Ms. Strangelove

or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Yoga

So, I just discovered that there's a dating app called "Hater" where you can, in theory anyway and in their words, "meet someone who

hates the same stuff." This is perfect. I actually love this app, not because it's well designed (it's not... at all), but simply because the whole core theme of everyone in online dating seems to be their unfettered positivity about everything. The idea of being able to bond with someone not over your shared love of something stupid like kombucha but rather your mutual hatred of something stupid like people who don't own televisions is exactly what the emotional slough of despond that is online dating needs.

Now, listen. I am not an inherently negative person. But, I am a human being. I experience a full spectrum of emotions. I have good days and bad days, good moments and bad moments. I certainly have my share of annoyances, not to mention the occasional existential crisis. What baffles me about online dating is the absolute relentlessness of people's desire to appear to love everything all the time. I can't tell if this is genuinely how these people are or if they're just desperately slapping a veneer of preternatural sunshine over their humanity. Either way, the women of online dating are clearly terrified of seeming negative about anything. "I love my kids, I love my pets, I love my job, I love my family and friends. Everything in my life is perfect I just need the right man to share it with." It makes me feel a little like I fell asleep and woke up in a Huxleyan dystopia where people will be thrown in a gulag or exiled to the Falkland Islands if they admit that they get bummed out now and again. "The world is wonderful! The Dear Leader makes the sun rise!"

I don't know if it's Xanax or yoga or just plain old fashioned denial, but I'd love to be that happy all the time. 

The Cinnamon Peeler

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
And leave the yellow bark dust
On your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
You could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to you hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
–your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in the water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
you climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon peeler's wife. 
Smell me.

—Michael Ondaatje