Offensive much? Thoughts?

Thanks to manonetheside for the tip.
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A few months ago. Me, in a lounge with two married colleagues. One of them is pregnant with her second child. We take a break from the day-to-day and talk, of course, of love.

Me: “How did you guys know that you had found the one, that this—this man—was it?”

They look at each other for a moment, and then they look at me. The non-pregnant one says what both want to say:

“You just know.”

Future mommy of two nods her head. Their smiles tell me that they know something that I don’t, that—somehow—they hold a secret that only time and circumstance can share. I can sense in their calm that they live in a different world, one collapsing past, present, and future at once; they seem fueled by nostalgia, contentedness, and an assured hope, all in the same breath. In that unspoken moment, they reveal as much as they can about this thing I did not have: That with it, the beginning is good, life only gets better, and tomorrow holds so much more. That look in their faces: that’s what it meant to “just know.”

+++

Early April. The other side of knowledge.

I know. Maybe I think I know but don’t really know, or maybe I only know part of something bigger and don’t have a complete grasp of the whole project of knowing quite yet. But I do feel like I know, and therefore, for all intents and purposes, I know. I know. I know.

And I could describe for you how I know, but perhaps that ruins the project of knowing for you. You could misguidedly take my knowing and have it prescribe your own search for knowing, but perhaps knowing for you will be different from knowing for me. I could describe for you how I know, but perhaps it only applies to how a gay college-educated Filipino Californian knows that he is head over heels for a gay college-educated Czech/Welsh/Native American Oklahoman. Perhaps it only applies to a dynamic that travels from hot tub, strip club, and bachelor party to email after email, text message after text message, phone call after phone call. Our knowing is a consequence of being 1647.88 miles away from each other—23 hours and 51 minutes if we wanted to make the drive—but feeling as if we are with each other at every step.

I understand the “you just know” moment now, not as a monolithic, universally-applicable signal that the rest of your life has potentially arrived. It is not a secret withheld from you by your friends, who you theorize use “you just know” as code for “I’m gonna fuck with you” or “I don’t really care to describe it.” The truth of “you just know” predicates itself upon its very first syllable: you. I can tell you the story of how Parker and I came to be, but it’s something that will only ever apply to Parker and me. The soaring, anything-is-possible feeling floating between us is something that will only ever exist with us. Romantic comedies, love songs, romance novels: they only provide models for what the effect of love is, but the causes will always be different. To insist that you will feel the same when you find yours is to pretend that we are the same, that we need the same way, that love will provide us with the same gifts. You will know. Only you will know.

And so, I very purposefully leave out the weeks and events that transpired between Parker and me, from that very first fifteen-word email I received at home, to where we are now, seeing no end in sight, planning to see each other very, very soon. Because with love, I’ve discovered, the process of falling may be fun: it can be interesting and illuminating, and it is—as it was with Parker and me—a roller coaster of does-he-or-doesn’t-he. But unlike a roller coaster, falling is not the best part. It’s nowhere near as spectacular as being in love itself. It’s different from flirting; it’s different from dating; it’s a completely other world, and in that way, perhaps it is a secret. But it’s a secret that only Parker and I know, a place—as Keane might suggest—that only we go. The absurdity of love is not that it’s a possession that we must take turns finding; we cannot, unlike many other “goals” in the world, work to make it happen for ourselves (as much as we workaholics detest depending upon fate). The true craziness of love is that we all must wait until it becomes our own, at the wandering intersection of time, context, and another. Someday, when your road matches those roads, you will be well on your way. You will know what I mean just as surely as I know for myself now.

What now, then? What now that I know? Well, past knowing: I don’t really know. I’ve never known before. And so this dating column heads to where it has never gone before: beyond the happiness of knowing, to begin demystifying—or, if I’m lucky, reinforcing—the truths of happily ever after. After all, things with Parker have only just begun. And despite knowing, I am sure there is much more to learn.

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In the morning, the sun beats through the huge glass door of the mansion office, exposing Parker and me on a hardwood floor, lost in a pile of blankets, sheets, and pillows, the aftermath of a tug of war to keep warm.

