a ticking-time-bomb scenario for the past year.

“Dude, what is your life about?!” quizzes Gina every morning over IM like the opening bell of a boxing match, startling me into the ring of another Monday. The alarm to starting the day off single.

“Ummmm, who the hell knows?” I say, too exhausted to think of anything better.

I don’t feel almost twenty-eight. Not an actual adult, I’m more adult-ish. See, I’m just a girl. An awesome one, of course, but just one. And like so many other little brown girls my age, I believe the problem of loving, lusting, or even “liking liking” someone can be solved with a simple equation: x + y = gtfohwtbs (if “x” 28 years old and “y” = socially retarded men). So when Dex10 IM’s me again, I react as if on autopilot because doing otherwise would be to go against nature. I’m just following orders:

Dex10 (3:14:46 p.m.): hey

nyCALIgrl4 (3:15:06 p.m.): what?

Dex10 (3:15:26 p.m.): oh

nyCALIgrl4 (3:16:14 p.m.): is there something specific you wanted? or…

Dex10 (3:16:50 p.m.): why are you asking so many questions? i was saying hello

nyCALIgrl4 (3:18:56 p.m.): k

Dex10 (3:19:42 p.m.): am i on death silence?

nyCALIgrl4 (3:20:02 p.m.): ummm

nyCALIgrl4 (3:20:16 p.m.): i dont really have anything to say to you

nyCALIgrl4 (3:20:21 p.m.): have a nice life?

Dex10 (3:20:42 p.m.): oh…

I’m such a badass. I am literally the baddest bitch on the planet. If there was a bitch contest between me and every other heartbroken, hissing, red-eyed, puffy-faced woman in the world, I would defeat every last one of them—handily. People should start worshipping me. To that end, I’ve prepared a few imaginary lectures on the subject of bitching yourself out of a relationship: Step 1, treat him as you would a tardy Comcast guy after waiting from 2:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.: with zero emotion save thinly sliced loathing…

Yeah, I don’t believe me either. I’m a bitch, but I swear I don’t want to be. Really, I think I have to be.

What I really want is to grab this man and hold on for dear life, despite the fact that he kissed another girl in a club—more on that later—and told me I was too perfect for him and that he liked me as “more than a friend but less than a girlfriend.” Cognitive dissonance, he called it. I want that blinking cursor to crap out all the words I’m thinking but not writing and turn that white space black like my heart. I want to see him naked again—just once. I want to make him eggs again.

I want never to be in love again.

To make sure I don’t backslide, I copy, paste, and send my badass response to Gina. The two of us do some preprogrammed LOLing, WTFing, GTFOHing, and I feel encouraged—for now.

But what about later? If I lose this round, will there ever be another? I’ve wasted countless work hours Googling “marriage babies black” because, really, what’s the point in finishing an article on the popularity of Sen. Clinton’s pantsuits when I’ve been sentenced to a closet full of ’em. According to data from the U.S. Census bureau, in 2001 nearly 42 percent of black women over 15 years old (which I guess is marrying age now) had never been married, compared to 21 percent of white women the same age. Since 1970, the overall marriage rate in the U.S. has declined by 17 percent. For blacks, it’s dropped 34 percent.

I hate math—and acronyms.

Never heard of the AAHMI? Me neither. The African American Healthy Marriage Initiative is sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services. It has a Web site (although it’s at a “.net,” which is considerably less convincing than an “.org”) and one hundred followers on Twitter. All those people get to hear its good news, like the fact that black families are less likely to be headed by a married couple than any other ethnic group: 46 percent of black families “versus” 81 percent of all the others. Black families are also more likely to be headed by a single woman—45 percent of black families versus 14 percent for whites—and these manless women are popping out babies like it’s going out of style. Sixty-eight percent of live births in our community are to unmarried women.

So, it’s our stats versus the rest of the country’s, and there’s no time to go to the cards for a decision. It’s over. Technical knockout. While our women were snatching up college degrees and busting up glass ceilings, our men were getting snatched up and