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Phew.

Everything is an effort right now.

It's half-past-two on Sunday and I just staggered back with the grocery shopping, an experience made all the more interesting by the two days that preceded it.

Friday night was a bit of a sesh with the chaps, and as a result I had a bit of a sleep in on Saturday. Well, quite a large sleep-in on Saturday. OK, I admit it. I didn't actually get out of bed on Saturday at all. So, cue Sunday lunchtime when I eventually surfaced, one day and four hours behind in my drug regime. I popped the pills anyway, showered, brushed my teeth, dressed, wrote a grocery shopping list and stumbled out the door and into the street.

Cue weird withdrawal effects again, though this time I felt so sedated I was barely capable of emotions at all - they felt like too much effort. I walked slowly and carefully South down the street, feeling like a decent gust of wind might blow me over. My T-shirt felt a little slacker on me than usual, contributing to my overall conclusion that I am wasting away.

Tim Hortons was the next stop. No milk and no bread = nothing for breakfast and no coffee possible so a pit stop was essential to stop me from fainting from somewhere along the way. Surprisingly my dark glasses weren't enough to prevent the most persistent of women from speaking to me in Tim's, even though they and my overall body language clearly communicated, "Leave me alone". I wolfed down a BLT and guzzled my coffee so I could leave all the sooner. As I drifted into and along the Danforth my thoughts dwelled on the invisible woman again.

It's a week since I e-mailed her to say how I felt, how much I wanted to see her, and what information and preferences I'd need from her in order to visit her in hospital. For example, the name of the hospital might help me narrow things down a bit. That's where she's been, and that's the reason for the lack of communication of late. Yet a week has gone by and I've heard nothing, so it looks like it's all over. There doesn't seem to be a role that I can play in her life. I'm pretty sure she could use having me around, and all week I've had daydreams of showing up with a bag of grapes (which I'm lead to believe is the traditional thing to bring someone who's in hospital) and a tea light. Why a tea light? Because I could have lit it and placed it on her bedside table as I popped the occasional grape into her mouth, thereby proclaiming the occasion our first candlelit dinner. What a terrible waste of such thoughtful and romantic consideration.

The good news is that I don't feel depressed. I don't even feel sad right now, just exhaustively resigned to the fact that I am wasting my time trying. In retrospect, I have tried everything possible to invite her into my life and to get into hers without invoking a restraining order. From the start I've only asked two things of her, to be honest, and to keep me in the loop. Yet she seems unable or reticent to do either of those simple things. I am always out of the loop, usually last to know, and frequently fighting for even the slightest sliver of information. Sometimes that sought-after snippet of info arrives, but then it isn't always true so it makes the waiting worthless. And all that before I even mention the cognitive distortions I get every day, telling me she's not really real. I've tried to get these eliminated too, by asking her to meet with someone else from her life - her Dad, who also mountainbikes I'm led to believe. Her ex-husband, who appears to be doing the majority of the care taking right now, lives only a few blocks from me I'm led to believe, and could probably use an extra person to split the load with. Yet all these requests have been e-mailed into a black hole and never, ever returned.

It just makes me feel that I can't be that important to her. So, why am I even bothering?

This train of thought got me as far as Zellers as I ambled along, steering clear of other people and trying to disguise the fact that I was blatantly light-headed, and probably walking as much from side-to-side as I was walking forwards. I fought to maintain the absence of smoking I'd enjoyed by being passed out for a day but gave in by the other side of Zellers, stopping at a convenience store to grab some smokes. I already felt like I needed to go to the bathroom despite doing so before leaving the house, so I had a very slow walk under the shelter of the storefronts around the parking lot. I finished my cigarette at the ashtray affixed to the wall, and fumbled in my pocket for the quarter (25 cents) I'd need for the shopping cart in Metro. When I turned into the store, I wondered where all the shopping carts had gone before I realised I was in Staples rather than Metro.

OK, so despite the food I still wasn't functioning as well as I should be.

I turned around and made it into Metro, a few steps further along the sidewalk. I floated my way through three Men's Health recipes, the deodorant, and facewash I needed. Thankfully they have a customer bathroom there so I parked the cart and headed in with my rucksack, clutching my stomach as I went. The floor was as wet as the shower room in the last gym I was in, but - thank heaven for small mercies - they did actually have toilet paper. I mopped the seat thoroughly.

It was good that I did risk the public bathroom. Let's just say that what came out had a high water content so five minutes and 50 metres of toilet paper later I was ready to wash my hands and leave. Grocery shopping has been an arduous task since the separation, mainly because it was one of the few times I'd use the car. Along with the short pause at Tim Horton's it was a two-hour round trip. As I flipped and flopped across the parking lot towards the Victoria Park Avenue subway station, rucksack straining on my shoulders and the 'green' shopping bag in each hand brushing my legs as I walked, I reflected on the plentyoffish.com date I'd had Friday afternoon.

It was OK I guess, though on meeting her outside of the theatre where we were to catch a comedic play on Friday afternoon I realised why her POF.com photos had all been headshots. Still, she looked cute, wasn't unattractive, and didn't mind that I was a few minutes late. We chatted, sank a beer, caught the play that turned out to be funny because of its inherent and unrelenting un-funniness, and went for nachos. I thought the fact that she was a paramedic was pretty cool. We didn't click though, and before writing this I sent her a short e-mail to say as much. After all, there's nothing worse than ambiguity - the experience with the invisible woman has reinforced that belief, if nothing else. Unfortunately, I'm still subconsciously using the invisible woman as a 'gold standard' by which to judge other women. Those were the things I noticed on the date: "Hmm, I'm nowhere near as sexually attracted to this woman as I am to the invisible woman," happened almost immediately. "There's no innuendo, no ball-busting, no verbal jousting, no 'zip' like there is with her," was the conclusion I came to as we finished the nachos. I walked her back to her bike but we both fumbled our words when the conversation turned to the topic of a next date, so I hope that she's feeling similarly to me.

Still, at least it didn't turn into a POF horror-story that caused me titling my blog entry so. I've heard many horror stories from friends, and will probably either blog about them soon, or even turn them into an article if I can find the right publication to print it.

The other, sadder conclusion though was that - as lonely as I feel from time-to-time - I'm not ready for another relationship right now. I think I'll leave my POF profile up in case a woman comes along who cannot resist contacting me, but being a man that's unlikely even in this pseudo-female liberated time we live in. When it comes to dating, women are the buyers and it's a buyers market.