Where to begin….Having just turned 40 last week, it makes one look back at the years and reminisce about things. Was it really 10 years ago that I turned 30 and got dumped? Where does the time go? Of course there is a tad more to the story than that.

Picture it – NYC 2000, a chilly winter day. My current boyfriend’s mother passes away the day before I am to have the big “three-oh” celebration (I swear that woman never liked me to begin with – stealing my thunder). Well that kind of puts the whole kink in my birthday plans. I mean they were Muslim, so they had less than 48 hours to have the funeral and burial, which as you guessed it meant my birthday was no longer a high priority. But I survived, not wanting to be a completely selfish and heartless bastard, I mean his mother had passed after all.

Skip ahead two weeks, I’m sitting at the office and I get a phone call. It’s the boyfriend telling me it’s over after 4 years; not that I guess in retrospect I didn’t see it coming. Seems he has been seeing someone else since November and they want to spend Valentine’s Day together so I have to finally get the old boot, 3 days before the holiday. So now I am single, 30 and alone for the first time in 4 years on Valentine’s Day. And they said the whole Y2K thing was a hoax.

Anyhow, fast-forward to April and I get another call from the now ex. Seems the current beau has given him the boot since he caught my ex cheating on him. I try but cannot feign any sympathy. I mean let’s face it, the guy had no problem sleeping with my boyfriend but finds it appalling that when he finally steals him from me, he goes and cheats on him. Hasn’t anyone heard of karma?

So here I am 10 years later. Still single but now 40. I can’t remember having a real date since Clinton was in office and no prospects on the horizon. I try to keep a light-hearted attitude about it, but with each passing year the outlook seems bleaker and bleaker. I’m about to just order the rocking chair and 5 cats and call it a day. But yet I persist. With that glimmer of hope that just one of these days my prince will come riding in again and rescue me from the tower. Life is after all, for me any way, a “fairy” tale.

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