Way Down Deep, page 4
I’d brave dragons in Earthsea to be away from all of that.
Is that so crazy? I think it might be crazy.
Let’s talk about something less crazy, like books.
Top five books.
8.27am
Don’t be embarrassed. Hell, I’m kind of embarrassed now, since you asked where I’d go if I could go anywhere and I wasn’t creative enough to think of made-up places.
If I had occasion to kidnap you, I’d take you places that make Earth seem magical. Like lava tube caves, or to the desert at sunset, or to that Icelandic lakeside under the Northern Lights … as long as you’re prepared to deal with my drunken weeping.
I can’t take you to Narnia, but there’s places here that are still pretty amazing. Bonus: you’re less likely to get eaten or turned to stone here in the real world.
I’m further embarrassed to tell you about my favorite books, because you clearly know what you’re talking about, and for the past decade or more I’ve typically read whatever’s popular—but not TOO popular, mind, because hipster cred. Basically, whatever book I thought might convince an interesting woman to sleep with me, should she spot me holding it in a coffee shop.
But that doesn’t say anything about me, does it? Apart perhaps from my prurient applications of conspicuous literacy. It doesn’t tell you anything of substance, to be sure, nothing worth knowing about me, and I think that’s what you’re after.
So let’s see … what books would I actually want with me on that desert island, where there are no witnesses?
Let’s just get this out there right off the bat—my favorite book is probably Jurassic Park. I’m not saying it’s the best book ever written, but it’s the one I’ve read more than any other, discounting the books from my childhood. (I read Hatchet about a hundred times, and White Fang maybe twice that.)
To make matters worse, let’s stick another Crichton on the list—Andromeda Strain.
Okay, I think I need to muster some variety, here. Let’s see, number three… Oh, I’ve liked a lot of Chuck Palahniuk’s books. Especially Choke. There might be some outdated hipster posing mixed in there, but I do genuinely like his storytelling.
Number four. How about Life of Pi? I picked that up in a Barnes and Noble when I was about twenty-five, thinking I’d peek at the first page, and then wound up reading the entire thing without ever leaving the store. That’d never happened to me before and hasn’t since, but I do hope it happens again someday. I drank about five coffees over the course of the afternoon and, unable to put it down, read some of the book while peeing in the store bathroom. For that reason, ethics compelled me to purchase the copy.
And number five, I’m thinking maybe something nostalgic. Let’s go with Holes. I fucking LOVED Holes. I’ll totally be giving that to the boy when he’s old enough.
Wait a second, that’s so lame—I don’t have a single book written by a woman. Maybe you could recommend me some, based on my ridiculous short list. My nights are long, so I promise I’ll read each and every one you prescribe.
But not before you tell me what books a certain booklover loves best.
10.42am
You make me want to be kidnapped so badly, right here and right now as I sit in my pyjamas just finishing up my breakfast. All those places you said—I could almost believe that here isn’t so violently mundane after all. When you describe our world, it sounds like dragons are just around the corner and magic is so close I could breathe it in.
I appreciate that. And all your books.
I’ve never been the sort to judge something people read for enjoyment. What better motive is there for reading then to fall into the familiar? To have fun, far away from whatever we have to deal with here?
In my opinion, Jurassic Park fits that bill perfectly. I love that it’s just a little more twisted than the movie. That Hammond isn’t the cosy-old-misguided-but-sweet-grandpops type. And even though Crichton himself is a bit of a tool, I go out of my mind for all that goofy pseudoscience stuff.
He’s got a way with info and detail. I’ll give him that.
Anyway, my fave books…
I’ll see you a Crichton and raise you a King. The Talisman, most probably. Just because it’s that disappearing-into-other-worlds thing again.
Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin. If you need a woman to read, she’s your gal. Especially Tehanu, because it’s beautiful and amazing.
Another woman: Octavia Butler. Kindred. God, you can almost taste and feel everything she writes about. It’s raw and good and science fiction about things no one else writes science fiction about.
I suppose I should have something less fantastical on my list so:
Notes on a Scandal, by Zoe Heller.
It’s almost a memoir, the main character is so real. Like you can’t believe she doesn’t exist. And you hate her you hate her you hate while aching inside over her loneliness.
Finally, something from my childhood too. Monster, by Christopher Pike.
Gory and viscous, but with this great melancholy core.
And with that, I am out of lists.
How about this: last meal on earth?
