I studied your pictures for hours. Hours over weeks, because it took that long to arrange a date. Not because of you, because of me—in the aftermath of my breakup, I spent long days on worthless magazine pitches: tired ones about California cuisine, unhinged ones about the erotics of wildfire. Work was the only way to forget Elena. But I was forcing myself to date, at least once, at least to try. I’d clear the air, open myself to possibility.
In your only picture not taken from suspiciously far away, you pursed your lips into a plug of flesh, which was meant to seem fun but made me worry your mouth needed to be obscured. Your skin was clear, your hair greasy, hanging rogueishly around your face, and you looked like a regular suburban girl. You didn’t have cheek piercings or scarification or an explosion of blue hair or sex-nerd acronyms in your profile, like everyone else. Not that I didn’t want my hair pulled, but the terms and outfits leant sexual adventure a corporate air. I still don’t know what a kitten is or a brat or a demi tenderqueer or a switchy top-leaning service bottom, and I refuse to look any of it up. I’m too old at not-even forty. Before I met Elena, almost a decade ago, I’d been on one internet date with a doctor in Wisconsin. By the time I met you I’d spent a month flipping through hundreds of profiles, and I already had rules, at least regarding the terms I could decipher: no sex jargon, no fur mommas, no INFJs, no California sober, no cishet men who accidently listed themselves as mtf instead of m4f, no straight girls arching their backs in bikinis, seeking a unicorn for their man’s thirty-fourth. You were none of these. You were plain, unthreatening, so you were a go. [ . . . ]
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