"My Ex Left Me To Travel!"

Coming of Age in your Mid-Twenties

I can barely recite my well-rehearsed, AA-style, but really used and reused during the first half-minute of a first date introduction without being reminded of the unresolved itch of my zit-com love life.

There really is nothing pre-pubescent about applying a three-olived dirty martini on the increasingly ripening “find-myself” loneliness conundrum at Bar Planet on a Saturday night. But just when I find myself coming to terms with my men-o-pause-all cynicism as I reapply my $45 lip gloss while throwing back the last of my $23 cocktail with the only kind of validation allowed at one of the “Best Cocktail Bars in Sydney”, in comes the overcompensating twenty-four year old with his unforgettable punchline.

Did we ever sound like that? How had twenty-four all of a sudden become the overzealous better-than-thou teen whom everyone knew was just desperate for reassurance? I had nothing but brimming sympathy for the drunken heartache of a sentence starting with “My Ex” and finishing with “Travel” because we all knew that between the-one-that-got-away and the-one-that-I-let-away is where you choose to say the word “I”.

So I find myself quickly running my mental fingers through the online dating zit-geist of 2021 through to 23, or what I now like to coin Sydney’s rendition of the Roaring Twenties (we can all agree that the ban of physical distance between you and the next person backfired with an over-indulgence of boundary-crossing friendships and fleeting romances). To only find that I had definitely, recently, binged on a slice of trite cake in the age of seasoned singledom.

There will come a time in every young woman’s life where even in what already seems a lifetime of inventing and reinventing your skincare routine, you will miss the adrenaline of an emergency trip to Priceline and a making-something-out-of-nothing phone call to your best friend.

So begrudgingly, but with that another-one-bites-the-dust attitude I say:

“Hi, I’m Mimi, I’m a High School English Teacher, the bar is the most underappreciated seating at a restaurant, I run and I paint, but never both in the same day, my frustrations always seem to suffer from a delayed onset and regrettably I am not well-travelled but I’d like to be, no this is not my first time here but yes, I would like another drink.”