8
Friday
12.39am
Sorry about the radio silence, stranger.
The boy’s grandmother came over to watch him so I could deal with some legal crap to do with paternity and the boy’s citizenship options and on and on. The only upside is that I can now casually toss out the phrase “met with my solicitor today” and feel a little British about it.
When I got back, the boy’s aunt was here—his mom’s sister. I’ve only met her once before, so as much as I wanted to pull out my phone and check all those precious messages I’d felt buzzing against my butt way back when I was leaving this morning, etiquette compelled me to be a half-decent host.
There was a lot to talk about. Heavy shit. Once they left and the boy was in bed, I had to just sit by the window and have a drink and turn it all around in my head, get it filed away and set aside before I finally read your texts.
Last meal on earth, you say? A classic conundrum.
I love food. I’m a good cook. I have about ten things I can cook really well, and I think that’s all you need.
If my mom was still here, I’d want her to cook my last meal, but failing that I’d do it myself. (Not because I’m amazing or anything, just because I’ll miss cooking once I’m dead.)
I’d pick out every ingredient and probably marinate something overnight. Steak, likely. Really good steak, grilled rare. Asparagus if it’s in season. Corn on the cob. Garlic potatoes with loads of butter. I’d invite you to join me, but I wouldn’t be upset if you couldn’t come. I’d understand.
Now here’s your next question: What question do you most wish I’d ask you? And what would your answer be?
1.33am
I just knew you’d be a good cook. I could sense it. Though I had no idea it would torture me so much to hear it. Here I am at one in the morning, bleary-eyed from the doze I’d just drifted into, and instead of going right back to sleep I’m drooling over your food.
Oh, I can almost taste the butter and garlic on the potatoes. I can nearly hear the sizzle of the meat. Maybe I can even see you doing it—though of course most of your features are blurred out, like an innocent passerby on a crime-prevention programme.
Also I’m now furious at my fridge for only containing microwave meals.
Tomorrow, I swear I’m going to order better food.
Food from a fancy restaurant.
And then when I eat, I’ll pretend you made it.
Even though you’re a sly one, to ask me such a crafty question. Now I will have to reveal double about myself—once in asking, and again in answering. Two for the price of one, as it were. Oh yeah, don’t think I didn’t notice! But as I’m still busy dining on your steak in my head, I will answer. And I’ll even give you a humiliating slice of my inner life, with it:
I would want you to ask me how my day was, like I live in a cheesy sitcom set in the suburbs. You put your coat on a hook and sit down at a huge dining table in an enormous kitchen, and then I tell you all about the cheese and pickle sandwich I had, and the sheets I ordered from Dunhelm, and the article I read online.
But most importantly, I would tell you about the window.
I opened the living room window for the first time in years, and stuck my hand out so I could feel the rain. It was warm, much warmer than I remember it being, and the smell of the air sung inside my body.
Now you go. You tell me what you would want me to ask, and how you would answer.
5.35am
I should really be asleep. The boy wakes up by seven most days, and I only got three hours tonight before his dreams woke him and he needed me.
Well, I say “needed me.” I’m not sure if I really help him much. I just sort of squeeze him and rock us back and forth on his bed until he stops moaning, and when he falls silent but is still breathing fast, I sing to him. Tonight I sang Thunder Road, which is a ridiculous song to sing to a child who’s having night terrors, but I don’t think it made anything worse, so, hey. Parenting.
I’m rambling here, because to be completely honest, your last text left me a little flustered. Not, like, frustrated. Like, weirdly sweaty and warm in the face.
Warm all over.
Warm from the way you describe imagining what I cook.
Warm to think maybe you’ll order something fancy someday and think of me while you eat it.
Warm because you made me laugh, with that throwaway comment about the blurry-faced passerby. I haven’t laughed in so long. I mean, I laugh for the boy’s benefit when we’re watching TV, a pantomime sort of laugh. But you made me laugh for real.
Did the rain on your hand feel as good as that laugh did? I hope so.
That made me warm as well, you talking about the rain and the air. You have a way of making the mundane sound … sensual. I want to backtrack and say not in a sexual way, but that’s not strictly true. It’s pretty fucking erotic.
I’m deliriously tired, and all my social filters have gone to bed, so there you are.
Can I join your fantasy and make it all old-timey? As you’re telling me about your day, can I toss my fedora smartly on the coatrack, then stride to the hutch where I keep my classy crystal decanter of Scotch and pour myself a glass?
