fleetingness, openness

what are you thinking about, he said, and for once i had an answer

as i was walking toward him, i swiped his name to the right, like i did before every time i saw a man. bringing him out of the folder where i kept them, and into my main inbox.

we were sitting on the park bench an hour later and he smiled and said, grant.

yes? i answered. he was looking at his own name in my phone.

i changed my picture, he said. i forgot i get so tan in summer.

i noticed, i said. when i saw his new picture a week ago, it had given me a wave of nausea and jealousy, my stomach lurching as i looked at him suddenly making eye contact with me, and whoever else he was talking to, through the screen.

but that wasn’t what he was talking about. he’d changed it again, to a picture of him lying in grass with a fluffy white dog, looking indeed quite tan.

it meant something to me that we were on the same easy, flowy page. i was incredibly relieved, at least, not to be using the horrible app where men by turns seemed to fetishize me, demand access to my body, or simply be so dull and slow that i felt insulted just by speaking to them.

i’d rather you tell me you’re going to cry and we can process it together, he’d said while we were lying in my bed.

do i seem more normal this time, i asked him.

you asked me that last time.

well i wasn’t feeling normal that day.

what’s my best facial feature, he said, and i answered you have a nice face but i really like your body.

what are you thinking about, he’d said, and for once i had an answer. i wasn’t thinking about other lovers, or my dead mom, or whether my chin looked fat in the way i was currently sitting.

i was thinking about whether we’re friends, i said.

if we’re not then i don’t know what we are, he answered. we’re sleeping together. i guess that changes things for some people.

i’ve never understood why you can’t sleep with your friends, i said. i’ve never understood that. i felt very dreamy and happy around him suddenly. i was the perfect level of stoned, which is barely.

there’s two things, he said. i could somehow feel his heart racing, maybe just his crippling anxiety, him carefully thinking through what he wanted to say.

i appreciate you being so present with me, he said.

that’s what you wanted to say? i asked. i was touched, to be honest, his energy seemed very genuine and sincere in that moment.

it was nice, i decided, how present i felt with him, how we were both getting something from spending time together and there was complete openness and also a complete irrelevance of the future.

it’s like an oasis, he said. it’s kind of intense.

i felt a mixture of charmed, endeared towards him, and pleasantly surprised, although none of that was quite the right word. it felt like there wasn’t coldness underneath the quietness, the hesitancy, the reserved and unsure quality he always seemed to have.

with time i’d started to see him as softer, less calculating, less impenetrable. like my perception had shifted back towards how i perceived him those first couple hours we spent together, before i abruptly got uncomfortable, arrested by the feeling that i’d shared too much with someone who wanted only to be entertained.

that was the other thing; i’d always said things to him, overshared recklessly, without a care for seeming attractive or confident or presenting in a certain way. it flips back and forth, i’d said about him from the beginning. from comfortable to weird.