Kat Sadler

“I think I might go home,” I say to Tori and Lizzie. We’re in the queue for the toilets in Fever, a nightclub in Epsom where the boys are fresh out of upper sixth with three A-Levels in Lynx Africa and the superhuman ability to push past you in a nightclub using just your arse for leverage.

I don’t often go clubbing with my younger sister and her best friend, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I look like an intolerant chaperone, batting away men that amble up towards them, like I’m protecting precious stock at basecamp from a hoard of approaching zombies.

“I know you. I recognise those teeth.” A boy appears out of nowhere in the smoking area and says to Lizzie. I don’t know what it is about nightclubs that make boys think it’s suddenly all right to say things a murderer would say to his victim, right before he drowns them in a bath of acid and makes a shrine with the remnants.

Shakespeare said all’s fair in love and war, but I don’t think he meant terrify a woman into submission by making her stare into the unrelenting face of death.

Back in the toilets I’m beginning to think that all love is a fucking lie and I’m going to die alone as an elderly chaperone and maybe I should call the police to warn them that a man might be found a few days from now with a bag of my sisters teeth.

“No! You’re single now!” Lizzie snaps.

You don’t see the true power of feminism until you’re standing amidst a chorus of drunk women in the toilets of a club instinctively chanting “SINGLE” and aggressively performing Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” like a New Zealand Haka.

I feel bad because I only went into the toilets so I could release all the drunk texts squirming around inside me like emotional larvae. They are flies ready to hatch and propel themselves into the sky, on a mission to find some nice, horrible shit to bask in.

They will sacrifice any shred of dignity from their human host to find it.

I get into the cubicle and start to close the door when another girl, one from the chanting, pushes the door open and spits something disgusting into the toilet.

“Sorry, I’m not very well” She says, and then leaves.

I stand, staring into the toilet, watching the floating bit of indiscriminate fluid she’d just produced, thinking about boys.

There’s been some good bits to being single. I’ve saved a lot of money on make up wipes by just crying the make up off my face. I put a lot of make up on to hide how sad I am. I’m scared it’s actually weighing down my face and making me look sadder.

I’ve also accepted defeat and downloaded Tinder again. Boys say there’s a scale of hotness to craziness, so I’m considering setting all my Tinder pics to me in a bikini crying in the shower.

I quite enjoyed the process of getting Tinder last time, because I got to update all my profile and look at how much I’d grown since the last time I had it. But this time around when I went to update, it already had all my most recent pictures ready to go. It was pretty convenient, but also a harrowing insight into my growing inability to sustain a relationship if they cant last as long as a profile picture on Facebook.

The novelty of Tinder also wears off pretty quickly as I become more aware that I’m just soft of judging the different faces of lonely people, different manifestations of myself in different bodies, each just as sad and lonely.

But also I fucking hate travelling, puns, sports, the outdoors, gin, physical activities, wine, not having a serious thing, meeting up for a drink in a bar, seeing how things are going, having fun, and bodily contact. Which makes me think that I don’t have so much in common with them.

But I’m not giving up just yet. Shakespeare said the course of true love never did run smooth. I’m no expert on romance, but he was probably talking about the fact I haven’t shaved my legs since August 2016.