It’s official, I am Mary Hatch. Mary Hatch as some of you well know is the spinster librarian, a fate that would have befell Mary Bailey had George Bailey never been born in It’s a Wonderful Life. I’m not sure if Mary Hatch had a cat or ten but I am fairly certain she did. Consider that assumption my contribution to Frank Capra’s masterpiece.
What I do know is this. I am perpetually single. I have a cat, five if you count the four wooden one’s my second mother has bought me to decorate my tiny corner of their expansive land in Northern California. And as of 10:00 a.m. tomorrow morning I am officially a librarian. I am way hotter than your typical librarian and my wardrobe doesn’t really consist of anything that could be considered frumpy. Formfitting and revealing are probably better adjectives.
The truth is it is a good job for me and something I would be very good at. My brain tends to retain large quantities of information rather well and I appreciate good organization. These are two things 
that a library can accommodate. Me and the library are a good fit barring my penchant for profanity. The library is of course a world that revolves around words and writing and that is also a place that I will feel at home. Mentally it is a near perfect fit; as far as appearances go, I will likely be the black sheep. I actually relish the fact that this 99.9% accurate.
I am excited for the job. It is something I can and believe I would like to do for a very long time. The think my brain is getting stuck on (because I always get hung up somewhere) is this stupid thing a friend’s husband said about me sixteen years ago when he was trying to fix me up with every loser he worked with at the grocery store in where he was the stocking manager in Southern California.
In the late 90’s I was dating a guy who was polyamorous unbeknownst to his girlfriend of seven years. He was a douche and I was douche. I have accepted it. I learned some valuable things about myself and what I wanted. I also realized that it didn’t matter how you fit into a relationship where cheating was involved it all sucks. That situation is completely absent of any sense of fulfillment. It was hungry and desperate like a pride of lions with one antelope steak left between them.
While I was being a douche and learning valuable lessons my childhood friend’s husband was trying to set me up with slightly less loser-y losers than the one I was currently dating. He would call me and invite me to dinner with him, his wife and “a friend.” He did it so many times with so many men that I would immediately begin drilling him about his friend. “He’s a nice guy, he makes a lot of money but…” There was always a “but.” A typical line that followed that conjunction was he is 32, still lives with his mother, is pretty awkward and is still a virgin. I wish this was an exaggeration but it really isn’t.
I always wondered what he must have thought of me. The guys he tried to fix me up with were pretty fucking insulting. They probably were no worse than the guys I was choosing myself but on the superficial front my choices were far superior. At 23, vanity trumps financial and even emotional stability 9 times out of 10.
After many attempts to get me to meet his friends, he gave up. He began joking that I was going to wind up a spinster librarian, alone and bitter. He actually said that. And I have decided that that mother fucker might be Nostradamus because as of this moment he is correct on all accounts sans the bittier bit.
Then I just think about everything else going on in my life. He might have called some of the stuff but I’ll be fucked if I don’t have some fight left in me. Working at the library will stimulate me mentally. I’ll have opportunities to meet men I might be more compatible with intellectually. (Or as my friend Kathy so eloquently put it, “You’ll meet men who can read.”) And as I stated previously I’ll have that whole slutty librarian thing going on so I’ll only stay single if I want to be single.
So maybe I won’t be Mary Hatch. I will still be me with a job I will be fucking good at in a place that will put some of my more substantial talents to good use. I guess the only thing Mary Hatch and I really have in common is that we both look really hot in glasses.
As I lay in the dark, scanning the vast barrenness of my bed I run my hand over the empty landscape where he would sleep. Who is he? I don’t know. Last night as I dreamt he was a celebrity I had seen in an interview earlier that day. That wasn’t really who it was of course. Really he was just one of the muddy puddles in my memory, a puddle that used to be an ocean of love, joy and ultimately sorrow. He was the puddle I still occasionally dip my finger in, swirling it furiously trying to create a storm, a wave, something. Of course it never yields the desired results and as the puddle slowly dries up I lose interest.
When I can’t bear thinking about it anymore I roll to my other side and stare at the other silhouettes in the dark room. The furniture is just a collection of shapes in the quiet, lightless room. This room feels foreign even in the light. It isn’t really my room. I haven’t built my room, my bed, not yet. I assemble my room and space in my head. I begin my plan to rebuild. Things are falling back into place. Everything is nearly reassembled.
