4

There's Plenty Of Room In Your Empty Apartment

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So one night you have a party, inviting all your married friends over, and they all show up because they love you. Truly, your friends are a great reason to stop thinking about that loaded .22 pistol you keep wrapped in a sock above your coats in the hall closet. After you all watch A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, because no one has been able to stop thinking about it since you brought it up that one time, your friends leave, two by two, and you're left alone again.

"Bye, everybody," you say, but your voice echoes through your empty apartment, because they've been gone for 40 minutes and you've just been standing there, staring at your closed front door. You gather up the empty beer bottles and put them in the recycling bin. You mop up the thick, red and brown fluids left by SaraCraig. You pick up the empty chip bowl from your coffee table and set it in the sink. You turn on the water and watch the bowl fill up. The crumbs float to the edge of the bowl, spilling over and vanishing down the drain. You grab a sponge and gently wipe away the residual oils. You set the bowl on a dishrag, leaning it against a glass so that it dries by morning. Then you return to your couch. You notice an empty beer bottle by the television that you didn't notice at first. You stare at it, forgetting to sit back down. There's a quarter-inch of warm beer still in the bottom of the bottle. You can't recall who was drinking that beer, but there's a faint memory of a lipstick stain across the bottle's mouth.

3

If Loneliness Is Your Lover, Let Madness Be Your Mistress

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Even though it's the middle of the week, you find yourself walking to this dive bar you know, intentionally dragging your sneakers across the pavement so that they don't look so frustratingly new and clean. Chicks hate that.

You buy a beer and lean into the bar, hoping to project an "I'm too cool to talk to anyone" vibe that women will find irresistible. It doesn't work, so instead you lean over and say hi to a girl sitting near you, and that works crazy well. Like, she smiles and responds immediately and it's the easiest thing ever and you find yourself wondering why you've never tried it before.

"Do you know how to get the jukebox to work? My name's Louella. Call me Lou."

You tell her your name, and she smiles. You smile back. Then Lou and you start talking and discover that you share all the same weird, stupid interests, like playing Monopoly with extra money and scuffing up your brand-new sneakers at the beach. She's fascinated by your job. She's even into target-shooting, which is sexy as hell.

"I have a gun," you say. "A Walther P22."

"Really? You carry it around with you?"

"No, it generally stays wrapped in a sock at the top of my hall closet."

"That's pretty weird," but she doesn't say it like she's freaked out. Instead, she smiles and leans in close.

"You wanna get out of here?" she asks.

"Yeah," you say. "I have an idea for somewhere fun to go."

You take her outside, get in your car, and drive toward the Fitzsimmons Plant.

2

The Fools Don't Guard This Place Anymore

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1

We All Find Happiness Eventually

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The worst part of sharing a physical presence and consciousness with Lou is that you're both fused to the rotting corpse that used to be your body. But you find a way to make it work. Maybe you're not so into late-night cons, and maybe she doesn't share your love of demented 1980s horror/special effects masterpieces, and maybe the constant agony of living in a twisted abomination of flesh and that exists simultaneously in the physical world and a hell dimension that is itself the source of human suffering is sorta inconvenient, but what relationship doesn't have its problems?

The point is, the companionship is nice. Even the unfathomable limits of pain and sorrow that course through your existence are somehow bearable just because you have someone to share it with. And even though you're dead, you do get to live on in her heart, both literally and figuratively. And sharing your every secret thought, every memory, and every dream with another person is wonderfully fulfilling, even if you are forced to do so because your brain occupies the same physical space.

And because you can see all of eternity at once, a sensation that the human consciousness could never hope to endure, and yet, impossibly, yours is forced to, you know that you're going to grow old together. And you know the precise date that you will both die. It is a long fucking time from now.

JF Sargent has some commitment issues and is an editor and columnist for Cracked. Check him out on Twitter and Facebook.

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For more reasons our ancestors did it better, check out 5 Lifehacks For Living With A Terrible Attention Span and The Mundane Background Story Of Every James Bond Adventure.