass it?

 

The first idea that popped into my head was to invite her over to hang out at my parents’ place. Not only had they just built an addition onto my childhood home that included a game room filled with countless amenities perfect for entertaining, but it was secluded and completely separate from the rest of the house—making my first kiss cherry ripe for the popping, should the night take us in that direction. On top of all of that, it’d give me the perfect opportunity to introduce my gal to my goddess of a mother and the wiener dog brothers, Ollie and Herbie. I figured we could shoot some billiards, throw some darts, putt some golf, play some chess, and maybe I’d even get the chance to show her my gargantuan collection of digital movies. Depending on how the night played out, I surmised we may even end up watching one.

 

Lady Bird (2017), V for Vendetta (2005), The Aviator (2004), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Beaver (2011), Wild (2014), and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004): I’d have given up both my sense of smell and my left nut for the opportunity to experience one of these favorites with a girl like Piper, and there was no better place to do it than alone in my parent’s game room. There was no doubt it’s where I would be the most comfortable, but the biggest problem with this idea was how inconsiderate it may have been to ask Piper to come there. Comparatively, I can’t think of many things I’d detest doing more than spending an evening at her parent’s place with her family, and it felt wrong to ask her over in the same fashion in case she felt even remotely the same. Even if she seemed thrilled with the idea, there was no way of knowing for sure if she was going along with it just to be polite. I decided to shelve the idea for now and maybe come back to it after we’d gotten to know each other better.

 

After extensive brainstorming, try as I might, I was unable to come up with an idea even remotely as perfect as my first. I really didn’t want to go somewhere public again because it came with so many different outside factors to take into account, but what else was there? The more I thought about it, the more I was drawn back to my first idea. With nowhere else to turn, I started to look at it differently and began to play the role of devil’s advocate by asking myself some questions: “What are the odds she wouldn’t hate coming to my parent’s place?” “She’s not socially awkward like me; what if she doesn’t share the same distaste for such a meetup?” “In fact, what if she actually looks favorably at a get-together of this nature?” There were no definitive answers to these questions without talking to her about it, and at the end of the day the possibility that she would want to meet there made the notion of asking her simply irresistible.

 

I had decided what I was going to ask Piper to do with me for our third date, and because I told myself courting was an exact science, I then needed to determine when I would ask her. It needed to be soon enough that it didn’t seem like I had forgotten about her, but with enough time passed since our last date to show her that I’m not obsessed with her. Seeing as how she had just taken me to heaven the other night by cuddling my brains out at my place, I thought I’d play it safe and give it a good week before asking her out again to avoid suffocating her with my advances. What happened next, however, was something I never even considered as a possibility. Just a few nights after our marathon cuddle sesh, the plot twist of the century happened when she called me.

 

“Hey babe! I had a really good time with you the other night,” she said. “I’ve been doing some thinking about things, and I’d really like to see you again soon! Maybe this upcoming weekend? My mom said I could use her car, so I could meet you somewhere?” Her throwing conventional courting rules to the wind and taking initiative got me positively befuddled and left my toes tingling. Once I picked my jaw off the floor, I told her I was just thinking how I’d like to see her again too and proposed the idea of hanging out at my parent’s place in town. I told her about their new game room, and to my star-studded delight, she seemed genuinely thrilled with the idea.

 

 

Mama

The remaining time that week leading up to my titular third date passed slower than it does on a weekday when I send my brother a new trailer to check out and then just sit there and wait for my message to turn from “Delivered” to “Read,” but when the fateful day finally arrived, I was ready and raring to go. Always looking for an excuse to squeeze in some more quality time with my mother, I headed over plenty early for an abbreviated “mom/son date” before Piper showed. She had belonged to a women’s Bible study for many years, and I think she was able to find great purpose among those women, as well as the only real social outlet she had. When it disbanded around the same time I dropped out of college, however, I think it was a time when we both found ourselves alone and lacking any real connection with other human beings (aside from her holy matrimony with my father), and we kind of gravitated towards each other. Through our mutual exile we connected and started dedicating entire days to hanging out with each other, days we so lovingly dubbed our “mom/son dates.”

 

These joyous get-togethers typically occurred a couple times each week, starting from the morning and always ending in the early evening, ensuring I’d be gone long before I had any chance of running into my father. These were days of fellowship and bonding between mother and son and usually consisted of nothing more than me driving over and spending the day at my childhood home just hanging out with her and our dogs and cat. There were occasionally dates that broke this mold by including additional festivities like driving to the big city together to catch a matinee at the theater with the puffy recliners, or, on very rare occasions, she would drive to my apartment where we would spend the day, accompanied by her beloved grandcat, Jack.

 

I think these “dates” not only kept us both busy over the years but also delivered us from what would otherwise be a very dark and isolated mass of time in our lives like a cancer, filled with depressive naps, doom scrolling for countless hours, and intense longing for human interaction—at least I know that’s true in my case. I dread the thought of what my mental health might look like right now if I didn’t have this special time with my mother. To tell you the truth, some of the days I’ve had with her have been the best in my life, and I’ve had times with her I wouldn’t trade for anything. As good as these days spent with my mama were, however, I knew from the beginning that they came with an expiration date.

 

 

(Temporary) BFFs

From the dawn of my adulthood, my Mama had been my best friend, my favorite person in the world, the light of my life, and my everything. As with many of the best things in life, however, it was never meant to last.  Like an odious, lingering stench in the air that you can never quite escape, the impending arrival of two separate calamities loomed on the horizon with every minute I spent palling around with my mother. The arrival of either meant an unequivocal end to our carefree days together, and neither could be avoided, ignored, or circumvented in any way. First and most imminent was my father’s eventual retirement.

 

No one who’s ever met my workaholic father can envision him being retired, but at 64 years old it’s something that is coming sooner rather than later, regardless of how implausible it might seem. Whenever he does stop working his main job, he’s going to start spending the majority of his days at home for the first time in his life, and because my father and I have always been as volatile together as Mentos and Diet Coke, with a massive eruption taking place almost anytime we meet, I would no longer be free to come and spend hours on end alone with my mother. Because of this, it was crystal clear that I needed to find someone else I could spend my time with, and fast.

 

What’s even more pertinent than that, however, is the fact that he’s selflessly sacrificed every last bit of himself to provide for his family, and he deserves to be able to spend the last stage of his life quietly alone with his soulmate. Lovers will always take precedence in their lover’s eyes over children, family members, or anyone else, and rightfully so. To not respect this fundamental of hopeless romanticism when it came to my mother and father and deny them this time together would make me both a selfish charlatan and a hypocritical backslider.

 

The second, and far more distressing, upcoming factor preventing me from living happily ever after, hanging out with my mama until the end of my days, is the fact that, at some point, she is going to lose her goddang mind. Based both on genetical factors and countless early signs I’ve witnessed of her already declining cognitive functions, I widely regard it as fact that my mother will slowly develop severe dementia over the next decade or two like her mother before her, and it will likely lead to some of the most gut-wrenchingly difficult years of my life. When my mother had to endure her mother slowly forgetting everyone and everything she ever knew or loved, I had to stand by and watch as it nearly broke her. There is no doubt in my mind that I will face a similar struggle, except I’m not nearly as strong as she was, and it will steadily rip me apart from the inside out if I have to face it alone.

 

These two ever-nearing inevitabilities weighed heavy on my mind every minute of the day, and far more than just future grievances, I saw them as a damning testament to the fact that I needed to hurry up and find a girlfriend my mom could pass the baton to before she runs out of time and I’m left with a vast, gaping void in my life.

 

 

Pre-gaming

As usual, I reached my parent’s place not long after the break of dawn and came bearing refreshments by way of the local Starbucks: my mom’s usual grande Pike’s Place medium roast coffee with four shots of hazelnut and a splash of half-and-half, and my usual venti iced white mocha with ristretto shots and strawberry cold foam. It was an order I’d placed so many times I wager I could have done it while sleeping, backwards.

 

We spent the first two-thirds of the day doing what we usually did and sat in the game room while I played Xbox and she read her books and worked on the daily planners she made on her iPad. As I played through various games, she would frequently look up from her work and make observations or ask questions about what I was doing in the game. I knew that, really, my mother could not care less about anything to do with video games, but she not only feigned interest in the ones I played in front of her, she watched them intently for hours and hours on end because she knew how much I liked it and how much it meant to me.

 

Between bullies and the origins of my terminally debilitating OCD, middle school was hell for me, but it was also the last time in my life I can remember having a handful of friends that I could hang out with frequently. We’d have sleepovers regularly, where we would spend the night sitting around the TV as we took turns playing various titles of that time when we weren’t playing multiplayer like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, or Super Monkey Ball. As one of us played, everyone that was watching chimed in with comments or quips about what was happening on the screen, and for whatever reason this became one of my favorite activities to do with friends.

 

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was the peak of my social life, and somehow during our “dates,” my mother picked up on my keen interest in this specific breed of social exchange and made it her mission to replicate that feeling for me all these years later. By going through the motions of watching and commenting on the games I played, she was not only wildly successful at recapturing the profoundly satisfying magic of those get-togethers with my peers but also somehow managed to create something new between us as well, something even more special. 

 

Although watching me play video games may not have been her first or second or third choice of pastime, I think after watching enough of them, she did at some point start to genuinely take a keen interest in games with dramatic, complex stories, realistic graphics, and lots of cutscenes, like the newer entries into the Final Fantasy, Assassin’s Creed, and Resident Evil franchises, or anything where there was camaraderie between a group of characters working together towards a common goal. Especially those who made sarcastic, playful verbal jests at each other along the way, like Gimli and Legolas did during fights throughout The Lord of the Rings films (2001-03).

 

When I think about how my mom has selflessly forced herself to sit through something for countless hours that she had absolutely no interest in otherwise, solely because she knew how much I would enjoy it, my mind struggles to even comprehend the sheer magnitude of love and compassion that she’s shown for me in just this one example. Tragically, this is not even remotely the case for how I treated her key interests. Over the years I have consistently shot down her every obsession she has tried to share with me, like her favorite a cappella group, Pentatonix, Alex Warren, or cop television dramas with a hefty dose of levity like The Rookie (2018-) and Will Trent (2023-). One by one, I have all but outright refused to even entertain the idea of engaging with her about these things she holds dear simply because I have no interest in them personally.

