Day 43 of 66 Days of No Sex
Mood: Excluded
I’m at a hotel party hosted by my old college professor. We’re a few blocks away from an annual writer’s conference that draws out over 12,000 attendees every year. The hotel room is filled with educators in boxy glasses, poets in beanies, and too many liberal arts degrees. Of my professor’s network, I’m the only one not currently enrolled in an MFA program or teaching or buying a damn bookstore in Baltimore.
It’s awful being in a room with your own kind and feeling like an outsider.
My professor introduces me to another a previous student of his who recently completed his MFA at NYU. He has stubbled cheeks and an impressive mustache.
“So what do you do in Boston?” he asks.
I recite my job summary the way I would confirm my address at a dental office. I have no pretty bows to wrap up how my life fits into itself, or why job has nothing to do with writing. I feel bad for leading mustache man down a rabbit hole of failed dreams. There’s a social contract not to make others feel bad about your life not panning out and for others to nod kindly at whatever you say.
“I’m figuring things out,” I say. I take another sip of my bourbon, really hoping this mouthful will the merciful one that knocks me out. “I still write on the side,” which is technically true, like how your sirloin steak is on the side of your veggies.
“What do you write?” he asks.
It feels weird to label what I do. Erotic blogging? Slut journalism?
“Creative nonfiction.”
I exhaust my relevancy in a minute, and my poet friend jumps in to talk to mustache man about faculty members they’ve had, specifically ones I’ve never heard of. I excuse myself and my half-empty bladder to the restroom.
I’m drying my hands when my professor comes by.
“You talk to [mustache man]? I was trying to hook you two up.”
“Yeah.” I ask my professor instead about another writer who was at his reading.
“He’s married,” he says. “His wife is a writer, too.“ He tells me they’ve been married for so and so years, and cuts their dating history short when he notices I’ve stopped listening. “But if I had to pick someone who could successfully…“
I smile and take it as a compliment.
The bourbon has yet to serve me my last waking breath so I return to the party, but linger in the corner to check my phone.
There’s a guy I’ve been texting, and I have this unreasonable infatuation with him. We’ve known each other for almost a year but have only interacted in person a handful of times. We met under casual circumstances, so he has no reason to believe I like him as more than a friend.
I don’t think he has a preference for me, and if he did, he has the social awareness not to go for me the way others do—he’s not the type to let his tail wag at the smell of food.
I find myself thinking about our future, though we’ve never been on a date. I know how familiarity will feel with him: being on our computers in bed, remembering what’s in his bathroom drawers, asking him for help. We would have a sensible and emotionally manageable relationship.
I don’t want to sleep with him—I want to be associated with him, and for people to look at us and think, “that’s a strong pairing.”
I drink the rest of my bourbon and pull up his name on my phone.
Would you like to get dinner sometime?
This is the only guy I’ve asked out in the last year since deleting all my dating apps. It feels judicious.
***
I’m at a gay bar later in the night. My poet friend’s classmate is getting eyes from a guy behind me. He’s leaning against one of the walls covered in sports memorabilia and giant black and white portraits of women from the 1900s.
“Don’t look now,” I tell her friend, “but the guy in the baseball T thinks you’re cute.”
“Does that mean colored sleeves?”
It takes one rum-and-coke drink order for me to return and find them kissing. It’s all skinny arms and the ruffling and flattening of boyish hair.
They hang off each other’s bony shoulders like they’re clinging to a buoy, as if holding on to someone, anyone at all, makes them safer than the rest of us.
I can’t stop watching them kiss. Despite being in the middle of a dance floor, it’s not grotesque or trashy. In between making out, they smile at each other like they need the breath and the extra moment to appreciate the face so close to them. It looks kind. They look happy.
I’m being called honey as men excuse themselves around me. A drag queen in a vibrant fuchsia dress is being peppered with kind words. There’s an inclusive energy among the distinct friend groups at the bar.
Without warning, I’m imaging the venue being sprayed down with bullets—the framed pictures on the walls with fresh holes, the choreographed ducking and falling of bodies to protect ourselves. The playlist pounds on over a clash of voices like an unrehearsed opening night, the orchestra of fear.
I stay low and still, inches away from the face of someone else. We breathe the same sweat, and our cheeks stick to a floor covered with simple syrup and lemon rinds. We hear nothing at all, yet sense the drying of mouths and the enlarging of lungs.
Maybe we kiss to feel safe, or at least look at each other to be kind.
“Hey, I think I’m going to call an Uber.” I lean into one of my friends who is dancing in a tight circle. A remix is playing and everyone is smiling and on their feet.
***
I’m alone in my hotel room. The bed has two feet of walking space around the edges. It’s positioned directly in front of the bathroom, which has a toilet that runs all night unless I use the ice bucket to refill its tank.
I’m tipsy. The bed sheets are starchy and hard, and I think I’m allergic to something because my legs have been itching at night.
I lean over to the bedside table and grab my phone. I start unbuttoning my shirt, revealing more of my necklace, more of my chest. I take exactly two pictures: one on my back and one on my side where the single ceiling light throws a flattering shadow.
I don’t have any recipients in mind. Sometimes, I just like to look at myself to appreciate the times I do feel pretty, and to validate my loneliness being a choice. In pictures like these, I try and see myself how guys do when I look at them.
I see a girl who knows exactly what she’s doing.
I see a girl who’s asking for very different things than me.