Here’s where the fantasy falls apart, though, because in this black-and-white world I’d probably wear trouser socks, just like you’d wear pantyhose with seams up the calves. But here in reality I’d most likely plop down sideways on the chair next to yours and wedge my bare feet under your nearest thigh, and flex my achy toes, and one of them would probably pop, and that’s not very sexy, but reality rarely is.
I’d make it up to you by asking what you want for dinner, and hopefully it would be one of the ten things I’m really good at. Maybe Moroccan lamb stew, if it’s cold and dreary out.
Maybe I put the slow cooker on before I left that morning so you could smell it simmering all afternoon. I wonder if you’d sneak tastes or make yourself wait? That’d tell me so much about you.
I’d ask you all about the sheets, what thread count and what color, and what sort of cheese you used in the sandwich, and did you toast the bread, and was the article any good?
Is it completely patronizing to say that I’m proud of you for opening the window?
Is it creepy to say I got especially warm at how you said it sung inside your body?
Is it weird to say that now I feel as though I haven’t really lived, having never kissed a woman and tasted cheese and pickle on her lips?
None of these count as my question, by the way. Rhetorical and all. My real question this round is, have you ever been in love?
As for your question…
I’d want you to ask me my name.
And I’d tell you it’s Malcolm.
6.07am
Oh god, what a thing to wake up to.
I don’t know where to begin.
Or I do know where to begin.
I’m just afraid of all the things I want to begin with.
It’s that feeling again of am I saying too much? Or maybe going too far?
But I just have to tell you that you make toe popping sound really … something that I’m too embarrassed to label sexy. For a second I could almost feel them under my bare thigh, cold and yet somehow warming at the same time. Intimate, I think the word is, though to be honest I have no real idea at all.
I’ve never been close enough with anyone to just have little habits like that.
To maybe sneak a taste of their delicious stew—because I totally would. I could never wait for something like that, for something made with care for me by another person, for something that simmers and comes out of a slow cooker and sounds like sheer bliss.
My mouth is flooding just thinking about it.
My mouth is flooding just thinking about your other questions, oh your questions, oh you’ve no idea what a luxury questions are to me. They make me want to whisper in your ear instead of telling you across a table. About the cheese, which was soft and sweet, and the sheets that have buttons on them and fold so crisp and clean, and the article…
It was all about evidence that we aren’t alone in the universe.
And no no no it’s never patronising. No, it’s never creepy.
It’s the opposite, whatever the opposite of patronising and creepy is.
It sings inside my body too.
Makes me want to ask what you would taste like, if I were to taste you.
God. God. I have to … just stop there.
6.25am
Damn, I forgot to respond to your question.
Though I think you know the answer anyway.
No, I’ve never been in love.
Have you, Malcolm?
10.59am
I got a legit shiver, when I first read your reply. A shiver I just had to sit inside all morning, waiting for a chance to sit down and respond properly.
I’ve long known that hearing my name in certain breathy, vigorous contexts is like sex kryptonite for me, but I never would have guessed that reading it in a text could do that.
TMI? It’s, like, lunchtime, so I can’t blame it on delirium or booze. Oh well. What’s sent is sent.
For a second, I thought how sad it is that you’ve never been in love. But then I thought harder about it, and in a way maybe it’s not. It means you still get to feel that for the first time.
Actually, after I asked you that question, I regretted it. I thought, what if she asks me the same? Because I’m not very proud of my answer, to be honest.
In short, I’ve been in love. I’ve been in love so many times I’m beginning to wonder, have I actually ever been in love?
I fall in love easily. I’m quick to toss those three little words around, like they’re singles instead of fifties. Or the old me was. He was way better at falling in love than actually maintaining a relationship, though.
In hindsight, I had a pattern: see a girl, interact with her briefly, then construct an elaborate, baseless, two-dimensional concept in my head of who she is and how dating her would so perfectly accessorize and complete my life.
Fast forward. By the three, four, five-month mark, everyone’s resentful and disappointed. Inevitably. The poor woman’s fallen short of my ill-informed and unrealistic expectations about who she is, and often vice versa, because I put up plenty of fronts of my own.
The breakups always took weeks, too. These grinding emotional autopsies before the wretched, long-suffering relationship could finally be declared dead.
My romantic history is basically that Gotye song on repeat for four hours. Super fraught and beautifully tortured at first, then by the fifteenth time you’re like ENOUGH WITH THE FUCKING XYLOPHONE.