 

As we sat together on the game room couch and did our activities, the Dachshund brothers would fill the gaps between us and either nap contently or chew on bully sticks, a special treat we only gave them on our “date” days. I could never live without a dog and a cat in my life at all times, and over the course of my life, many dogs and cats had come and gone. The bunch we surrounded ourselves with at this point in my life was our newly acquired dachshund puppies Ollie (Oliver) and Herbie (Herbert), and our dapper tuxedo cat, Dickens. My cat, Jack, had to stay back at my apartment because he had a reputation for getting violent with other animals.

Jack’s mandatory isolation from all other pets at family gatherings truly broke my heart, but the need for it was something we learned the hard way when our last wiener dog, Gracie, had to be rushed to the vet to get stitches after we tried to introduce him to her. Dickens, the once painfully timid tuxedo cat we got from my uncle, spent his time lounging nearby, keeping his distance but at the same time never straying too far. This was in the early days of the newly reformed feline’s years-long transformation from a reclusive shadow lurker into something of a bashful socialite, at a point when he still hadn’t quite emerged from his shell entirely.

 

At home, warm and cozy, surrounded by my favorite person and some of my dearest animal companions: to me, there was no better place to be, apart from the same situation with my happily ever after love interest taking the place of my mother. It’s a fondness for something I’ve inherited from my mother, and I don’t think I could ever see myself becoming someone who finds their fulfillment from going out on the town every day.

 

On rarer occasions when I didn’t feel like gaming, we’d watch television shows and movies on the same TV, from the same couch—with every single one of our selections curated by yours truly. Most occasions I would give my mother a list of a couple titles and let her choose, but we both knew that it was just my selfishness masquerading as the illusion of giving her a choice, as almost every time she picked a title I wasn’t fond of, I’d end up talking her into watching my choice instead anyway. She had a knack for making me feel like decisions like this were mutual between both of us so as to prevent me from feeling any guilt, but it was always just a thin veil I could see past if I ever cared to try.

 

On the even rarer occasions I was at my parent’s house and we weren’t in the game room or taking a break to eat something in the kitchen, we liked to spend time reading in the screened-in porch we called the four seasons room—once again surrounded by our animals. I hadn’t finished reading an entire book since I read through Watchmen (1986-87) in high school, but that never kept me from compulsively buying them regularly to accumulate for my collection. Reading is a relatively newly acquired taste for me, and I hadn’t started actually reading through books in their entirety until after the time depicted here.

 

Back then I really only read the first few chapters before giving up on them and moving onto the next. During this time we sat on an older, slightly decrepit couch that had been surrendered from a lifetime’s use in another room of the house, surrounded by walls covered entirely with tall windows overlooking our backyard. While my mother sat beside me and read through countless titles on her Kindle over the course of these sessions, I would sit there and thumb through my latest purchases and think of new ones I wanted to buy next.

 

Since then I have discovered a love specifically for manga and graphic novels, and am proud to say I have since finished several books like the No Longer Human by Junji Ito, Dante’s Inferno graphic adaptation by Paul and Gaetan Brizzi, 300and the first couple entries into the Sin City comic series by Frank Miller, and Black Hole by Charles Burns, and I am currently in the process of reading the third Sin City book, The Big Fat Kill, Final Cut by Charles Burns, The Complete Eightball 1-18 by Daniel Clowes, Blankets by Craig Thompson, and Fight Club 2 by Chuck Palahniuk, Cameron Stewart, and David Mack.

 

 

Third Date: Letting My Flag Fly

Unable to shake the daunting thought that this third date was my “make it or break it” moment with Piper, I sat in the Four Seasons room beside my mother and pets and heedlessly flipped through the pages of the novel I was currently “reading” as I got more and more anxious the closer it got to Piper’s arrival. I’d completely lost control over my inner monologue, and my head buzzed, frantically ruminating on thoughts like, “After tonight I could either spend the rest of my life miserable and alone, or I could do it joined in a sacred union with Piper—which one that comes to fruition is determined entirely by how I handle this night. It all comes down to tonight.” Psyching myself out with grandiose hypothetical ultimatums was nothing new, but the mental poison weighed heavy on my mind all the same. Just as I felt the doubt start to creep back in and began to lose myself completely inside my overactive psyche, something popped into my head reminding me about the last time I was nearly consumed by my own mind, and suddenly I knew exactly what I needed to do.

 

 

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Mullarkey: Part II

Just like two weeks earlier as I sat in the theater parking lot, rendered all but immobile by the horrifying thought of what might or might not happen in the coming hours, the answer was in the heavens. I bowed my head, clasped my hands, and looked desperately, once again, to God for contentment.

 

“Dear Jesus, thank you so, so much that I get to spend some more time with Piper tonight, but please, PLEASE let my mind settle a bit right now and help me to stop worrying so much about it. Thank you so much that my life seems to be turning around finally, and thank you that Piper and I found each other. Thank you so much that I started hanging out with her, and thank you that she seems to actually like me. Please let me not mess this up. I really think Piper might be “the one,” so please help me act natural around her tonight and not say anything too dumb or creepy or off-putting. Help me just go with the flow and not get too hung up on any little thing like I do sometimes. Thank you for this opportunity, and PLEASE help me not mess it up. Thank you. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

 

Even if it was only fleeting, I opened my eyes and at long last felt at ease, just as the dogs started barking hysterically and made a mad dash to the dining room where the front windows were. My mom and I got up and followed the same path behind the Doxie brothers and up to the front windows, to see a car had pulled into our driveway. I looked down, bemused for a moment, at the two little sausage dogs standing on the cushion of the window seat, completely losing their collective minds. They had the same reaction to anything and everything that moved, came into view, or made the slightest sound outside, whether it be a squirrel, stray leaf, plastic bag, or neighbor jogging, and we didn’t even pay much attention to it usually.

 

Having grown up with Dachshunds all my life, I hardly even noticed their countless psychotic meltdowns. They were Dachshunds, after all, and that’s just what Dachshunds did. Smaller than a watermelon, louder than a train whistle: I knew them well. A breed infamous for their exorbitant amount of incessant yapping, woofing, and howling, it simply never ended with them, and if you wanted to have a Dachshund, you simply needed to be okay with that. But then it hit me. The sight of the ferocious, snarling dogs acting like they were ready to rip someone apart, it hit me like a sack of potatoes at 50 miles an hour: Piper had a history with dogs. She was terrified of dogs. My blood began to boil at my catastrophic blunder and my senses heightened as I promptly entered damage control mode. I done F’d up, but she was on my driveway, and this was no time to dwell on past mistakes. All I could hope to do now was minimize the amount of hell that was about to break loose.

 

 

Naughty Dogs

How could I have been so inconsiderate? How could I have been so careless? I sprinted to the foyer and headed swiftly out the front door before the dogs started to crowd the area and stumbled down the front lawn to greet Piper at her car in an effort to impede a potential entryway massacre from taking place. I was confident there wouldn’t be a problem, but I dreaded the thought of how intimidating they must have seemed for someone with Piper’s past. 

 

“Hey babe!” she called out as she closed the car door, with her nerves already starting to show through the subtle uneasiness in her voice. I finally reached her car, full of concern and short of breath.

 

“Hey… babe… I’m so… so sorry. I am SO sorry; I wasn’t thinking. I messed up bad bringing you here. I am SO sorry.”

 

“Heyyyyy baayybyyy, look at you, calling me babe! Don’t worry about it; I can handle it!” Her words shook as I watched her eyes nervously scan the area behind me, presumably trying to zero in on the source of the daunting barks and growls as they echoed throughout the entire cul-de-sac.

 

I was thrilled she caught my first “babe”, but paid it no mind in lieu of our current pickle. “Heh heh, yeah… But seriously, these dogs are terrible. I am so sorry; I feel terrible.”

 

“Nahh,” she said as she flung her hand forward in a “big deal” sort of way. “Don’t worry about it!” She headed right past me, marching towards the front entryway as I reluctantly followed close behind, still not entirely sure of how to handle the situation.

 

“Babe, wait… BABE!” She just kept walking up the driveway. Presumably seeing it was a genuine oversight on my part, my guess was that she only pressed on so diligently to prevent me from feeling any worse about the situation. I needed to find a way to see past her facade and accurately gauge how she really felt in case we needed to change our plans for the night. Suddenly she stopped dead in her tracks just before the porch leading to the front door that I had carelessly left wide open, leaving nothing but the thin glass door to the foyer between us and the naughty wiener boys, who could now see an unfamiliar had overrun their territory and were out for blood.

 

They had congregated directly in front of the entryway behind the glass, standing as towering and imposing as they could at 7 inches tall, yapping up a storm and doing their best to appear vicious. They talked a big talk, which was something I found hilarious most of the time, given their stubby stature and 20-pound, plump hot dog bodies. I knew that while their bark was loud, their bite was almost nonexistent, as they had never actually attacked anyone before. To Piper, however, I’m sure they came off just as nasty and fearsome as the most deranged and rabid flesh-ripping Rottweiler. She turned back to me and forced a smile as she looked directly into my eyes.

“They’re c-cc-cute!” Her voice was raw and trailed off as she forewent all previous efforts at a convincing delivery.

 

“I swear, they won’t bite,” I assured her as we entered a tense stalemate before the front porch, although looking at Herbie convulse and spew saliva from his jowls, I was beginning to doubt the truth of that myself. Now that we had come head-to-head with the tiny terrors, Piper tensed up completely and became hesitant to go another step further. “I am so sorry. Honestly, I didn’t think of this when I invited you here.”

 

As stupid as it sounded, it was the God’s honest truth—we almost never had visitors outside of our immediate family that the boys were familiar with, and it had been years since we had witnessed the type of greeting the boys gave foreign guests that tried to enter the house. The wiener brothers stood there, hot on pursuit, growling, snarling, biting, showing teeth like Cujo, and raising the hair of the Mohawks on their backs, trying to look as big and menacing as possible: this was not how I pictured the start of our evening.

