"The law of averages maintains there must be other people out there like me."

I have written and rewritten this next post so many times I don't even remember what I was trying to say.

I just had a really amazing experience of knowing someone wonderful. Someone who was so like me, someone who made me laugh and renewed my faith in intelligence and caring. Someone I already miss, someone I feel somehow smaller, less without. One of the things that brought us closer when I asked these two questions - "What do you fear most?" and "What do you dream?"

My answer to the latter was I dream of the end of the world. Of an apocalypse. I dream of the coming plague, the sun dissolving on the horizon, of reality falling away like puzzle pieces to reveal another reality beneath. I dream of utter horror and loneliness and I dream of the world reborn. Mostly I dream of knowing it will end, that the power of a thousand suns will be released on earth, that what we have created will end us, and we will die in a nuclear holocaust, or worse survive.

But that's not what I fear, it's what I dream. When I asked what you fear most, I didn't have an answer to my own question. But now I know.

And even saying it turns my spine inside out, knowing who helped me find the answer turns my heart to shadow because what happened between us made it even more likely to be true.

I fear being alone. Not temporarily. I love living alone, I love being on my own. I love dancing in my car, staying up curled around trashy disposable fiction, passing hours on my own. What I fear most lead me to ask what I wanted most. And what I want most is a family. A partner to share my life with, someone committed to seeing the next day with me, and the next. And the next. Someone who knows me, is overwhelmed by love for me and the whole world, and maybe wants to adopt a kid with me. And we have friends.

That's what I want most. Stupidly simple. Maybe just stupid. Because I can't do it on my own. You can't have a dream that depends on someone else because there's no guarantee that it can happen. In fact, the law of averages maintains it cannot happen. And so that's what I fear most, dying, leaving this world, and not having had that.