I’m totally to blame. I wasn’t equipped to date actual human beings. I fell for a woman’s quirky dress sense or her tattoos or her art, one thing or another, then once the novelty wore off I’d lose interest. I’m cringing even typing this, but I feel compelled to be honest with you.
It sounds shallow. It probably was a little shallow, but more than that, I think I just felt empty. I was always searching for that perfect, unique, fascinating woman to stitch myself to, so I could quit feeling like half a human.
That’s too much to ask of someone. To complete you.
I wasn’t prepared for any of my exes to be actual people with their own feelings and faults. I was only worried about what being with them said about me. I often wound up with people just like me. Big on facades, but lost and echoing inside.
So while I’ve said “I love you” a dozen times and meant it, a part of me wonders, do I really even know what that feels like?
There’s got to be more than whatever I felt, because I was able to walk away from it again and again.
But something about you, about this, gives me hope. That suddenly I have a crush on someone based on nothing more than her words. Her thoughts. Her fears and dreams and cheese sandwiches.
No artifice, only substance. Sort of odd, mysterious, charming and sometimes ridiculous substance, but I like that. I can dig my fingers into it. It’s strange and squishy with funny lumps, but it feels good. So fucking good and real after swiping at holograms for all these years.
I don’t even know your age or your hair color or the sound of your voice or your name, but I like you. That gives me hope. Hope that maybe someday I’ll quit falling in love and simply love. I’ve always chased the noun, when maybe I should have been trying to master the verb.
I can’t believe I’m even typing all this to you. So soon. We’ve been chatting for what, four or five days?
I don’t even care if you’re secretly an old married guy or a cruel computer algorithm or a hyperintelligent cat.
I don’t care that you can’t leave the house and I’m in no position to attempt a relationship right now.
Whatever this is, it’s exactly what I want. I want your words. Unpredictable, inexplicable, kind, addictive words coming at me out of nowhere on a tiny screen. Lighting up my face and pillow in a dark bedroom or compelling my fingers to keep tapping tapping tapping while I make lunch. (Cold chicken sandwiches; I’ve got a mayonnaise smear on my phone, rainbow-izing my pixels.)
Is that so crazy? I think it might be crazy.
Let’s talk about something less crazy, like books.
Top five books.
8.27am
Don’t be embarrassed. Hell, I’m kind of embarrassed now, since you asked where I’d go if I could go anywhere and I wasn’t creative enough to think of made-up places.
If I had occasion to kidnap you, I’d take you places that make Earth seem magical. Like lava tube caves, or to the desert at sunset, or to that Icelandic lakeside under the Northern Lights … as long as you’re prepared to deal with my drunken weeping.
I can’t take you to Narnia, but there’s places here that are still pretty amazing. Bonus: you’re less likely to get eaten or turned to stone here in the real world.
I’m further embarrassed to tell you about my favorite books, because you clearly know what you’re talking about, and for the past decade or more I’ve typically read whatever’s popular—but not TOO popular, mind, because hipster cred. Basically, whatever book I thought might convince an interesting woman to sleep with me, should she spot me holding it in a coffee shop.
But that doesn’t say anything about me, does it? Apart perhaps from my prurient applications of conspicuous literacy. It doesn’t tell you anything of substance, to be sure, nothing worth knowing about me, and I think that’s what you’re after.
So let’s see … what books would I actually want with me on that desert island, where there are no witnesses?
Let’s just get this out there right off the bat—my favorite book is probably Jurassic Park. I’m not saying it’s the best book ever written, but it’s the one I’ve read more than any other, discounting the books from my childhood. (I read Hatchet about a hundred times, and White Fang maybe twice that.)
To make matters worse, let’s stick another Crichton on the list—Andromeda Strain.
Okay, I think I need to muster some variety, here. Let’s see, number three… Oh, I’ve liked a lot of Chuck Palahniuk’s books. Especially Choke. There might be some outdated hipster posing mixed in there, but I do genuinely like his storytelling.
Number four. How about Life of Pi? I picked that up in a Barnes and Noble when I was about twenty-five, thinking I’d peek at the first page, and then wound up reading the entire thing without ever leaving the store. That’d never happened to me before and hasn’t since, but I do hope it happens again someday. I drank about five coffees over the course of the afternoon and, unable to put it down, read some of the book while peeing in the store bathroom. For that reason, ethics compelled me to purchase the copy.