 

“This is no time to be shy,” I told myself as I reached down and put my palm against hers, waited a second for her to react, and then rejoiced as we both intertwined our fingers in unison. Her hands were warm, and my hands were sweaty—this was the first time I had initiated touching of any kind, and while it started out magical, as her hand wrapped around mine, something about it felt wrong. Something about it was different from the first time we held hands, something I couldn’t put my finger on at first. Just as I began to ponder the source of that blight, my mother rushed onto the scene and sprinted into the entryway, bent over, and hastily swooped up a naughty boy under each arm. She tucked each boy tightly into either of her armpits like it was something she did every day and haphazardly whisked them away as she hobbled to a distant room to put them where they could be heard but not seen.

 

“Oh, um, that’s my mom! She’s great.” My relief was palpable, as we both proceeded onward, hand in hand, to the front door. I used my one free hand to open the door and let her in first like a true gentleman and then followed behind as she stepped up into the house.

 

“Why thank you, kind sir!” she said with a curtsy, in a voice that sounded as relieved as I was about Mama for showing up in the nick of time and saving our night. 

 

As we collected ourselves in the foyer, we could hear my mother in the distance yelling, “NO. NO! Bad boys, BAD boys!!! Stay! NO!” We looked at each other and giggled as I closed the two front doors behind us and we headed inside. After a brief moment, my mom came running back, clearly winded from the exertion as she breathed heavily and tried to introduce herself. “Hiii!!! I’m… Mullarkey’s mom, but you can… call me Saoirse! Oh, I’ve heard so much about you! But oh… oh my gosh! I am so, SO sorry about that; we can’t take those boys anywhere!… Really, they’re nice once you get to know them, but… Oh, I am so sorry; I feel horrible…”

 

“Haha, really, it’s okay! And thank you, I’m Piper,” she said confidently as she unlocked her hand from mine, reaching it forward to shake my mother’s. They gave each other warm smiles, and I swelled with pride as I watched my two favorite people in the world meet. It was short-lived, however, when something about Piper’s hands caught my eye. Looking closer, I felt a shiver run up my spine and grew goose pimples all over my body as I found out what that strange wrongness I sensed earlier was: one of my worst fears had become realized. She was wearing long, fake nails!!! The two went on to exchange further pleasantries, and my mother took our coats and hung them on the hooks in the hall, but my ears started ringing, and I was left reeling, numb to everything that was said or happened directly after their initial exchange.

 

 

Horror of Horrors

“Is there anything I can get you? My home is your home!” 

 

“Noo, I’m good! Thank you!” I managed to make out the last bits of their peppy conversation just as I came back down to earth but knew I needed more time to cope.

 

“I’ll be right back; I have to go to the bathroom!” I bluntly interjected as I started heading down the hall, frazzled. In that moment, it felt like it was the end of the world. “Not Piper. God in heaven, anyone but Piper!” I pleaded with myself in disbelief.

 

“Oh—okay!” I made a mad dash through the hall and to the right, into the small half-bathroom off the kitchen, closed the door, and began trying to regain my bearings. I felt like I was going to explode as the questions started piling up: “Should I send her home?” “How would I get through the night?” “How could she have gotten contaminated, of all people!?” “Is she still ‘the one’?” “Is she really as special as I thought she was!? “

 

It was a brash initial reaction, but over the next few minutes my frantic mind and hyperbolic thoughts began to simmer down and become more rational, as they always did. Before long my thoughts had turned from hysterical panic to logical problem solving, and I started to weigh my options for how I would handle the rest of the night: “Realistically, I have only three possible options: I could send her home now and try to forget the ghastly sight altogether… Or I could be a total jerk and tell her she had to take them off, or… Or, I could carry on with the rest of the night and try my best to ignore them.” I reluctantly chose the final option and did my best to convince myself that Piper was still a good person; she had just made a foolish, abhorrent mistake.

 

As I left the bathroom with what I thought was a better sense of what did or did not constitute a legitimate emergency, I headed into the kitchen and was surprised to see the two of them standing casually at the table on the other side of the room, still carrying on with their conversation and laughing to themselves.

 

As soon as she noticed me, Piper graciously excused herself from the conversation and headed in my direction with a big, beaming grin. “Oh my God, your mom is seriously the best!… Just give me a sec though; now I need to use the little girls’ room.” She disappeared into the bathroom behind me, and I headed across the room to my mother. She immediately turned to me, placed her hands on her hips, tilted her head, and gave me the most exuberantly proud smile, as if I’d just discovered the cure for cancer, as she started careening in my direction. We met in the middle, where she blurted something out like she’d been waiting all day to say it.

 

“Ooooo, Mullarkey!! She is prreeetttttyyyy!” I smiled halfheartedly and nodded in agreement as she winked at me. “Anyways, don’t you mind me! I’ll be in my bedroom if you need anything; you won’t even know I’m here! Now, go have one heck of a night!” She gave me another warm smile and headed back to her room, where you could still hear the boys barking relentlessly in unison, with a chorus that had started to turn into a collective howl. I could only imagine what it meant to her to have me finally bring a girl home. She’d been waiting for decades, watching the loneliness slowly eat me alive year after year after year while both my brother and sister fell in love, got married, and started families at a very young age, but my time had finally come. Piper came bopping out of the restroom shortly, preventing me from thinking on it any longer. A ray of pure sunshine and bubbly as ever, I smiled back as I told myself she was well worth the wait.

 

“Wow. Your house is so beautiful! It’s huge!… So, where’s this game room at?” I nudged my head slightly to the right as she held out her hand and gave me a jarring up-close-and-personal view of the calamity that was her hand and said, “Do your worst, Mr. Mullarkey!”

 

“Her hands… what did she do to her hands?!?” I pleaded with myself to find some way to make sense of it as she dangled her wretched digits before me. Her nail beds were like I’d never seen them before, with long, phony hunks of plastic crudely glued to the ends of them. Fake, long, and blood red, with white tips meant to look like the white part of real nails. It was a look for a hooker or a proud Black woman, not the girl of my dreams. She kept one hand stretched out to me like a sordid invitation, but I just stared blankly ahead at the monstrosity, so repulsed I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I thought I was ready to deal with it. I was not ready to deal with it. Seeing it up close made it infinitely worse. It felt like nothing was sacred, and I was ready to heave chunks.

 

“Ohh, you noticed! I got my nails done special for tonight! You like ’em!?” Poor, gorgeous fool. She gave me a big, deranged smile and flaunted the vile appendages before me with a little finger wiggle as I bit my tongue at the urge to say something I would regret. I cracked the best faux smile I could muster and shuddered at the thought that now all the germs and bacteria on her privates, her anus, and everything else she’d been touching that had gathered under her fingernails would now be transmitted onto my hand and everything else in the house that she touched, and they would all be, from here on out, thoroughly contaminated.

 

“Yyess. They. Are… So. Sooo. Pretttttttyyyy. Soo ppreetttty,” I muttered begrudgingly through my fully clenched teeth. Against my every instinct and reason, I reached out and grabbed the biohazard-level crime against humanity that was her hand and began guiding her through the living room and to the steps leading down into the titular game room.

 

“Awww, thanks, babe! I knew you would!” Just as I was about to lose it, we descended the steps as I once again reeled my egregious distaste back in before I let it ruin the night for both of us.

 

As I summoned every ounce of willpower I could muster, I gave myself a rushed pep talk and injected thoughts into my head like, “It’s not about what it is, it’s about her intent behind it. Her hands are gross, sure, but the only thing that matters is that she took time out of her day and payed money to get them like that because she thought it would be something really special, because she thought this night was worth doing that for, because of ME.”, “Her nails are only temporary, meaning that her hands won’t always look like this.”, and “Her germ-ridden nails don’t matter because everything everywhere is already contaminated and filled with as many germs as possible anyway, and it couldn’t possibly get any worse than it already is!” Once we had reached the bottom of the steps I cleared my mind, put on my best tour guide voice, and declared “This… is the game room!”

 

 

Daddy Dearest

“Woow!” she gasped enthusiastically, to my delight. I watched as she giddily looked around in every direction at all the activities and finally managed to put forth an honest effort to look past the atrocity she had done to her fingers and get on with the rest of the night.

 

“This is the pool table, the air hockey table, the dartboard, the putting green, the board game cabinet, the mini fridge, and then this. Oh, this one is my favorite! …” My family was far, far from rich, but I knew this room made us look it, and forever the true materialist, it was hard not to be smug about it to new guests. The game room was a small part of the addition my parents built onto my childhood home about a year prior, and growing up I never would have imagined in my wildest dreams that my parents would be able to do such a thing to our house. Money was always very tight growing up, but my dad is one in a billion, and he persevered.

 

Now, I’m not in the business of flat-out telling people my parents are better than anyone else’s, especially when I haven’t met all of them, but I will say that I have never seen, met, or heard of anyone who works as hard as my dad does for his family. He’s in his mid-sixties and still works six days a week at one physically demanding job—always with oodles of overtime—and then works 8 hours at a second job on his one day off. God knows we have our differences, but my father’s drive has never ceased to amaze me. He does it all to provide for his family, and my love, respect, and admiration for him have always been in abundance because of it. Sadly, that’s about where I run out of good things to say about my relationship with my father. I turned away again and continued on.

 

“…The TV! The 4K OLED Smart TV and my second Xbox. This… This is my favorite part.” I looked back to see how impressed she was, but she was nowhere in sight. “Piper!?” I was a bit puzzled, but there was only one place she could be, as there was only one other room downstairs. I headed in that direction with haste.

 

 

Detour

I reached the doorway and headed into the room with stone tile flooring and walls and ceiling covered in varnished cedar to find Piper standing in the middle of the room, looking down at the massive, hard-top-covered in-ground 7-person jacuzzi.

 

“What’s this!?” She said, looking back at me as a mischievous grin grew across her face.

