“I don’t read!”
I put on my good shoes. Pumps – Zalando Outlet.
Till, 32, something to do with IT, wanted to pick me up by car, which led me to calculate that I would have to walk a few steps. To be on the safe side, I stuffed my most flexible ballerinas into my handbag.
Our match was on ice for eighteen days. I was worried that it would turn like sour milk. But then Till arranged a date. He asked me point blank. As if he wanted to make up for his initial inactivity.
“Shall we stop by my mom’s house first? She lives just around the corner,” he said, while I condemned myself for having chosen this meeting place out of all the infinite possibilities.
Good, I thought. He wants to introduce you to his mother. Apparently it’s impossible to find anything between Dick Pic hail and a dress rehearsal for the mother-in-law-to-be. I agreed, miming the open-minded one.
“You’ve got something between your teeth,” a woman in her sixties greeted me, waving her index finger in front of my face.
“No, that’s… a gap,” I replied submissively.
Till laughed like a hyena, the ice was broken, and I missed my ex (his mother lived in Latvia, I never met her).
Till’s mother had a face that made me nervous. The wide-open eyes, the skin that reminded me of a terrycloth towel that had been washed too hot. I caught myself looking for physiognomic similarities in Till’s face, but then quickly felt ashamed of my superficiality.
You. Hated. Me.
I even kept quiet about the occasional smoker and heard myself blathering on about proper waste separation. Nothing. Even the heavy artillery left them unimpressed. My law exam, which I wanted to use for something good, bounced off her like a cheap self-tanner.
She turned me into confetti with her eyes and I understood. The reason for Till’s single status was sitting right in front of me.
I looked at myself from the outside and couldn’t help but ask myself: Why? Why are you bending over backwards for a guy you don’t even know? In a final attempt to get through the evening, I asked the most innocuous of questions:
“Who is your favorite author?”
“I don’t read!”
Till had put on this so-is-she-now face and I suddenly realized:
You don’t need to do that.
The tried and tested unexpected headache relieved me. Luckily, I had packed my spare pair of shoes, which got me home single as fuck.
Writing is her hobby: Sybille Statz from Cologne loves great romances just as much as she loves horror films, cats and 90s series. You can read more of her work in her two short novels “Matches for Real – Das Dating-Desaster” and “After Sunset – Korallenrot” and here.
What does our author Sybille Statz experience when dating? Here you can find the other episodes to read, marvel at and smile about.
Text: Sybille Statz