And number five, I’m thinking maybe something nostalgic. Let’s go with Holes. I fucking LOVED Holes. I’ll totally be giving that to the boy when he’s old enough.
Wait a second, that’s so lame—I don’t have a single book written by a woman. Maybe you could recommend me some, based on my ridiculous short list. My nights are long, so I promise I’ll read each and every one you prescribe.
But not before you tell me what books a certain booklover loves best.
10.42am
You make me want to be kidnapped so badly, right here and right now as I sit in my pyjamas just finishing up my breakfast. All those places you said—I could almost believe that here isn’t so violently mundane after all. When you describe our world, it sounds like dragons are just around the corner and magic is so close I could breathe it in.
I appreciate that. And all your books.
I’ve never been the sort to judge something people read for enjoyment. What better motive is there for reading then to fall into the familiar? To have fun, far away from whatever we have to deal with here?
In my opinion, Jurassic Park fits that bill perfectly. I love that it’s just a little more twisted than the movie. That Hammond isn’t the cosy-old-misguided-but-sweet-grandpops type. And even though Crichton himself is a bit of a tool, I go out of my mind for all that goofy pseudoscience stuff.
He’s got a way with info and detail. I’ll give him that.
Anyway, my fave books…
I’ll see you a Crichton and raise you a King. The Talisman, most probably. Just because it’s that disappearing-into-other-worlds thing again.
Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin. If you need a woman to read, she’s your gal. Especially Tehanu, because it’s beautiful and amazing.
Another woman: Octavia Butler. Kindred. God, you can almost taste and feel everything she writes about. It’s raw and good and science fiction about things no one else writes science fiction about.
I suppose I should have something less fantastical on my list so:
Notes on a Scandal, by Zoe Heller.
It’s almost a memoir, the main character is so real. Like you can’t believe she doesn’t exist. And you hate her you hate her you hate while aching inside over her loneliness.
Finally, something from my childhood too. Monster, by Christopher Pike.
Gory and viscous, but with this great melancholy core.
And with that, I am out of lists.
How about this: last meal on earth?
8
Friday
12.39am
Sorry about the radio silence, stranger.
The boy’s grandmother came over to watch him so I could deal with some legal crap to do with paternity and the boy’s citizenship options and on and on. The only upside is that I can now casually toss out the phrase “met with my solicitor today” and feel a little British about it.
When I got back, the boy’s aunt was here—his mom’s sister. I’ve only met her once before, so as much as I wanted to pull out my phone and check all those precious messages I’d felt buzzing against my butt way back when I was leaving this morning, etiquette compelled me to be a half-decent host.
There was a lot to talk about. Heavy shit. Once they left and the boy was in bed, I had to just sit by the window and have a drink and turn it all around in my head, get it filed away and set aside before I finally read your texts.
Last meal on earth, you say? A classic conundrum.
I love food. I’m a good cook. I have about ten things I can cook really well, and I think that’s all you need.
If my mom was still here, I’d want her to cook my last meal, but failing that I’d do it myself. (Not because I’m amazing or anything, just because I’ll miss cooking once I’m dead.)
I’d pick out every ingredient and probably marinate something overnight. Steak, likely. Really good steak, grilled rare. Asparagus if it’s in season. Corn on the cob. Garlic potatoes with loads of butter. I’d invite you to join me, but I wouldn’t be upset if you couldn’t come. I’d understand.
Now here’s your next question: What question do you most wish I’d ask you? And what would your answer be?
1.33am
I just knew you’d be a good cook. I could sense it. Though I had no idea it would torture me so much to hear it. Here I am at one in the morning, bleary-eyed from the doze I’d just drifted into, and instead of going right back to sleep I’m drooling over your food.
Oh, I can almost taste the butter and garlic on the potatoes. I can nearly hear the sizzle of the meat. Maybe I can even see you doing it—though of course most of your features are blurred out, like an innocent passerby on a crime-prevention programme.
Also I’m now furious at my fridge for only containing microwave meals.
Tomorrow, I swear I’m going to order better food.
Food from a fancy restaurant.
And then when I eat, I’ll pretend you made it.