 

“Um. This is the hot tub… Do you want to come back and check out all my movies and games?” I fought to keep my eyes as far away from her hands as possible. In the bit more than a year it’s been there, I’d only ever been in the hot tub a couple of times, mainly on account of not wanting to subject any unfortunate bystanders to my bitch tits and naked feet. Swimming and being in the water used to be one of my favorite things to do growing up, but ever since I gained so much weight in college, I never even considered it anymore.

 

“I wanna go in!” She started to jump up and down with glee. The thought had crossed my mind of maybe one day asking her to come in it with me, one day in the distant future after I’d lost a ton of weight and we were comfortable enough in our relationship for her to see my body. Not now.

 

“Umm… I don’t know… Here, you’ve gotta see this; I have more than 2000 movies in my collection! You can pick anything!” I started heading back into the game room, hoping she’d catch the hint and follow, but she stood vigilant.

“I wanna go in the tub!” Her voice was starting to get a little naggy, but in a cute way.

 

“I don’t know… You don’t even have a suit with you, do you?”

 

“Babe!! I have underwear; that’s basically the same thing!” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but her persistence knew no bounds, and I was left with no choice but to give in. I brushed aside her inviting, seductive tone, as between her loathsome nails and the sobering fact someone was about to see my body, I was in no mood to get horny.

 

“Um. Okkayy.” I reluctantly headed into the room and clumsily pulled the massive hardcover off the top of the jacuzzi and tossed it aside with much effort. Then, I got an idea. Remembering the tub had a built-in Bluetooth speaker, I once again thought it might be the perfect opportunity to put some Eminem on and show her how much of a Stan I was—I mean, I even had the underground shit he did with Skam! Suddenly I was the one who was giddy, and I ran to the towel area, grabbed my designated swim bag, and headed into the attached bathroom as she set her phone on the floor and started pulling off her Keds and tube socks. “I’ll be right back!”

 

 

Vile Extremities

Safe and secluded in the bathroom, I couldn’t rip my clothes off fast enough. I got down to my socks and underwear, sat on the floor, and began to dig around in my bag. I pulled out my bright orange swimsuit, dug around some more, and to my delight found my Speedo brand black swimming t-shirt as well. With the ability to shield her eyes from my starkly pale torso, stuffed with enormous amounts of excess chub and covered in unkempt chest hair, this shirt was a boon when I needed it most. At XXL it was just big enough to cover up all the lumpy lumps and curvy curves of my body that I despised so much and gave me at least half a peace of mind. After the suit and shirt, something else I’d all but forgotten about plopped onto the floor: my trusty black ninja-like swim shoes that made me look like a total dingus but covered my feet all the same. I shuffled into my suit, pulled over my shirt, and then I knew that it was time once again to come face to face with my old arched nemesis: my feet.

 

I slowly pulled off my socks with a queasy sense of dread in anticipation of the sight of it. The slippery bastards’d been there at the end of my legs my whole life, taunting me. I’d chop them off if I could, the nasty buggers. I did what I had to to keep them tidy and trimmed but detested looking at them, loathed touching them, and I’d never worn sandals in my life. They called it a part of my OCD; I called it safe, I called it contained. Socks weren’t socks to me; they were the last line of defense against the wretched appendages, and when I lived in the dorms, I wore them in the shower too. They’re always the last thing I take off before a shower and the second thing I put on after.

I got both socks off, looked at the ninja shoes beside me, and in one of those defining moments I knew I had a choice to make: would I do my best to appear normal and head out of that bathroom barefoot, or would I be safe, while also looking like a total nut, and wear the ninja water shoes? No one in the world had ever even seen my feet since I was a toddler, and they were so white and pale they looked like they belonged to a comatose cadaver. Ultimately deciding that the ninja shoes would call even more attention to the bloody things than my pasty complexion, I proceeded with naked feet. Ready to go, I got to my feet, brought up my Eminem Deep Cuts playlist and got ready to put it on as I headed out. It felt like the right time to finally teach Piper about my love for all things Eminem, Marshall Mathers, and Slim Shady—the GOAT of GOATs.

 

I stepped out of the bathroom feeling as vulnerable as a day-old baby bird that has fallen from its nest without anything covering my tootsies, and I closed my eyes and tried to focus on what my mom would always tell me as a kid at the public pool: “Nobody’s looking at your feet. Nobody cares about your feet.” It didn’t take long for something else to catch my attention, however, as I opened my eyes and saw Piper standing next to the tub with her back to me, wearing nothing but a white lace bra and panties. She turned around once she noticed me, bringing the shocking sight of her nearly bare full body into view for the first time. She started walking over to me as I fumbled with my phone, and once again my Stan plan started to fall apart when I realized the tub’s Bluetooth speaker needed a four-digit passcode to pair with my phone. I hadn’t the slightest clue what it was.

 

 

Tummy Time

“Hey babe!” she chirped casually as she walked up and stopped, nearly naked, directly in front of me. Her bulbous, bountiful bosoms were practically bursting out of her brazier, and every square inch of her belly, legs, and feet was completely bare and on full display.

 

“Oh god,” I thought to myself as I began to melt like I was looking directly at the Ark of the Covenant, and suddenly I felt my carnal desires start to take over as I got a good, long look at Piper’s unclothed belly. You see, I think when most guys see a woman in public that they feel profoundly attracted to, a lot of them tend to engage in some unsolicited rubbernecking by sneaking a peek at their buns or breast areas. I find this type of behavior as vile as it is deplorable, and I do not partake in such ogling, as it is beneath me. However, I also ain’t nothing but a mammal, and my one caveat to this rule has always been my Achilles’ heel: the navel.

It’s not as if I’d deliberately gawk at a woman’s stomach if it’s unintentionally laid bare due to a vulnerable moment of her stretching or bending over, but if there’s a girl (who is very clearly of age) in something like a crop top or sports bra walking around just letting it all hang out and putting her umbilicus on full display for the entire populace, I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t do a bit of overzealous glaring in her direction. I don’t know why (I’ve actually traced the origins of this peculiar attraction back to either Britney Spears or a Star Wars action figure from my youth, but that’s a story for another post), but the abdomen has always frosted my cupcake like no other. That same level of hyper-fixation doesn’t usually translate when I see women’s stomachs through screens, but in real life there’s simply nothing like it. At work, when I check out customers (who are very clearly of age) who aren’t wearing anything over their midriff, my whole body gets numb, and I forget how to speak. Needless to say, seeing the love of my life’s exposed breadbasket for the first time that day was a real doozy, to say the least.

 

 

The Bulge

“You’re… wearing a shirt?”

 

“Oh, um, yeah… sorry. I have to,” I told her, without a coherent answer coming to mind as I frenetically shot a text to my mom asking for the Bluetooth passcode and fought tooth and nail internally against my own physiology to keep myself small. Try as I might, however, I was already at half-mast and growing by the minute. Back then there was so much time between my occasional bouts of arousal that it was easy to forget my peen could even do anything else but urinate or get in the way in the shower, but that night Piper and her perfectly toned abs and titillating innie made me well aware of what I was packing in my swim shorts, what it wanted, and what it was capable of. A grade-A nuisance is what it was.

 

I realized resistance was altogether futile and tossed my phone to the side before glancing back at her for a second and unintentionally let my eyes linger a bit too long. In just a moment I unwittingly got another glorious view of her unclad breasticals and started to notice the way the light hitting her tummy at just the right angle highlighted the faint fibers of peach fuzz covering it before feeling another shift from below my belt. I knew that I needed to get my junk below sea level if I was going to have any hope of not being the creepy awkward boner guy.

 

“Come on, babe. You look great! You don’t have to—” 

 

“-Let’s go in the hot tub!” I cut her off. It was the eleventh hour and the dawn of my manhood, and knowing I didn’t have time to debate the undebatable of whether I wore a shirt or not, I hunched over, closed my thighs as much as possible, and hobbled past her in a frenzy. I made a mad dash to the outer rim of the top of the hot tub with my hands covering my nether regions and hoped to god she didn’t see my shorts sticking out. On my way in, however, I tripped over one of the headrests protruding just above the floor and stumbled a bit before ultimately losing my balance and tumbling into the water like a giant sack of potatoes.

 

I landed near the middle with an enormous splash reaching far outside the tub and collected myself before taking a moment to adjust my body so that my head was above the water and the rest of me wasn’t. I laughed unintentionally a bit at my doofus blunder and did my best to play it cool as I crept down low and waded to one side of the tub, pulling myself into one of the molded contours of a seat.

 

 

Lover at Last

“Hehe. I guess you really wanted to go in too!” she playfully bantered as she bounced her way over to the opposite side of the whirlpool with a peppy strut, crouched down, and carefully sat down above one of the headrests. She dipped her feet in, scooted forward a bit, and looked at me with a beaming grin as she proceeded to precariously plunge downward into the water and swiftly plop into the seat directly across from mine with a scant splish. I looked away immediately and then downward to see I wasn’t home free yet, as the water sat revealingly still and fully translucent. With the outstretched state of my peter once again at risk of being brought to the light, I darted over to the controls in a delayed struggle against the weight of the water pushing back against the series of chunky flabs that make up my body and frantically turned the jets on max. After a delayed, pithy sputter, the nozzles began to shoot out a forceful deluge of bubbled water with a low and steady hum, successfully concealing my perky manhood in a timely fashion.

 

We were supposed to be looking in awe at my colossal collection of digital films and engaging in heated bouts of ping pong, pool, and darts right then, and the possibility of getting a raging boner from the sight of her bare torso had never even been considered in my risk analysis of the night. Back in my seat below a safe, concealing abundance of bubbles, I hunkered down and got comfortable as I began to wait. As a practicer of celibacy and one who had never choked my chicken even once, I never really learned what to do when I got excited down south other than wait patiently for it to go back down.

 

She leaned forward and inquired, “So. I’ve been thinking… You know how I kind of got upset the other night when we were on the couch and you dropped that three-word bomb on me??”

 

“Yeah?” Whatever she was about to say, I knew I needed to buy as much time as I could until I was small again.