The other fraternity brothers bustle in the other room, packing frantically for flights and road trips home, piecing the mansion back together after the weekend’s raucous bachelor party. I bury myself under our covers, shielding myself from the sun, the boys, the reminder that my unexpected two-night fling was coming to a close. It is a fruitless attempt at escape.

I overhear the guys outside, rock-scissors-papering their way to a decision: who’s getting Parker out of the office to make sure he catches his plane? One of them had entered mistakenly in the night. When the door opened, he found us frozen, pretending to be asleep, but betrayed by the obvious—no one falls asleep directly on top of each other. We heard his shock, a surprised “ummmm, go to bed,” and the quick shut of the door. Now they debated who would lay eyes on the assumedly post-sodomic moment: dear God, not me.

Someone mans up and leads a pack to fetch Parker. Underneath the covers, I imagine them standing at the door, silently ooh-ing and aah-ing at us, looking down at our makeshift bed as if we were a freak show at the circus: “And in this ring, ladies and gentlemen, we have what looks like a normal morning-after … but look: it’s two men!” We were an unlikely byproduct of this hypermasculine event, and they couldn’t, despite their machismo, look away. All of us wondered, through the nuances of our individual subject positions, if this had actually happened.

Parker leaves the room quickly. With my flight still hours away, I stretch, my body flattening some of the sheets while pushing away the others. I blink my way into the sun, take a breath, and confront an inevitable end-of-hook-up question: What kind of hook-up was this? And what type of closure does that entail?

I have no ready answers to either question. I exit the office. I find my bag by the entrance of the mansion. I begin packing, and out of the corner of my eye, I see Parker following his ride to the airport, approaching the door. We stand side by side without acknowledging each other: I, intent on my packing, he, checking messages on his iPhone. I want to say something: nice meeting you, have a good flight, let’s stay in touch, SOMETHING. But he is out the door and gone. And I continue to pack the weekend away.

+++

On the long flight to San Francisco, I settle: I will not communicate with him. No emails. No phone calls. Our awkward, unacknowledged goodbye provides proof enough that this weekend was merely fun. I remind myself that not every successful flirtatious or sexual encounter can (or should) turn into something more substantial. I tell myself I need to absorb the excitement of the bachelor party’s shenanigans and learn to move on, that someday I will have an opportunity to pursue a fruitful relationship under less sexualized—and heterosexualized—circumstances. I have never been one to stray from more conventional dating models anyway. I am old-fashioned. I date. I wait. This fleeting, drunken weekend fling was not meant to be anything more than what it was. I will be fine. I will look back at this weekend and laugh. If anything, I’ll see him at the wedding and maybe there’ll be more fun there. But otherwise, I decide that there is nothing more to think or say about Parker. Done. Gone. Filed away into my memories.

Until he emails me. I arrive at my apartment, sit down at my couch to catch up on the weekend’s piling email, and find a short note from him:

I just wanted to say bye since I didn't get to at the house.

And in fifteen words or less, he manages to keep me from shutting the door. His email revives what my heart—but not head—cling to: the naïve belief that anything can happen.

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Parker sleeps in until 5pm. My early afternoon fills with paranoia: What if he’s sleeping in to avoid me? What if he was so drunk last night that his body needed this extra time to recover? In his mind, did anything actually happen between us?

I spend the day not mentioning a word to any of his brothers. I eat the hangover special: chicken fajita omelets. I tan by the pool. I have a few drinks. I plant myself on a couch and watch UCLA lose dejectedly to Villanova. I shower and check my email in the mansion’s office. I’m dressed for our 7:30pm limo ride to a strip club: my best jeans, a casual white-button down, its sleeves folded halfway up my arm.

Through the door, I see him in his boxers as he waits to iron his dress shirt. I say nothing. He says nothing. I wonder if this is awkward or normal: our still-unacknowledged interactions from last night.

I wait outside with the rest of the guys. They filter in and out of the porch and the kitchen, and eventually, looking out into the Texas hillside are me, Parker, and another brother. I sit quietly as Parker asks his brother a question. His friend goes back inside, leaving us alone, eyes still out into the open.

He takes out his box of cigarettes. He remarks that they’re empty, and I laugh at him knowingly.

