When ‘I Don’t Know’ Is The Answer

I think I am becoming the type of girl that looks for reasons to leave. I search for red flags, for warning signs, for people to give me reasons to say, “No thank you” and retreat back into the fortress of singledom I have built for myself. It’s comfortable, being by myself with a basically empty fridge and the sounds of Carrie Bradshaw pretending she knows what the fuck she’s talking about in the background. No one ever asks me what I am feeling in there.

I’m not sure if it’s cynicism that has soaked into my core or just the utter fear of being vulnerable but I find the word “yes” to be too bitter to say. It’s like tequila. My tongue rejects it and I just shrug and use “I don’t know” as a placeholder so I can stay in a world of almost instead of going into a world of absolute.

I wear all back for three weeks and then nothing but bright green for two after. I can never make my mind up about who I am or what I want to be and the idea of having something with such stability is so utterly foreign to me that I cannot even picture it fitting into my life. I am coffee mugs filled with $8 wine and sheets that have seen multiple boys without being washed; I am not buying in bulk because it’s savvy or someone who will ever remember to RSVP.

I cancel, I bail, I show up late all apologetic and frazzled but the underlying emotion is that I don’t know if you belong here with me. I am not Summer Finn, here to make your life quirky and weirdly blue with musical montages after you crawl on top of me. I am someone who isn’t written about, is not idolized, and still has to Google to make sure I actually understand “consistency” before putting it in a paragraph because the concept is so bizarre to me I’m not sure I do.

I don’t know if anyone belongs here, belongs with me. I think I might be the puzzle someone picks up at a garage sale that’s never complete, is always missing one or two pieces in the landscape of a poppy field and it isn’t sad; it just is. I’m content in my instability, in my unknowing. I don’t know is the only thing that always sticks.

And I know I don’t know isn’t fair. I know I am coming up on my expiration date with answering, “I don’t know” to “Do you like him?” But I’m going to expend it as long as I can, squeeze every second out of the almost that I can possibly get. Keep spinning in my world of randoms and weirdness and fragmented sentences because that’s where I make sense.

Because if I keep answering with I don’t knows then nothing will ever have to be a something. Because somethings are scary and I don’t knows are the only thing I do.