 

“Well… I mean, it’s definitely way too soon to be saying you love me, but still… I decided that… I think I like you, and I think I’m ready to give you a chance. So many guys have treated me like garbage in the past, and I thought I wasn’t ready to be in another relationship yet. But then you came into the picture, and… well, you’re different. You’re so kind and sweet, and I really enjoy myself when I’m with you… And… I think I wanna try to make this work, make “us” work. Or, at least see where things take us.”

 

“Wow. Um. Okay!” If there was anything she could have said that would get my mind off of my member in this moment, it was exactly that. “Wow… Thanks! This is awesome… Thank you!” I needed to say more. I knew I needed to say more, but my mind went blank, my body tensed up, and I just couldn’t get anything else out. This was the moment I’d been waiting for since that eye-opening screening of Moulin Rouge! (2001) at 11 years old, and I’d been through hell and back to get here.

 

In those 19 years I went full circle, from assuming it’d be no time before I’d inevitably find myself in a relationship, to hoping I might find one one day, to starting to get a little nervous it hadn’t happened by now, to it being the only thing I could think about, to feeling like I couldn’t live through another single day without a girlfriend, to being on the verge of giving up altogether, to now, having it finally happen. It was a journey that damn near killed me more than once, and now, when I needed Piper the most, I found myself sitting on the threshold of getting everything I ever truly wanted in life.

 

 

Bombs Over Bewilderment

Piper’s confession that she like-liked me that night, along with her overture to become a couple that followed, was a catalyst for bringing such a monumental shift in my life that it’s difficult for me to accurately quantify its significance, let alone describe it. The problem was that immediately after she dropped that bomb on me that night, I completely checked out of reality. When you want something so badly for so long that you try to kill yourself because you don’t have it… That you dedicate more than two-thirds of your life to getting it… That you attend schools, take classes, change majors, go to churches, attend youth groups, go to sporting events, join gyms, go to doctors, go to parties, write memoirs, check into mental hospitals, and get jobs, all primarily because you believe doing so might increase the possibility of you getting it… and you still don’t have it? The aching despair of living without it turns into the norm, and the notion of actually getting it becomes a tall tale.

You use the thought of it one day happening as incentive to keep getting out of bed in the morning, to convince yourself that going through the meaningless mundanity of your day-to-day life has purpose, but after weeks become months, become years, become decades, at some point you become so detached from the literal act of getting it that deep within your heart-of-hearts it starts to seem altogether preposterous. Your personal mantra, your credo, your tenet, your ideology, your dogma—it’s a nice idea that you use as your north star to help keep you on due course, but it’s something you find so egregiously implausible that you don’t dare let yourself re-develop a genuine desire for it.

 

Like throwing a penny into a fountain with a wildly unrealistic wish, you really want what you wished for, and it’d be wondrous if it came true, but the idea of the universe actually granting you that wish is so far outside the wheelhouse of what you deem plausible that getting it would feel almost supernatural. Like praying to God for a million dollars, sure, you want it, but for your own sanity you don’t even let yourself entertain the illusion of having any genuine hope that he’ll give it to you.

 

And then, one fateful day, after what feels like ten lifetimes of days of living without, this otherworldly thing you wanted so badly that you had to brainwash yourself out of wanting, lest you lose your mind entirely, falls right onto your lap? Your mind goes blank, your body goes numb, and it becomes a full-fledged out-of-body experience. You forget which way is up, every last one of your wits goes out the window, and at least at first, you can’t do anything but just sit there reeling in the aftermath as it plays out in slow motion.

 

“Oh, man, wow. Holy cow. Really? Thank you! But… Wow!” My flabber was officially gasted, and lost inside my own head, I couldn’t manage anything on the outside but repeating meaningless, throw-away utterances because I didn’t know where to begin with an actual reply. Shellshocked to my core and faculties in shambles, I eventually stopped my parroting and receded in my attempts at saying anything coherent and instead decided to just sit there quietly and wait for her to say something else. From the fervor in the cadence of her proposition, I expected her response to my non-response to be one of confusion or frustration, but I didn’t give her enough credit.

 

Instead, I looked back into her eyes as much as I could manage and saw her giving me a tranquil look of harmonious approval and warm tenderness, like I didn’t need to say a word to try to explain myself because she already understood. She got it. I could repose because somehow, some way, from across the bath she deconstructed my unwitting beguilement for exactly what it was: fear, excitement, confusion, and an utter and complete lack of experience.

 

I turned my head away again after a moment, but when I looked back, her demeanor had changed entirely. In an instant, it was like a switch had been flipped, and suddenly Piper’s iconic smile n’ stare had culminated into a spellbindingly seductive glare. Her eyes were smoldering, engulfed in flames like they’d just been doused with gasoline, and she unfurled a sensually mischievous grin as she gradually slipped out of her seat and started heading in my direction. Whatever she was planning, it was anything but platonic.

 

 

The Kiss

My already tense muscles turned to stone as she methodically moseyed her way across the tub, maintaining her steamy semblance the entire way. This night had become one for the ages, and she hadn’t even been there an hour. I knew exactly what was happening, but I told myself it wasn’t what it so clearly was. As she waded closer and closer, I simply sat there like a Derry kid in the Deadlights as my mind waged war with itself trying to determine what was or was not happening. As she entered my vicinity and took a seat right next to me, I could no longer deny it: this was my first freaking kiss!

 

As she sat there beside me, as close as close could be, the thick cloud of mystique surrounding the thought of getting my first girlfriend began to fade, making way for the overwhelming draw of my carnal desires to take hold in its stead, all while maintaining a thick undercurrent of my usual brand of unsure apprehension. I looked far in the other direction as she scooted in closer still, and I began to feel the tepid exhale of her breath against my shoulder. The tears of joy and disbelief had already started swelling behind my eyes, but I fought to keep them back as my mind ran asunder over how I should play my part in the moments to come.

 

Ecstatic as I was terrified, in a rare, fleeting moment of bravery, I turned to her and made a strained yet earnest attempt at looking her in the eye but instead got interrupted along the way by the sudden sight of her two bodacious big ones, each bulging brazenly from their white lace confinement as if they were about to burst out and poke me in the face. Stupefyingly enamored to my very core, I was left defenseless to the arresting spectacle of her magnificent mammaries and inadvertently let my gaze hover for an extended moment before shamefully shooting my head in the opposite direction once again.

 

“Sorry! “Sorry!” I pleaded, still telling myself, to the bitter end, with her practically on my jock, that I was being a creep and that my unchecked libido was an offense. I sat there next to her and proceeded to turn away as I began to sulk, but she acted quickly in turn, like she was expecting my timid recoil. Without saying a word, she reached over my shoulder, carefully wrapped her hand around the bottom of my jaw, and turned my head forcefully in her direction, simultaneously shifting my body around until I was facing her and looking directly into her eyes, except this time there was no retreat.

 

We sat there for a moment, gazing into each other’s eyes as the uninterrupted eye contact sent my mind into a manic whirlwind of continuously overlapping thoughts, both good and bad. My hysteria came to an unexpected halt as we sat there, however, when I was interrupted by the abrupt jolt of my toes forcefully bumping into the side of Piper’s foot at the base of the tub. My eyes were drawn as far downward as they could go with my head still in Piper’s clutches as the blunder momentarily took my attention away from my flustered psyche. When I lifted my line of sight back into hers, she had a stern look of warning across her face, once again demonstrating her innate ability to read me.

 

“Don’t you do it, babe. Don’t you say it one more time!” Her instructions were clear and concise, but they were inevitably overpowered by both my decades’ worth of conditioning to be proper and say things like “my please” and “thank you” any time they may be called for and my obsessive-compulsive need to follow those instructions precisely without exception, and I opened my mouth and began to say the word she had forbidden anyway.

 

“Sorr—” but before I could even finish saying the word, Piper’s relaxed grip became clenched once more, and she pulled my mouth forward, jamming it into hers. Pure bliss. Time froze. Trumpets sounded. Angels sang. Lights shone down on us from the heavens. I stopped holding back, closed my eyes, and leaned in. I was completely floored. It was warm, it was wet, and it was heaven. My obsession with getting my first kiss had been nearly lifelong, and in this moment I felt a resounding, absolute goodness in my very soul. It was all that I had always dreamt it’d be and so, so much more. 

 

The majestic merriment of this moment had nothing to do with sexual gratification or crossing something off my bucket list I’ve wanted to do for so long, but everything to do with receiving definitive proof of acceptance from the one whose favor I value more than anything. Just as cuddling with Piper made me fully accept that she genuinely liked me, this kiss unequivocally showed me that she wanted me and wanted to be my one and only. With her lips pressed tightly against mine, I knew that I was hers, and she was mine. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, beyond all subliminal feelings of inadequacy, we belonged to each other. Far more than just a girlfriend, with this understanding I found a new lease on life. I could, at long last, let my guard down and speak freely without worrying about being creepy or out of line. Freed from the suffocating shackles of this unyielding, omnipresent demon called doubt, I could be my authentic self with her, and I cannot possibly describe to you what it felt like to get all of that with one kiss.

 

This was validation, affirmation, and salvation in their purest forms. I could no longer fight it, and the tears I’d been holding back finally gave way and started streaming down my cheeks as she held her lips pressed against mine for a good, glorious while. As all lingering thoughts of inadequacy and doubt vanished, every joint and muscle in my body loosened up and went completely limp—all except for the part that had only just gone back to being small, which was now, once again, harder than advanced trigonometry. She pulled her body back a bit and tenderly let go of my jaw. Remaining close, she was about to say something, but instead paused and gave me a tender look when she noticed my tears.

 

“Awww, babe, what is it?” She said as she wiped some of the tears away with her thumb.

 

“You know, that was… That was my first kiss…”

 

 

Unconditional

Magical, the best moment of my life, life-affirming— Yes, kissing her was all these things, but there was another lingering element to it that I couldn’t place at first, something misplaced, something oddly unpleasant, yet… not? Then it hit me—her breath. While her mouth lingered in mine, I couldn’t help but pick up a strong hint of something strikingly foul about the aftertaste on her tongue and the air wafting out of her mouth and into mine, something reminiscent of dead fish or moldy cheese. A repugnant assault on the palate, the heinous stank permeated the inside of my mouth, at first clashing with the overwhelming sense of jubilation I was experiencing otherwise. As I sat there beside her in the tub, however, that rancidness began to slowly fade.

