I don't know how many relationships ago it was, maybe it was just the last one, (and the one before that and the one before that and the one before that) but I can remember telling myself, "You know, no matter how unlikely it seems that you will ever be loved or love anyone ever again, it'll happen, and you'll look back on this and you'll think, Damn, that was silly to be so sad." The marvelous thing about this is that no matter how many times you tell yourself this, it's never really a comfort.

Even now that I can practically hear my own voice in my head from the past saying the words it doesn't make me feel any better. Sure, obviously after whatever relationship was particularly hard I moved on and found someone else---but what if this time is different? What if I never find anyone ever again and when I go crawling back to my current girlfriend she's no longer there for me and I just must spend the rest of my life crawling around in the gutters, love bankrupt and broken? A life lived condemned to carnal pleasures performed only by my hand. Oh, the horror.

It's been years since I started faking confidence and it's still hard to keep the guise up. I'm confident! I am! I swear! I just don't want to die alone. But I'm so confident I will never die alone because people like me... people like me... I'm a driver... I'm a winner... things are gonna change, I can feel it.