Even though you’re a sly one, to ask me such a crafty question. Now I will have to reveal double about myself—once in asking, and again in answering. Two for the price of one, as it were. Oh yeah, don’t think I didn’t notice! But as I’m still busy dining on your steak in my head, I will answer. And I’ll even give you a humiliating slice of my inner life, with it:
I would want you to ask me how my day was, like I live in a cheesy sitcom set in the suburbs. You put your coat on a hook and sit down at a huge dining table in an enormous kitchen, and then I tell you all about the cheese and pickle sandwich I had, and the sheets I ordered from Dunhelm, and the article I read online.
But most importantly, I would tell you about the window.
I opened the living room window for the first time in years, and stuck my hand out so I could feel the rain. It was warm, much warmer than I remember it being, and the smell of the air sung inside my body.
Now you go. You tell me what you would want me to ask, and how you would answer.
5.35am
I should really be asleep. The boy wakes up by seven most days, and I only got three hours tonight before his dreams woke him and he needed me.
Well, I say “needed me.” I’m not sure if I really help him much. I just sort of squeeze him and rock us back and forth on his bed until he stops moaning, and when he falls silent but is still breathing fast, I sing to him. Tonight I sang Thunder Road, which is a ridiculous song to sing to a child who’s having night terrors, but I don’t think it made anything worse, so, hey. Parenting.
I’m rambling here, because to be completely honest, your last text left me a little flustered. Not, like, frustrated. Like, weirdly sweaty and warm in the face.
Warm all over.
Warm from the way you describe imagining what I cook.
Warm to think maybe you’ll order something fancy someday and think of me while you eat it.
Warm because you made me laugh, with that throwaway comment about the blurry-faced passerby. I haven’t laughed in so long. I mean, I laugh for the boy’s benefit when we’re watching TV, a pantomime sort of laugh. But you made me laugh for real.
Did the rain on your hand feel as good as that laugh did? I hope so.
That made me warm as well, you talking about the rain and the air. You have a way of making the mundane sound … sensual. I want to backtrack and say not in a sexual way, but that’s not strictly true. It’s pretty fucking erotic.
I’m deliriously tired, and all my social filters have gone to bed, so there you are.
Can I join your fantasy and make it all old-timey? As you’re telling me about your day, can I toss my fedora smartly on the coatrack, then stride to the hutch where I keep my classy crystal decanter of Scotch and pour myself a glass?
Here’s where the fantasy falls apart, though, because in this black-and-white world I’d probably wear trouser socks, just like you’d wear pantyhose with seams up the calves. But here in reality I’d most likely plop down sideways on the chair next to yours and wedge my bare feet under your nearest thigh, and flex my achy toes, and one of them would probably pop, and that’s not very sexy, but reality rarely is.
I’d make it up to you by asking what you want for dinner, and hopefully it would be one of the ten things I’m really good at. Maybe Moroccan lamb stew, if it’s cold and dreary out.
Maybe I put the slow cooker on before I left that morning so you could smell it simmering all afternoon. I wonder if you’d sneak tastes or make yourself wait? That’d tell me so much about you.
I’d ask you all about the sheets, what thread count and what color, and what sort of cheese you used in the sandwich, and did you toast the bread, and was the article any good?
Is it completely patronizing to say that I’m proud of you for opening the window?
Is it creepy to say I got especially warm at how you said it sung inside your body?
Is it weird to say that now I feel as though I haven’t really lived, having never kissed a woman and tasted cheese and pickle on her lips?
None of these count as my question, by the way. Rhetorical and all. My real question this round is, have you ever been in love?
As for your question…
I’d want you to ask me my name.
And I’d tell you it’s Malcolm.
6.07am
Oh god, what a thing to wake up to.
I don’t know where to begin.
Or I do know where to begin.
I’m just afraid of all the things I want to begin with.
It’s that feeling again of am I saying too much? Or maybe going too far?
But I just have to tell you that you make toe popping sound really … something that I’m too embarrassed to label sexy. For a second I could almost feel them under my bare thigh, cold and yet somehow warming at the same time. Intimate, I think the word is, though to be honest I have no real idea at all.
I’ve never been close enough with anyone to just have little habits like that.
To maybe sneak a taste of their delicious stew—because I totally would. I could never wait for something like that, for something made with care for me by another person, for something that simmers and comes out of a slow cooker and sounds like sheer bliss.
My mouth is flooding just thinking about it.
My mouth is flooding just thinking about your other questions, oh your questions, oh you’ve no idea what a luxury questions are to me. They make me want to whisper in your ear instead of telling you across a table. About the cheese, which was soft and sweet, and the sheets that have buttons on them and fold so crisp and clean, and the article…
It was all about evidence that we aren’t alone in the universe.