 

“Wow. Hmph… No shit?” She asked rhetorically as I looked at her somberly and shook my head, still regaining my senses in the glorious fallout of my first kiss while also trying to determine if the taste saturating my mouth actually was, indeed, bad. “Well, then… It looks like I’m gonna have to be your teacher!… Wanna try with tongues next?” She gave me another saucy smile and started to slide forward until she was practically on my lap.

 

“Oh gosh! …Oh man, I mean… heck yes! But—” I interjected as I recoiled backward and away from her, avoiding any further advances. I was pitching a tent something fierce, and while I did basically say I was comfortable doing anything with Piper without fearing judgement, the place I drew the line was at anything involving sperm.

 

“Baabe! Now what is it!?”

 

“I’m s-sorry… It’s… It’s hard.” I said, pointing down at my no-no zone. Her face lit back up, and she seemed relieved to hear that’s all it was.  She looked down at my bulge for a second and then back up at me. 

 

“Haha… Relax, babe! That’s how I like it!” she said as she slowly crawled partially back onto my lap, pressed me against the series of jets shooting water out along my seat’s backrest, and leaned in for another kiss. I stopped resisting, tenderly slipped my mouth back into hers, and felt something wet and smily reach down my throat and circle around my teeth as I let my body just melt, and once again succumbed to the strange, overbearingly foul sensation that was Piper’s flavor until I couldn’t even smell the chlorine in the tub anymore. I let the flagrant taste she was emitting saturate my entire palate and smother every last taste bud until I could hardly breathe through the nauseating flavor. It was unsavory, it was noxious… and as we kissed, it was something I was starting to grow incredibly fond of. 

After kissing even more, my affinity for Piper’s unique brand of heinous zest grew even deeper and by the end of the night slowly became the best thing I’d ever tasted in my life. She got real close, but I made sure to keep my tallywhacker at least half a foot away from her Florida soldier at all times, both to preserve my innocence and ensure I didn’t spill my seed all over my father’s hot tub. The more we kissed, the better her putrid flavor tasted, and I became obsessed with her obscene tang to the point I wanted to marinate the entirety of my mouth in it and never taste anything else again. 

 

Unlocking our lips for a quick breather, we looked at each other for a moment and both started laughing—a hearty laugh of unbridled joy that we were together, relief we had managed to find each other in this crazy world, and sheer electric excitement for where we would go next. Suddenly, I felt a profound surge of gratitude, as I often did whenever things in my life were going really well, and I felt compelled to thank her for bringing about this goodness.

 

“Man, Piper, you know… This has been great. Thank you for this, really.”

 

“Haha, you don’t have to thank me, babe; it’s my pleasure! …”

 

We looked at each other for a brief moment and smiled before we came back together. Just as she leaned forward to kiss me, a few strands of her damp, fire-singed mane fell inward and draped over her face, and in a picture-perfect moment, I got the chance to do something else I’d dreamt of doing for as long as I could remember and brushed the bit of hair aside with my hand before leaning forward to meet her lips with mine once more.

 

After even more spit-swapping, I had become intoxicated by her signature rotten taste. I craved nothing more and found its palatableness to be borderline orgasmic. Yes, her ungodly breath was more odious than having to sit through an entire screening of Joker: Folie à Deux (2024), but as far as I was concerned, the only thing that mattered was that it was Piper’s breath, period. A girl like that chose, of her own free will, to kiss me, and that was the only part about it that I found relevant. Taste, smell, annoying quirks, and off-putting habits: If you form a relationship with someone you truly have feelings for, any of these things that may come along with them are altogether inconsequential, and in some cases like mine, can even become appealing. This is the life lesson I learned in the hot tub that night as I kissed the woman of my dreams.

 

“Okay, that was good! Now, try tilting your head this way a little bit, and I’ll tilt mine like this.” I did as she said, and she went on to teach me the finer points of tonsil hockey and all manner of other tips and tricks late into the night. We kissed, kissed, and kissed some more after that; we kissed until our mouths became sore and our fingers got pruney. In-between kisses we discussed what we wanted to do moving ahead, and although it wasn’t all clear, one thing we knew for sure was that we’d be doing it together. As I watched her drive away into the night after our extensive tongue wrestling, I came to the realization that maybe it’s not such a big deal what girls do with their fingers.

 

 

The Rest, As They Say, Is History

As I said at the start of this parable, these three initial first dates formed the foundation of my relationship with Piper and were enough to show me not only that Piper was my soulmate but also that I was starting to fall in love with her. Over the five years since we made our relationship official in the hot tub that night, we have not only stayed together but also remained thoroughly enamored with each other as well. Like any couple, we’ve had our hardships, but we’ve endured them together, and our bond has only become stronger because of it. 

 

When I told Piper that I loved her on our second date, it wasn’t just immensely premature; it was a lie. There was no way I could have truly loved her already by then, but after five years such a statement is far less far-fetched. Honestly, I have fallen madly in love with her during that time, and I did tell her a second time just a few months ago that I loved her, except this time I meant it with all my heart. She never said it back, however. She never told me she loved me back because she doesn’t exist. This may come as a surprise to none of you, but the person you’ve come to know as “Piper Paisley Jones” over the course of this prologue is, as a whole, a load of malarkey.

 

 

Epilogue

It was all a ruse! Although the “Piper” I’ve chosen to center this prologue around is not based solely on a real singular person, she is a composite. A sort of Frankenstein’s monster of a dream girlfriend, she is a fantasy I constructed using some of my favorite qualities I cherry-picked from a myriad of  more than a dozen different girls I’ve been enamored with at some point in my life. The red hair, the nose ring, the smile n’ stare, the unflinching confidence, and virtually every other aspect of this compounded character is a trait of a real woman I’ve known over the years that I once thought might be “the one” for me.

 

Once I had an image in my head of a fully realized individual, I imagined even further what it might be like if this was a real girl that came into my life and then began to weave the tale of how we met and fell in love over the course of three dates. I determined how she acted and the things she would say on these dates based partially on what I think having a girlfriend would be like and partially on what I hope having a girlfriend is like. And, because even though I may want a perfect girlfriend, I also firmly believe there is no such thing, so I made sure to throw in some conflicting negative elements as well, like eating rudely, not liking dogs, and having a promiscuous past to make her feel more authentic and keep the story grounded. Once I had the general blueprint laid out for the story, I carefully pieced most of the rest of the details, interactions, and events together using hundreds of tiny, entirely true details to form a fully fleshed-out narrative.

 

The irony of creating a blog to write my truth on and then start it with a series of posts based on something fictional is not lost on me, and I would like to start again by formally apologizing for this deception. I presented this story as straight memoir, and while that genre does grant you certain leeways and leniences with some things, it does not grant you license to pull wholly fictional people and events out of your bum at will. I tried many times throughout the story to hint at the fact it wasn’t entirely true and even went as far as to put a word in the title to strongly suggest it wasn’t real, so really, I don’t think I fooled anyone anyway, but that is beside the point entirely.

As my reader, you mean the world to me, truly, and there are not many things in this world I hold in higher esteem than the time and attention you give me by reading my content, so I wouldn’t have done this if there wasn’t great purpose behind it. Before you decide how you feel about my trickery, all I ask is that you give me just a few more sections to explain myself.

 

 

Please Allow Me To Re-introduce Myself

My name is Mullarkey, and the hard truth is that I am a 35-year-old virgin and have never kissed, cuddled, held hands with, or romantically embraced a woman in my life, although there is nothing in this world I want to do more. I don’t want to have sex before I’m married, and I believe with every fiber of my being that we were given life to find our soul mates, and the best thing you can possibly do in life is share it with a romantic partner, companion, and lover. Living alone, isolated, and without so much as a glimpse of any of these things is slowly killing me, and it hurts like nothing I’ve ever before known.

 

Women, relationships, love, and sex—these are the things that occupy my thoughts more than anything else, and when I was starting to piece together the identity of this blog years ago, there was never a doubt in my mind that they would be where I started. The only problem was calculating how, exactly, I would address them.

 

I knew that every new blog lives or dies by the success of its first series of posts, as it is one of the most vital factors in establishing an audience and determining its long-term staying power. I knew I wanted to speak of the pain I felt so often because of my loneliness, but I didn’t know the best way to go about depicting that. When I first sat down, put my pen to the page, and made an attempt at creating a good starting point for my blog, I quickly realized just how big of a challenge it was going to be. Not only did I have to state my plight clearly and concisely and do it with enough passion and skill to really connect with readers, but I also had to make it all interesting and entertaining enough to make them want to come back.

 

I knew well what that type of success tastes like. Years ago I took a creative writing class in college and wrote the first few chapters of a memoir in it called Cola Diet Other. My teacher not only loved it, but he also read it all to the whole class and even told me it was publishable. The other kids in class loved it too, and for one short semester I got to feel a bit like a rockstar. When I created this blog, I had been out of college and painfully alone for many years, and I desperately craved this type of attention again. It became just one of many reasons I created this website, and if my teacher had never given me the confidence to share my story in class all those years ago, I honestly don’t think I’d have the confidence to tell it to you like I am now.

 

I coined the title The Female Enigma Serial but never got much farther than that. For many months I made attempt after attempt at crafting a great start to my new blog, and every time I did, it always came out exactly the same: “My name is Mullarkey, and I have never been more miserable in my life. I have never felt more alone, and at 30-something years old, I have still never had a girlfriend, kissed anyone, or cuddled. I want to do these things more than I could possibly express, but I’m starting to wonder if I ever will. It hurts so bad, all the time. I want to give up.”

 

By starting like that, with no build-up, my words were as hollow as my point was moot. How could I make it matter? How could I share my pain with you in a way that doesn’t fall flat? I wrestled with this for the better part of a year until it finally came to me: I would use the power of prose to show you my anguish rather than just tell it to you. Shortly after this revelation I came up with the idea of making a prologue to the serial, came up with the title The Piper Parable, and then I grabbed my keyboard and hit the ground running. 