We board the limousine and don’t interact for the hour and a half ride to the nearest strip joint. When we arrive, we find a reserved area, half booth seats, half swivel seats. I pull a swivel seat behind me, and as I look around at the girls—half-attractive, half-not—he pulls a seat next to mine. He asks me to save it for him. I nod.

Our party’s first bottle of Grey Goose arrives, and a first string of girls comes to give Emil lap dances. I think briefly about his fiancé before Parker sits down next to me. We talk about the strip club and the girls. I demonstrate unusual curiosity, as I confess never having been to a strip club before. He compares this one to ones he’s visited in Oklahoma and Bourbon Street. He says this one is not bad, but it’s certainly not the best.

He offers to buy me a lap dance from a girl. I laugh and tell him it would do nothing for me; he laughs and tells me they’re fun. Being clear about my sexuality though—something I never articulated explicitly the previous night—opens the door to debriefing our hot tub encounter. He makes it official: he couldn’t find me. When he peeked into the mansion’s office and saw me on the floor, he thought that I was one of his brothers. He eventually gave up looking and fell asleep. “But tonight,” he says, “we can fix that mistake.”

Two of his brothers tap him on the shoulder and ask if he wants to go to Pervert’s Row—the closest tables to the main stripper stage. He gets up to follow them, but turns around and tells me to come with them. He almost grabs my hand before remembering where he is.

I’m handed a dollar bill and told to stick it into my mouth. I do, playfully. We look around Pervert’s Row, and while no one is on the stage quite yet, we eye the swarm of girls writhing on the laps of visiting men. He expresses fondness for one of them in particular—he calls her Ms. Canada, because he was trying to talk her into dancing for the bachelor. I compare her breasts to the breasts of some of the other women, and he begins mentoring me on the differences between fake boobs and real boobs.

When we return to our reserved area, word has gotten around that I had never been to a strip club. The bachelor insists on buying me one.

He brings a girl over to my swivel chair, a blonde with a short cut, and she begins to dance. I ask her if she knows what’s going on, and as she twists across my lap, I whisper to her: I’m gay, and they’ve put me up to this. She becomes self conscious and whispers back: don’t worry, I won’t do anything uncomfortable. And as she puts on a show for the other guys without actually giving me a full show, I notice that right next to me is Parker, in his own swivel chair, receiving a lap dance of his own. I find it ironic, funny, and then flirty that we—two men with some sort of interest in each other—are bonding in the straightest possible way. I feel the rest of the boys watching us. I hear them cheering us on. We, men into men, effectively being teased by beautiful women, become, in a way, more of a show than the women’s show itself. The explicit image of heterosexual desire collides with implicit homosexual desire to perform perhaps the most exciting event of the evening.

Parker and I look at each other and laugh. The strip club has a way of relaxing all the rules you’ve ever known: it does, in a way, enact its own rules upon you. For more than just its dancers, it’s a place to let your hair down, and for Parker and me, that meant defusing any unease from the previous night’s unfinished business.

The rest of the night blurs by: we flirt at another bar. He pulls me into a bathroom stall for a kiss. We buy a post-drink pizza. He puts his arm around me in the limo ride home. It slips down my back, reaches under my shirt, and nudges at my side. We take pictures. And when we get back to the house, I see him stealing pillows and blankets and throwing them onto the same floor on which I had slept alone the previous night.

And this time, when I wait for him by the makeshift bed, he comes inside and closes the door.

To be continued…

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Past 4am. A hot tub in the middle of nowhere, Texas. I’m in the backyard of a mansion that deserves to be in a reality show. Its lights are off—inside and out; its inhabitants, a dozen drunken fraternity brothers from a large southern university, are asleep. Except for the one in the hot tub with me.

I, of course, was never in his fraternity. And our hot tub, of course, is the only thing lighting the Texas darkness; its jets are the only thing we hear.

We’re at the bachelor party for Emil, a mutual friend who happened to be the president of his college fraternity. The party is everything I anticipated: a keg sits yards away; the mansion’s theater screen had been programmed for March Madness; and a trip to a strip club was planned for the following day. For me, the weekend is a giant “what if”: What if I were a fly on the wall when a pack of southern white fraternity boys went on spring break together in Texas? What would I see?

