Oh troll,
Do you know what true loneliness is?
Sure, horniness can be a kind of loneliness. Wanting to be touched, wanting to be held. or just being alone, feeling how very by yourself you are in your bed. You are so alone, the beginnings and endings of your body are the only life in your tiny bedroom. You think, if I can ever not be alone, if this can ever not be my life, I will take that opportunity. I will make whoever chooses me next love me and I will love them in return, no questions asked.
That's not real loneliness.
Let's say you have a date. You kind of know this person from high school, but you kind of don't, because he’s older. You meet him on an abnormally warm night in february. He picks a cool bar that you’ve been to before. you're late. He texts you, I'm here, can I get you anything? This is a good sign.
You meet him and it's good from the start. You know the same people. You grew up in the same neighborhood. He's cute. He's funny. His teeth are crooked. He looks like a six-foot-tall little boy. He looks, honestly, a little like your ex.
The bar is full but not too full. You see someone you know, and she says hi as she passes your table, which makes you seem popular. You finish your first beers and both get another, then you finish those and say fuck it and get the bar's fancy drink, a vodka-matcha. He tells you when he was in ninth grade he made a song called "bitch yeah" that gained him minor-celebrity status in the New York high-school scene. “Bitch yeah.” Pretty funny.
You're buzzed, beyond buzzed, and he says 'we could get beer and go back to my apartment,' so you do just that. You hit his juul with one hand while smoking a cigarette in the other. He's talking about this neighborhood like you've never been here, when you used to live a few blocks from here with your ex-boyfriend.
You tell him about popcorn lung as you walk into his apartment. It's one of those renovated bushwick apartments. You can tell it's fancy because there is a doorman on duty behind a big plastic desk. You ask, joking, if there’s a fitness center, and he says, "I mean, I would never call it a fitness center, it's just a gym.” The building’s walls are painted hospital-blue.
Popcorn lung, what's that?
I don't know. I guess it’s a disease where vape smoke gets inside your lungs and pops them like popcorn kernels.
Into the apartment, such a boy apartment. There's a homemade poster of Mickey Mouse smoking a joint underneath bubble letters reading New York. The couch is dirty. The tv is flat-screen.
He asks for a lighter, you hand him one, and he uses it to open his bottle of beer. He can open bottles of beer with a lighter!
He hands you a beer. You drink your beer. He drinks his beer. You kiss him. You're kissing.
He says, my roommates are coming home soon, do you, uh, wanna go to my bedroom?
Into the bedroom, which is such a boy bedroom. The bed is made. You make out some more. Good kisses. You are kissing compatible: your teeth don't clang into each other, not too much tongue but enough. That’s not nothing, troll, it’s pretty rare to find someone who you enjoy kissing.
He gets up -- he has to go to the bathroom. when the door closes behind him, you pop up like a jack-in-the-box.
There's a Who poster over his bed. a rolling stone one too. Even collages of the fucking Beatles. It’s pin-neat, with the same black ikea wood and apple-tv setup as every boy, as your ex.
There's something on his windowsill-- a well-preserved photobooth strip. You spot it right away, because it’s identical to all of your well-preserved photobooth strips, so you know what it’ll be before you look. It’s him, this boy, with a girl who kind of looks like you, but also maybe skinnier, but also, let’s be honest, kind of like all the girls you know. They’re smiling. They’re kissing. They’re laughing. He looks happier. He looks healthier.
The toilet flushes. The photobooth strip goes back on the windowsill-- so fucking visible, you think, it’s almost rude. You sit back on the bed.
"Did you draw those?" You point to some geometric line drawings tacked up on his wall. "Those? No, my ex worked at an art bookshop. I just tore those out of a book"
You make out again.
He's making little baby seal squeaky noises and then boom, it's over, it happened. You swallow, of course. You pop up and he kisses you.
"Thanks, I didn't think.... uh... you're really good at that."
“Yeah well,” -- you almost say, I love blowjobs -- “you have a really nice cock.”
“Thanks.”
He makes some vague attempt to finger you, but nothing's really taking off in that area. It is unclear if he’s going to go down on you. It’s definitely on his mind. He plunks his head on your stomach, but never actually assumes the position. The night, which once felt like a cozy funicular, is unspooling. The mood has shifted.
"Wanna watch tv?" Relief and disappointment.
He plays the same TV show you used to watch with your ex, a cop comedy. you're making out again, he grabs a condom, but again... nothing's really working. You offer to do it sans condom. You say, I’m clean! You say, I'm on birth control! He says no. You make out some more.
He says you can sleep over, so you do.
You wake up in the morning because your phone is going off, because your friends who love you want to know how your date went. you write back, ‘well, i think,’ but you're not sure. You look over at him: he's asleep, curled up into himself, his back to you.
You look around at his posters-- feathery pencil drawings, colorful prints-- and think, this is all by the ex. He is in love with his ex. Then you think of your ex, how you guys would joke that he always wanted to grind and rub in the morning and you would lie there like a bump on a log, only acknowledging him to shrug him off. Now here you are, mister rubby, you just want some confirmation that this person knows you're here and doesn't regret it. you touch his ear. It's so nice to just touch another person's ear. A complete ear, perfectly formed in all its rivulets and ridges, like a seashell. Should you just leave? You could. You won't, because you're scared he'll be visibly relieved if you do.
His alarm goes off and now he's up. He's hungover, are you? Not really. He suggests getting coffee. You get dressed. He looks less cute in the morning. He's telling you about the M train as if you didn't take the M train every goddamn morning last year.
How do I look?
You look good.
You put on your coats and walk into his blue wallway. Blue walls, blue carpet. A blue not seen in nature. The blue of a gymnasium, of an airline, of a commuter train magazine cover. He says, “you were gasping for air at three am last night.”
Gasping for air?
Yeah, I had to wake you up.
It must have been the popcorn lung.
Popcorn lung? what’s that?
You don't talk on your walk to the subway. The February morning sunlight is harsh, and you think to yourself maybe you actually are hungover. You're running late, so actually no coffee, just straight up the JMZ steps to the Manhattan-bound platform. A year ago, you'd walk from your ex's apartment to this platform, hating your life robustly. It was warmer then.
The M comes. You find seats next to each other. He reads about the state of the union on his phone. He works in 30 rock. You ask if he’s ever seen anyone famous. He tells you he once saw Jimmy Fallon in a parked car, yelling at someone over the phone. You tell him Jimmy Fallon's a well-known alcoholic. He says, no way, I didn’t know that. You say, yeah. He says, this train is really slow.
You get to broadway-lafayette, your stop. You get up. He says, this was fun, or, I had a good time (he doesn't say both these things; he says one of these interchangeable things). You say, yeah. You pat him on his hat head. Right as you are walking off the train, he stands up and hugs you .
Out on the street the light is too bright, yeah, you are hungover— maybe hungover adjacent. you're ten minutes late to work. The sun is cold. February is the spring of winter.
That, troll, is loneliness.