 

 

Cards On The Table

It was to be an expansive, deeply personal fable structured around real-life pivotal events in my life but centered on a faux girl, a faux relationship, and three faux dates. I would use this faux story as a vehicle to tell a great many truths that, by the time I was done, would provide a comprehensive introduction to every theme and subject that would be expanded upon extensively in the serial to follow. I envisioned each falsehood amplifying every truth, and that by the time I was done you, the reader, would have a good sense of who I am and a general idea of what sort of things you can expect to read about in my posts to come.

 

From my first cuddle to my first kiss, I imagined what I thought getting these things might look like and then crafted a tale around that with a heavy emphasis on just how much those things meant to me. By comparison, I also tried to highlight how much it hurt that I still don’t have these things, making sure to embellish and exaggerate to my heart’s content in an effort to make it more entertaining to read than just a list of dull bullet points about why I’m so sad. Finally, once I had the general framework outlined for my entire fictional narrative, I went back in and piled on as many more painful truths as I could to ensure the tale was far more fact than it was fiction.

 

Did I succeed in what I set out to do so long ago with this story that was supposed to be a brief fictional introduction but quickly ballooned into a massive, five-part epic spanning more than a year? Was the juice worth the squeeze? That is entirely up to you to decide, but I like to think it was. Now, after a story containing hundreds of plot points and proclamations, you’re probably wondering what parts, exactly, were true and what weren’t.

 

 

The Fact in The Fiction

Now that my deception has come to light, I feel like your entire general idea of who I am has been called into question, and before moving on to The Female Enigma Serial, I’d like to set things straight. For lack of a better way of clarifying what were the facts and what were the fabrications, I’d like to just briefly run through a few examples in each of the five parts and point out what the truth was, and by the time I’m done, I will hopefully have given you a good sense of what the truth is in the rest.

 

 

Part I

• We start out with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: Moulin Rouge! (2001) indeed changed my life at 12 years old and forever shaped my views on things like love, relationships, courting, girls, and sex. The rest of the background stuff is all canon as well—my heightened fascination with the female species, the fact that it was never really quenched, and how it only grew more insatiable by the year.

 

• Movies have always been my love language, and Moulin Rouge! (2001) was just the first of many that I let influence my young mind and affect my development.

 

• Finding my better half has very much been my only true aspiration in life for almost as long as I can remember.

 

• I did speak to girls almost exclusively through AOL and MSN instant messenger in middle school, and in the process developed an inherent fear of speaking to them in person. The “get-bae-quick” scheme I devised in an attempt to bypass the dull pleasantries that come at the beginning of a relationship by talking to them about the deep stuff online right away was a massive failure and only further handicapped me socially.

 

• My amount of interaction with women plummeted as I got older; meanwhile, my interest in them skyrocketed.

 

• As backward as it may seem given my background, I indeed do not want to have any sort of sexual encounters until I’m married. I will expand upon this and the reason behind it greatly in the serial to come.

 

• Although a beloved movie star did in fact film a movie in my hometown long ago, it was not Keanu.

 

• My job at the department store really did save me, in a way, after I dropped out of college by the way it afforded me the opportunity to interact with humans again, even if it was as phony as a McLovin’ driver’s license. Over the years the position has acted as my sort of surrogate social life, granting me just enough fellowship I need to get by, but only just.

 

• There was a beautiful young woman who showed up unexpectedly one day at work around this time in my life, hired as a seasonal worker. I thought she was one of the prettiest girls I’d ever seen, although she sported no nose jewelry and had more brown hair than a “fire-singed mane of tangerine locks.” Initially, I did everything in my power to avoid running into her to save myself from the scorn I assumed she harbored towards me.

 

• I based her septum piercing on a girl I really liked that I met in art class at state university. I thought it was so hot, and I was gobsmacked by that because I was always so put off by the same piercing I’ve seen on others. She actually became the third girl in my life that I fell for who turned out to be a lesbian. The reason I gave her red hair is pretty straightforward, as I’ve always had a thing for gingers.

 

• I spoke nothing but truth about my troubled past and my infamy amongst my teenage peers for being “creepy.” I hated that word more than anything and developed a strategy to help me avoid earning that dreadful moniker in the future by incessantly putting myself down in my head. Although everything about that section was fact, fortunately these days the insults I tell myself are of a much milder variety than those described. I’ll still say the regular “I’m so stupid!” or “I’m such an idiot!”, but the vilifications rarely get as specific or disparaging as the insults that used to clutter my conscience not so long ago. The chronic overthinking of all the possible horrible outcomes of any given situation, on the other hand, is still alive and rampant.

 

Part II

• As much as I tried to avoid this girl at work, everything changed the day I inevitably ran into her, and she turned out to be one of the nicest people I’d ever met. Not only was she gorgeous and nice, but she enticed me even further by the way she stared into my eyes unrelentingly whenever I saw her and smiled this magical smile at me that gave me butterflies in my stomach, weakened my knees, and gave me hope for the first time in ages.

 

• Attention from her was like a drug, and it wasn’t long before the chance of maybe seeing her became my reason for going to work, for getting up in the morning.

 

• Really, you should have known from the moment I said this girl had no white on her fingernails that this was fiction.

 

• Things were great for a while after meeting her and getting to see her all the time and catch her smiles and stares. Soon, I grew accustomed to that greatness; before long, I grew dependent on it, and over time, I became complacent. My ultimate dream was to be with her romantically, but there was nothing in this world that would have convinced me to try and make her more than a friend, because it meant risking losing what I already had.

 

• In just under a year of being my co-worker, she found a better job across the street and put her two weeks in at the department store. I was crushed. Just as depicted, as I wallowed in my sorrow of never seeing her again, I made one last-ditch effort at getting close to her and sent her a friend request on Facebook—something I was always too scared to do previously. She accepted my friend request, and I’m afraid that is the point in the story where mostly fact gives way to mostly fiction.

 

• The night of my 30th birthday was one of my worst, although it didn’t happen like it did in this story. I broke the pact I made with myself after my suicide attempt at 18 and still hadn’t had a first kiss, first cuddle, or first girlfriend. I was absolutely broken that night. Sadly, the real story of that night is much more degenerate and drastic than just getting blackout drunk. (You’ll hear all about it in the latter chapters of The Female Enigma Serial.) To tell you the truth, I don’t actually drink alcohol, and I haven’t since college. Sometimes I wish I could drink and enjoy it like others do, but what it always comes down to is that I despise the taste of it. Simple as that, I just can’t stomach it.

 

• Like that night that never happened, my desperate, drunken attempt to ask this girl on a date through a Facebook message is equally untrue. In reality I did message a bit with her for a few months after we became Facebook friends, but nothing ever came of it.

 

• I may have never gone to see Jojo Rabbit (2019) at the theater just after my 30th birthday with a girl named “Piper,” but I did see it at the theater just before my 29th birthday with my mother. It remains in my all-time top five to this day.

 

Part III

• My materialistic tendencies aren’t just a harsh reality; they’re starting to take over my entire life the older I get and the more lonely and hopeless I become.

 

• It was indeed around this point in my life that I reconciled with God and started praying again, although my first prayer after so many years of radio silence was not about my non-existent first date, as depicted here.

 

• My family did get screwed over by a church once upon a time, most of all my dad. And to this day, like a cheap parlor trick, it’s one of the three things I can think really hard about at any given moment in time and make myself start crying over. The other two things are what the not-so-distant future might very well look like for my mother and her lucidity and how perfect my baby Max the Dachshund is (she was not in the prologue, as she didn’t come onto the scene until well after my 30th birthday, but you better believe she’ll be given her time to shine in the serial.) It’s kind of weird, I know, and I don’t fully understand it, but whenever I think about how special she is, how lucky I am to have found her, and how she’s going to be a part of my life for years to come, I can’t help but shed tears.

 

• It’s true I tend to assume strangers I run into in crowds are thinking nasty things about me, but also that they’re probably good people and are right to do so, because it’s probably true anyway.

 

• It is true both that I used to lose it on anyone who talks or looks at their phone during a movie and that recently I have discovered that on certain occasions with certain people it can be tolerable, and at times even preferable—if you’re with the right people.

 

• My first thought was to have “Piper” talk about how one of her favorite actors was Will Ferrell because that would be more believable, but the fact I myself enjoy John C. Reilly much more drove me to create this unrealistic scenario on our snowy walk to Taco Bell where a normal girl would know who that is.

 

• Asking to get punched in the face after watching Fight Club (1999), not sleeping for two days after watching American History X (1998), and the various films changing my life forever—all true.

 

• When I describe “That Special Feeling”—although the girl and our date are both fake, that feeling itself is magnificently, unequivocally fact. Throughout my life there have been girls so special and kind, so generous with their courtesies, that when I talk to them I almost forget I have Asperger’s. It’s like they intercept all of my awkwardness and lack of confidence and add just a bit more emphasis or react with their responses in a way that makes my response effortless in return. Almost every time I talk to anyone or interact with people in any way, I have to put so much effort into that interaction that I get exhausted after it, but these girls do this by making it so that I don’t have to try at all, and I feel like a completely different person around them. I could not possibly overstate what interactions like this mean to me; they are everything to me.

 

• I made Piper eat properly at Taco Bell during our first time out together to create a false sense of security that would only be ripped out from under me the next time we ate together, making its arrival all the more baffling. 

 

• It was very important that I added the part about the dangers of putting girls I’m attracted to on pedestals and thinking they’re far superior to me because that was one of the biggest things I struggled with with girls at school.

 

• The fact that “Piper” is giggly, bubbly, and a bit of a tease—I did this because for me, that’s my ideal personality type. I love when girls take initiative and say things I’d never dream of saying to anyone in a million years, because it’s something so bold and so different from myself that I admire anyone who does it. It’s just like the overt, egregiously outgoing girls in films that I idolize, like Girl Next Door (2004), and it’s what I’m most attracted to. I don’t want some moody, mellow sourpuss as a girlfriend, and I guess that’s ironic to say because that’s exactly how I present myself when I’m out in the world.