And at 4am on the first night of this bachelor party weekend, I see Parker, one of Emil’s groomsmen and fraternity brothers, with me in a hot tub. We have been the only ones awake for an hour and a half now. We’ve been drinking; we’ve been chatting. We compare my city life in California, his country life in Oklahoma. We get deep. Talk politics and family, life ambitions and lacunae. He opens up.

He goes inside for a moment, brings out some scotch from the kitchen, an ice cube floating in each of two glasses. He’s also brought back a box of Camels. We feel buzzed, and the cigarettes, we decide, would provide an extra, welcome layer.
He slips into the jacuzzi, a few feet away, directly across from me.

“So,” he says, “I’m going to get kinky.”

I raise my eyebrows.

“You get a cigarette if I get a kiss.”

In the span of a second, I realize the classic fraternity episode I’ve found myself in: alone, in a hot tub, drinks in hand. I look toward the mansion. I look back at him. I move from my seat and step across the hot tub. I plant each of my hands on either side of him. We kiss. As I back away, he hands me a cigarette. I return to my seat. We light our cigarettes and take a puff.

“So I thought this was supposed to be a bachelor party,” I laugh, surprise still intact.

He responds: “Well, wild things are supposed to happen, right?” His southern accent melts me.

As we continue talking, my mind rewinds to my first interactions with Emil, the bachelor. As my colleague and eventually my employee, he had known that I was gay. He had mentioned once having a close friend in college who was also gay, but I never thought that we’d actually ever meet.

In the hot tub, I inch my way toward Parker. Eventually, we’re close enough to make out some more.

After a bit, I pull away again. “So,” I point out, “not a tongue person, ey?”

He blushes. “I’m glad you noticed.”

I sit next to him, and he adds, “I’m sometimes a bit of a tease.”

Our glasses of scotch are empty, and we bite back and forth about who would get refills. He wins the debate when he says, “My shorts come off if you go get us more drinks.”

I pause before climbing out of the pool. I take my time. I let him stew in the jacuzzi. I would show him who could be a tease.

I return with our glasses full of Bud Light, and I sit them on the ledge, next to me, out of his reach. I step into the hot tub. I wait another moment before prodding, “Your promise?”

His shorts surface. I hand him his drink. He takes a sip before placing his arm around me. I think to myself that I had never been skinny dipping before, and my shorts come off too.

We look toward the mansion. “Where do you suppose we’ll find room to sleep tonight?” he asks.

For a moment, I’m glad he says “we,” but then I realize he’s right: all of the mansion’s beds and couches, by this time of night, were probably taken by the other guys.

“Maybe we can just grab some blankets and pillows and camp out on the floor of a room.”

Our plan: I would go in first and change out of my swim trunks. He’d follow in and find me on the floor somewhere. And we’d finish what we had started.

I go in. I dry off. I switch my trunks for boxers and a tank. I grab some blankets and pillows, find the mansion’s office room, and set up a makeshift bed: two pillows, two blankets. I leave the door ajar, slip underneath the covers, and wait.

I see Parker through the office’s sliding glass door as he leaves the hot tub. I hear him enter the mansion, his damp footsteps slopping onto the kitchen’s tiled floor. He dries himself off. He changes, and he begins searching for the room. I wait, trying not to make it seem that I am waiting at all.

He approaches in the hallway and pushes the door open quietly. I stretch so that he notices I’m in the room and on the floor. He looks down at me; I look up at him. Wrapped in his towel, he demonstrates his frattier side: he sticks out his tongue and makes a farting noise.

He shuts the door and walks further down the hallway. I want to call out his name but doing so would wake people. He opens and closes other doors. He has either mistaken me for someone else or is completely the tease that he promised he would be.

Either way, I recognize silence. And succumbing to the buzz of alcohol and cigarettes, I sink into a floor that I now notice is cold and hard. I roll myself into the two blankets I grabbed, laying my head on one pillow, wrapping my arms round the other.

The next thing I know, it’s 9:30am. I’m on the floor of an office, in a mansion in the middle of nowhere, Texas. As I shield my eyes from the sunlight blazing through the sliding glass door, I remember the last moments of a few hours ago. And I realize that the weekend I had expected to be heterosexual through and through had only just begun.

To be continued...