And no no no it’s never patronising. No, it’s never creepy.
It’s the opposite, whatever the opposite of patronising and creepy is.
It sings inside my body too.
Makes me want to ask what you would taste like, if I were to taste you.
God. God. I have to … just stop there.
6.25am
Damn, I forgot to respond to your question.
Though I think you know the answer anyway.
No, I’ve never been in love.
Have you, Malcolm?
10.59am
I got a legit shiver, when I first read your reply. A shiver I just had to sit inside all morning, waiting for a chance to sit down and respond properly.
I’ve long known that hearing my name in certain breathy, vigorous contexts is like sex kryptonite for me, but I never would have guessed that reading it in a text could do that.
TMI? It’s, like, lunchtime, so I can’t blame it on delirium or booze. Oh well. What’s sent is sent.
For a second, I thought how sad it is that you’ve never been in love. But then I thought harder about it, and in a way maybe it’s not. It means you still get to feel that for the first time.
Actually, after I asked you that question, I regretted it. I thought, what if she asks me the same? Because I’m not very proud of my answer, to be honest.
In short, I’ve been in love. I’ve been in love so many times I’m beginning to wonder, have I actually ever been in love?
I fall in love easily. I’m quick to toss those three little words around, like they’re singles instead of fifties. Or the old me was. He was way better at falling in love than actually maintaining a relationship, though.
In hindsight, I had a pattern: see a girl, interact with her briefly, then construct an elaborate, baseless, two-dimensional concept in my head of who she is and how dating her would so perfectly accessorize and complete my life.
Fast forward. By the three, four, five-month mark, everyone’s resentful and disappointed. Inevitably. The poor woman’s fallen short of my ill-informed and unrealistic expectations about who she is, and often vice versa, because I put up plenty of fronts of my own.
The breakups always took weeks, too. These grinding emotional autopsies before the wretched, long-suffering relationship could finally be declared dead.
My romantic history is basically that Gotye song on repeat for four hours. Super fraught and beautifully tortured at first, then by the fifteenth time you’re like ENOUGH WITH THE FUCKING XYLOPHONE.
I’m totally to blame. I wasn’t equipped to date actual human beings. I fell for a woman’s quirky dress sense or her tattoos or her art, one thing or another, then once the novelty wore off I’d lose interest. I’m cringing even typing this, but I feel compelled to be honest with you.
It sounds shallow. It probably was a little shallow, but more than that, I think I just felt empty. I was always searching for that perfect, unique, fascinating woman to stitch myself to, so I could quit feeling like half a human.
That’s too much to ask of someone. To complete you.
I wasn’t prepared for any of my exes to be actual people with their own feelings and faults. I was only worried about what being with them said about me. I often wound up with people just like me. Big on facades, but lost and echoing inside.
So while I’ve said “I love you” a dozen times and meant it, a part of me wonders, do I really even know what that feels like?
There’s got to be more than whatever I felt, because I was able to walk away from it again and again.
But something about you, about this, gives me hope. That suddenly I have a crush on someone based on nothing more than her words. Her thoughts. Her fears and dreams and cheese sandwiches.
No artifice, only substance. Sort of odd, mysterious, charming and sometimes ridiculous substance, but I like that. I can dig my fingers into it. It’s strange and squishy with funny lumps, but it feels good. So fucking good and real after swiping at holograms for all these years.
I don’t even know your age or your hair color or the sound of your voice or your name, but I like you. That gives me hope. Hope that maybe someday I’ll quit falling in love and simply love. I’ve always chased the noun, when maybe I should have been trying to master the verb.
I can’t believe I’m even typing all this to you. So soon. We’ve been chatting for what, four or five days?
I don’t even care if you’re secretly an old married guy or a cruel computer algorithm or a hyperintelligent cat.
I don’t care that you can’t leave the house and I’m in no position to attempt a relationship right now.
Whatever this is, it’s exactly what I want. I want your words. Unpredictable, inexplicable, kind, addictive words coming at me out of nowhere on a tiny screen. Lighting up my face and pillow in a dark bedroom or compelling my fingers to keep tapping tapping tapping while I make lunch. (Cold chicken sandwiches; I’ve got a mayonnaise smear on my phone, rainbow-izing my pixels.)
