back to Issue 19
by Mari Ramler
1
I feel feral, I told Reddit. I feel like a dumpster-diving, feral racoon. Eyes shining in the dark.
I was on sabbatical with limited human contact. I was writing a book. I was in my head, but I was also in my animal-feral-racoon body, digging, digging, and beginning to tire of my search. I said I was writing a book, and I was, but I was also looking for my person—in my case a man or a woman. By this time, a parade of people had marched through my heart, which had started to feel weak and soggy like wet cardboard that could come apart under any real weight. The people I found online and in real life I knew were not meant for me, were not who I was searching for. I would know I had finally found what was meant for me by feeling. The world would come alive again. Sing.
That time was so filled with words and so empty of real human connection that it got to the point where I couldn’t read books anymore. The only thing I could read—and did read—was Reddit. I read Reddit like a book I was trying to finish. I read Reddit with urgency from the moment I woke up until the moment I fell asleep, my eyes stinging, shining in the dark.
What did I read? I read subreddits named Am I The Asshole, Am I Overreacting, Women Over Forty, Dating Over Forty, Single and Happy, Ask A Question, Confession, Emotional Intelligence. I lurked Professors, Education, and AI. I got notifications about the escalating war in Iran, the price of gas, bombs. I’m not going to say I was addicted, that I had replaced my steady need for human connection and hope with an old-school interface comprised largely of incels and Red-Pillers, but yeah. I was.
About the time I began to suspect I was being radicalized into a Reddit femcel, I saw a post on r/UnfilteredNashville from a user named ObjectiveCurrency934. The post was titled “Nashville Dating.”
Hi all, he wrote. I hope this post is allowed. I’m a 40something male whose wife of 17 years died of cancer in late 2024. I’m just looking to meet some people and have human contact, romantic or otherwise. I’m a small business owner and regularly go to karaoke at Lipstick Lounge by myself. After my wife passed, I started taking singing lessons just as an excuse to get out of the house. If you’d like to grab a coffee, feel free to shoot me a DM.
He posted links to his late wife’s academic papers. She was a Communication professor at Belmont University. He posted a tribute the school had written about her. Meg. Dr. Meg Tully. She seemed both brilliant and beloved. Reading it, I began to cry.
I thought about them, ObjectiveCurrency934 and his wife Dr. Meg Tully, when I rode my bike around town, while I finished my book. I thought of Dr. Meg Tully’s dissertation which I absolutely Googled while I wrote. I thought about her husband ObjectiveCurrency934 singing, somehow, in spite of everything that had happened to them.
I put my phone in the other room with my notifications on silent. I sat on my hands for two days trying not to reach out. I was trying to be a feral raccoon who was happy alone. Mostly, I was just trying to keep myself away from emotionally unavailable men, which he probably was. I felt conflicted about reaching out to Dr. Meg Tully’s husband. She still seemed very present and real, which she was. This is a long way of saying I was trying to grow.
Dear ObjectiveCurrency934, I wrote on the third day. I don’t think I am the person you are looking for, but I spend most Sundays in Nashville drinking coffee and watching movies by myself. Let me know if you’d ever like to meet up.
P.S. I would also be up for karaoke.
2
When I walked in the Lipstick Lounge, I was late and did not have cash. I saw the only heterosexually coded, cis-het man standing in the back of the bar. I knew it was him because he looked like a kind, straight, white, non-threatening, supportive man. Also, he wore a red flannel shirt and jeans, whereas everybody else was in some sort of costume. There was a cat drag show going on with a trans woman in a Halloween cat costume in the middle of a strip tease. She wore three bras because she had so many cat nipples. She was throwing her second bra to the audience when I walked in.
Hi, he shouted from the back.
I don’t have any cash! I shouted back.
He dug into his pockets, but I shook my head, Where’s the ATM?
I paid my own way and tried to friendzone him.
I said he wasn’t ready.
He said he was.
He asked, Are you?
I said yes. But I was, at times, flighty because here is what I knew: I would have to fall in love with them both.
I asked Reddit what to do.
Let him talk about her, Reddit said.
Here is what he said: Meg asked him out when they both worked at a local movie theater. Meg subsisted on candy and mac and cheese and didn’t let him cook for her. Meg liked to do, of all things, large puzzles. When she did her comedy one, she papered over problematic men, carefully cutting and taping a perfectly shaped Tina Fey over Bill Cosby so that you couldn’t tell the difference. Meg was annoyed with a student who emailed at 3 am to ask about a grade. Meg made collages for the people she loved.
3
One day about a month into coffee and karaoke and movies, he said he didn’t know what to do about his wedding ring, which he still wore on his left hand. I tried to take it off one night while sleeping and kept waking up, searching for it in the dark, he said. I felt it was a question.
You should keep it on, I said. Maybe one day, if things work out between us, you might move it to the other hand if you wear another wedding ring. Or maybe you’d wear it around your neck on your chain with Meg’s ring. Or even wear two rings on the same finger.
I felt magnanimous saying it and then immediately threatened by my own generosity. He will always love her. She will always be with him, with us.
I asked Reddit what to feel.
Don’t be jealous of a ghost, Reddit said.
But Meg wasn’t a ghost. She was as real to me as any person had ever been. She was more real than the Redditors I spent every night reading. And she occupied an enormous place in his heart and always would. I didn’t know if he had room for me. I didn’t know if I had room for them.
Is it possible to fall in love with a widower’s wife? I asked Reddit.
The Buddhist ocean wave says that death is a natural transition rather than an end, Reddit answered. Life is the wave rising from the ocean, while death is the wave sinking back into the water, returning to the source. When a wave crashes and subsides, the water does not die or vanish; it changes form and returns to the ocean.
If life and death could be one thing, I thought, love might also.
Love was capacious enough to be both singular and vast, particularized and unified. It reminded me of when I had my second daughter. My belly growing, I would chase after my firstborn who was a toddler at the time and think, How could I ever love someone else this much? And then my second daughter was born, and, holding her for the first time, I thought, This is how.
All spring, riding my bike and writing my book, I heard her name. Meg-Meg, the crickets chirped, Me-eg! the robins sang. Even the water, rushing and then dissipating in the woods next to me as I rode my bike along the trail, seemed to sigh Meeehhhg before disappearing from view.
Mari Ramler is associate professor of English at Tennessee Technological University. She has recently published in Chiron Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, Folklore Review, Susurrus, After Hours, Hypertext Magazine, Survive and Thrive, and The Iris Review, among others.