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On the outdoor patio of a bar and grill: a gay Syrian Jew, a lesbian with a mom and two dads, a straight New York Jew, and me. Beers all around. A chili burger for me, a tofu salad for someone else. All academic types, yet the conversation, of course, is about sex.

Straight guy, to me: “So stop me if I’m prying, but in your experience, are you one of those gay men who is also incredibly promiscuous? I mean, do you find most gay men to be promiscuous?” He says this animatedly, but contains himself from projecting out loud.

Given my relative lack of experience, I want to laugh, but I know my Syrian friend is the type to broadcast his sexual escapades and habits, his occasional rendezvous at the local steam baths, his late night excursions to a popular San Francisco sex club. I can’t be disrespectful. But I choose to lean holier than thou and suggest my disapproval.

I shake my head. “No, I’m definitely not one of those gay men,” I assert, “It’s just not me. I don’t mind if other people do it, but I think as far as dating and sex, I’m looking for a more traditional type of experience.” I decide that tradition, with its connotations of valor and innocence, with its subtle implication that deviance exists, was just cocky enough to rope the other gay guy into the conversation.

I am right. He stops us, but at another word: “Wait, but what do you mean by promiscuous?” He wants to defend his lifestyle. “Just because I’m sex-positive doesn’t mean I whore myself out.”

Sex-positive: a term that a former machismo roommate introduced to me as self-evident in its definition—the quality of being attitudinally positive about sex, sexuality, and sexual experiences. At the time, my roommate accused me of not being sex-positive because I wasn’t interested in having it daily. I’d like to suggest to him now, after thinking about it for a year, that you don’t need to have sex frequently in order to be sex-positive. Can’t you be positive about sex but choose to be selective or—dare I say it: conservative—in your sexual expression? Does positivity necessarily correlate with a higher numerical value?

My friend, sex-positivity incarnate, continues (with passion, of course): “I’ll go home with boys who can come to a mutual decision with me. We want to sleep with each other and see what happens. We’re obviously attracted to each other, and there’s no more honest time between two guys than laying around, post-coital, talking. I think of promiscuous, and I think of jumping from man to man without agenda. I’m sex-positive because I have no problems with sex and can see it going further from there.”

By now, the three college students at a neighboring table are quiet.

In my head, a split-second flashback to an article I read on the reversal of romance over the last half-century: In the old days—or what people want to remember of it—couples dated, courted, and when attraction escalated, they consummated their relationship. Today, people consummate casually and freely, only evaluating after the fact if something else is there. Which one is more fun? Which one is safer? Which one works best in the long run?

The only woman at our table chimes in, academic claws ready to attack: “And traditional—what does that really mean?”

I purposefully keep things light. I turn my eyes to the side and flinch my cheek upward as if to blush. “Like in the movies.” I don’t blush though, because for me, this is true. I want the improbable movie romance.

Laughter. Initial disbelief.

“But come on,” my gay friend prods, “how many times have you picked someone up at a bar?”

“None.”

“Well,” my lesbian friend continues, expecting something juicier to bring proof to her disbelief, “how many times have you been picked up at a bar?”

“Never.”

“Really?” the Syrian, still skeptical, presses. He pauses, his hand clasped around the pitcher, but not ready to pour. I can tell he’s not used to being around the relatively sexless; his truth, perhaps, lives in the tradition of primetime drama, that perpetually smoky and drunk bar of the everyman in which sex—not socializing—is the objective. This is what twenty-somethings do, he might posit: choose to make sex positive or make sex negative.

But what to do with me, or with the experience of just no sex? Is no sex always bad sex? While clarifying the two branches of so-called promiscuity, is it possible to apply the same idea to its opposite: prudishness? Must a sexual conservative—someone not necessarily abstinent but still getting, whether by choice or not, less than average—be plundered into the black hole of prudishness? Is he or she, for example, boring—as opposed to naughty—by nature?

In my head, the wheels turn: With times, connotations, and traditions changing, how are we supposed to define romance, let alone find it? Or, have we now come to a point where our words can no longer define our actions? Does our action—or lack thereof—define our words? What does it mean to be positive about an idea whose meaning we can’t even agree on?