 

• My dogs and cats are just about the most important things in my life to me, and there was no way in heck I was going to write a story that didn’t touch heavily on this theme. Pip was my first baby that was all mine, not a “family dog.” I loved her with all of my heart, and I’ll never forget my time with her, but it’s true at times she had some rough edges.

 

• Her death happened at about the same time in my life and in the same way that I described in the story, and it’s true I wasn’t able to cry about her right after it happened—something that perplexes me to this day. It’s like I was so numb that I couldn’t even properly mourn my biggest loss at the time. But, one day, all the tears and emotion I had been holding in came bursting out at once, although I wasn’t at Applebee’s when it happened.

 

• Everything revealed about the many loose women I’ve met on online dating who called me “Babe” is all painfully true, and you will hear the whole story of them in one of the final chapters of The Female Enigma.

 

Part IV

• I’ve never held hands with a woman, and I think the desire for it is something that often gets overshadowed by my insatiable hunger for kissing and cuddling.

 

• Like in the story, my apartment is often messy, despite what you might think the home of someone with OCD would look like.

 

• Each of the examples I gave to explain what OCD really is were all obsessions and compulsions I’ve had personally, although some were ones I used to have and let go of, and some were greatly exaggerated.

 

• My two scantily clad portraits of Milla and Cara with taped-up nips are entirely real and remain on my wall to this day. My story about my misadventures in watching Caligula (1979) is equally true.

 

• The reason I included a part with these portraits on my wall is because I didn’t want to paint a portrait of myself for the reader that was flawless or clean; even if I was waiting for marriage to have sex, it was important I be true.

 

• The part of Piper smelling like “lilacs and gooseberries” was a very obvious nod to one of my favorite games of all time, The Witcher III. I wanted to describe my time with this woman as an assault on all my senses, and when it came time to give her a scent, I looked no further than that of Geralt’s great love in the game, Yennifer.

 

• The way Piper responded to my vulnerability about the loss of Pip—that’s the ideal.

 

• Archie was the first dog my family ever had while I was in the picture, and one day he bit the little girl who lived next door to us. That girl’s father threatened to sue us if we didn’t put Archie down, and that tragedy is how I conceived of Piper’s story with getting bitten by her neighbor’s dog. My love of cats and dogs is probably one of the most important things about me, and once again harping on the importance of compromise in relationships, I wrote her as scared of dogs because being with a girl like that scared me.

 

• My disgust with the way Piper ate the pizza we ordered at my apartment was once again important to illustrate because nobody is perfect, not even my dream girl.

 

• I’ve cut myself three times in my life, and I will never, ever do it again. My first time cutting was what I depicted here. The second you will read about in Cola Diet Other at some point, and the third you will see depicted towards the end of The Female Enigma Serial.

 

• My description of why I found cuddling so special and affecting is exactly how I imagine I’ll feel when I do get to cuddle for real. And I am almost positive I’m going to cry when I do.

 

Part V

• My Mama is indeed my best friend, my rock, and my favorite person in the world.

 

• We are so close, in fact, that I take off every Tuesday and Thursday just to hang out all day with her, my cats, and our dogs.

 

• As close as we are, however, I’ve always been well aware of the fact that our time together comes with an expiration date.

 

• Like I mentioned earlier, dogs are my favorite things in the world, and I thought, what better way to depict a realistic sort of relationship than to introduce a problem like the girl I fall in love with being scared of dogs?

 

• Kind of going all-out with the negative things I might have to deal with with a girl, I tried to think of the worst thing a girl I like could do that would also be something she was totally oblivious to doing, and it was having long fingernails.

 

• Tragically, all the stuff I said about my dad is true.

 

• Everything about the game room in my parents’ house is equally true, although the hot tub room is separate and on the first floor, not in the basement next to the game room.

 

• Boners are very much a real thing and can be funny sometimes to talk about. I felt like I needed to include it somewhere because my threshold for arousal is incredibly low, and if I’m getting close to a pretty girl, it’s definitely a subject that would pop up.

 

• I knew the kiss was going to be the climax for this entire story, and I tried to write it in a way that I would most want it to happen.

 

• Piper having bad breath when I kissed her was a detail I added late in the writing stage, but it’s one I think is important. I included it based on people I hear complaining about the way their spouses snore at night or other things. I don’t understand that at all, because, like my affinity for Piper’s bad breath, if my spouse snored horribly, I wouldn’t be able to sleep soundly without hearing it. Similarly, I cannot fathom how couples in love can have “bad sex.” You’re doing the best thing you can do on this planet, and you’re doing it with your favorite person in the world. Like, how does anything “bad” come into play?

 

 

The End of The Beginning

Without further ado, I’d like to conclude the prologue by looking ahead at the things to come next in The Female Enigma Serial. I couldn’t be happier to move on, as getting myself stuck writing a fictional story for more than a year really kept me from writing the kind of stuff I now can, the stuff I created this blog to say, the good stuff! This extensive serial will be oozing with content for many posts about all things female, love, sex, and relationship related. I will conclude this prologue by giving you a taste at what, exactly, that will be. All titles and contents of each post are subject to change, as this is just my preliminary blueprint.

 

My name is Mullarkey, and this has been my malarkey.

 

 

 

Still Ahead, on The Female Enigma Serial…

 

Part I: Woman – The Final Frontier

Hi My Name is Mullarkey and I’m a Hopeless Romantic

Let’s start this again, from the top. This is who I am, and this is what I want to achieve with the following serial about all things related to girls, love, relationships and sex.

 

No Filter

Filters are off! Unlike my previous blog, this is nothing but pure, raw, uncensored, unadulterated ME. Let me tell you why that’s so important.

 

A Surrogate Social Life

Oh, what would I ever do without my job at the department store? How it saved me, and how it’s hindering me. Customers, co-workers, and managers – Here’s the scoop.

 

Growing Up Mullarkey

Silly, silly young me. I could have a PHD in misconceptionism.

 

Family

Everybody’s got one. For better, and for worse.

 

Pets

One of the most cherished and important aspects of my life. This is my current bunch, as well as some of my previous.

 

Do I Want Kids?

Why or why not?

 

Unrealistic Examples, Unrealistic Expectations

Turns out, there are downsides to your parents having a perfect marriage…

 

Oh, The Places We’ll Go!

You’ve never seen this degree of overthinking, I assure you. This is why I fumble every interaction I have with girls.

 

Materialistic Me

Some people drink, smoke, gamble, have sex, or do drugs. I buy stuff. But can you really blame me?

 

Getting Physical

It’s the million dollar question: Why in the world do I want to wait to have sex? Also, this is how I deal with my natural urges.

 

 

Part II: Hormones & Humility

OCD, Asperger’s and Depression, (and a smidge of ADHD) Oh My!

Ah, my personal mental health cocktail. This is how each of their diagnosis’ came to be, and a brief summary of how they affect me today as it relates to women, relationships, and sex.

 

The Instant Messaging  Pretense

My life during the wild west era of the internet. How instant messaging helped me be social in middle school, and how it crippled me for the future.

 

The Day The Music Died

In 2001, a church did something incredibly cruel and un-christian to my family that completely derailed the course of my life, and drastically changed the trajectory of who I became as an adult.

 

Middle & High School

Bullies, girls, and becoming the man I am today.

 

The Films That Made Me

Moulin Rouge! (2001) is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to films that greatly influenced me, my development and my beliefs. Here are the rest that helped shape my beliefs about women, relationships, and sex.

 

The Pity Ploy

Someone’s pity is not something you want. It took me almost my entire life to learn that invaluable lesson, and I did it the hard way.

 

Chewing the Charcoal

The night I’ll never forget, the place I got sent after, and the lessons I learned from it all.

 

“Special Interests” & “Unspecial Disinterests”

What kind of Aspie would I be if I didn’t have a laundry list of things I’m obsessed with, and another of everything I hate with a passion?

 

 

Part III: Now, if We’re Talking Body

If anything is going to make me lose followers by the masses, it’s the contents of this post. But it’s also an unquestionably quintessential part of my story all the same.

 

Anatomy 101: The Mullarkey Miseducation

It probably won’t come as a surprise to you that my sexual education was severely botched by both my educators and my parents. This is how they messed up, how I attempted to compensate for the lack of knowledge early on, and how it affected me down the road.

 

The Navel Supremacy

Tummies are the best. But why? I take a good look at this fixation, as well as its origins.

 

No Bate for My Mastur

It’s the elephant in the room with this serial. Within this blog I am nothing if not an open book, and I would never start discussing a topic like this if I wasn’t going to cover absolutely every angle of it, the good, the bad, and the ugly. As well as the embarrassing, the shameful and the improper, as there is no such thing as “too much information” here on my personal blog. What I unveil, however, may surprise you…

 

P’s & V’s

Even more regrets, art classes, and the cross I have to bear.

 

 

Part IV: Broads & Birthdays

The Netflix Notion

I’ve messed up a lot of opportunities throughout my life, but this one just may have been the biggest. Things could have been so different…

 

A Tinder Confessional

Welcome to the chronicles of my time spent as a regular on online dating sites, and the girls I met on them. 

 

Thirties Birthdays Blues

I’ve had more excitement and close calls with females in my 30’s than I ever did in my teens or 20’s, and it always happens around my birthday. I have stories far more interesting than anything I could have thought up with a fictional girl named “Piper”, and this is those stories. If you thought my fictional story about getting drunk on my 30th like I talked about in the Piper Parable was reckless, just wait until you find out what I really did on my 30th!

 

Advocating for The Devil: a Mullarkey Q & A

What if I fall madly in love with the prettiest girl in the world, but after some years she gets fat and becomes the ugliest girl in the world? I talk so much about wanting a girl that likes me, but what would happen if I met a girl who was obsessed with me, and wanted nothing more than to pop my cherry? I say I want a girlfriend so bad it hurts, but do I also have what it takes to handle a break-up if I get one and that’s what it comes to? I finally ask myself the tough questions like these.

 

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

My Mama is my best friend, my everything, and my favorite person in the world… But that was never meant to last. The end is nigh!