After several long years of personal solitude, I have finally grown sick of being alone.
Which is disconcerting because I've always admired the hermit and the recluse.
I've envied those who could venture off into the great distances and live humbly and alone.

But I do not live in a cob cottage out on some long-forgotten barren moor.
I do not live in a quiet cabin on the shores of a lake in the middle of the nearly impenetrable forests of the Alaskan Range.
I do not dwell in stone huts tucked away from the winds on St. Kilda, or on a lonely, unnamed river somewhere in the Great Slave Lake's basin.

I live amongst people. In a hamlet near a village outside a relatively well-populated post-Industrial city on the shores of a large lake across from one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the World. And I am lonely.

So I held my nose and signed on to a dating site.
A popular free site. And waited. And waited. For nothing. I was actually anxious for a while. But for no reason, really, because nobody said hello. No women in the vicinity were interested.
But I expected that. As a fat guy, I am used to that. You are not seen as being a sexual entity when you are fat. You are there. People like you, maybe, and think highly of you...but there is hardly any notion that you may have romantic potential; the thought is probably disturbing.

Then the other day, after months of nothing, I received a message. The woman was attractive and shared many interests with me. We've made small talk over the past couple days. And I am locked into the mindset that this can't happen because she will not come to see me as a sexual being; she will not recognize or acknowledge and chance for romance. Layers of fat will distort her view. And I can feel the negativity flowing. Pessimism. Rampant self-doubt. I am now more worried that she WOULD be interested and then that, upon meeting, she would be horrified or completely let-down.

Foolishness.
I have to punch myself back to normalcy.