I zoom back into the real world. I hesitate about, then decide against, sharing my questions; the academics, after all, are talking about sex.
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I used to tell my seventh graders that reading is like playing a sport: to get good at it, you have to practice, practice, practice; the mind, after all, is a muscle that you need to exercise before it can get fit.

Easier said than done, of course, and I should know. I’ve recently returned to weight training after a hiatus of, oh, nine years, and I’ve discovered that things haven’t changed: my upper body strength is still nonexistent. In middle school, I always failed at climbing poles and ropes; I’d be the student who would never quite make an ascent, simply hanging on for as long as he could and never actually getting one arm above the other. I was the guy who would attempt doing chin-ups by jumping up with my legs, grabbing onto the bar, depending on momentum to get my neck barely above it, and then find myself falling to the sand below. For years, I had it in my head that perhaps I was just born this way. Not everyone could be strong, I told myself, not everyone was cut out for the Olympics, or even the Presidential Fitness Exam.

Had my seventh graders thought that way, they would've succumbed to failure and given up on academics before their teen years.

I, for one, have not given up on what working out can do for me. And I hope that the same is true with love, that there’s not a certain survival of the fittest test involved and that some people just wouldn’t be good enough to fit in. I will not give in to that possibility. I refuse to believe that my chances are screwed before I get to screw my fair share.

A few weeks ago, as I walked around my new gym for the first time, I was embarrassed not to know how these lifting machines worked, with their with cyborg-like names that all ended provocatively in –ex, with levers, weights, pins, and other doo-dads that looked dangerous if I used them improperly. Somehow, it all seemed a bit like exercising your hormones for the first time, when your urges left you most vulnerable to trouble: How was it that I learned how to like, to flirt, or to have sex? Unlike a former roommate of mine, I didn’t grow up with parents who sat me down to talk about love and loving; I didn’t have access—or the desire, really—to read how-to sex books. In my life, there were no diagrams and safety rules posted nearby. Could I have hurt myself or a partner if I didn’t know how to do things right? Was there an equivalent personal trainer I could consult for scientifically-proven tips on how to properly position my body? Did I need to stretch beforehand? Was I supposed to exhaust myself until failure?

Back at the gym, I was ashamed to come to a machine, see that the pin had been set at a weight of—say—8 or 14, and have to move it all the way down to 4. On the flies, even at a setting of 3, I found myself struggling to channel strength from my left chest in order to finish one set. I looked around at all the hot, muscular guys who pretended that this wasn’t hard for them. For me, their sweat-stained shirts betrayed their superhuman powers and revealed their pain. And then, somehow, they would head over to the shoulder press, set their weights at an insane poundage, and lift like they were playing with feathers.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t hard for them. Perhaps I just sucked at this game.

Similarly, how is it that some people have all the luck in dating? Some of them have had 8 or 14 significant others by the age of 25; I have a friend who is juggling 2 potential boyfriends and has a handful of consequence-free booty calls ready to go on speed-dial. Other buddies go out on at least one or two dates each week-- with different men! Meanwhile, there are others like me who can count on one hand how many people he’s slept with, and can use less than a hand to number the guys with whom he pursued a labeled relationship. Are my friends with the endless dates simply working out more than me? Are they more social, or are they more “fit” in the dating scene? Could they be faking it? Are they really in pain as they complete rep after rep of dates that lead to nothing except knowing how to date well? Are they sweating through this, or are they, as the jocks (and even average Joes) at my gym seem to show, all very much at ease with this?

I wonder what would’ve happened had I started working out a younger age. Had I the will and made the effort in middle or high school to go to the gym more regularly than required by my PE departments, would I be stronger, more in shape, and able to lift much heavier weights than I can now?

My young cousin Gloria started having boyfriends when she was in the fifth grade. Of course, nothing much—god forbid—was happening in the fifth grade (though you never know these days), but by fifteen, she had dated enough guys to know when she really liked someone. In her sophomore year of high school, she met the guy that she would then date for seven years—that’s through high school graduation, through college, and even after that. I see similar stories posted on my Facebook News Feed daily: so-and-so is now in a relationship, so-and-so is now engaged, so-and-so has changed his or her last name, is buying a house, is having her second child… all by 25. To this day, I’ve had a hard time squeezing seven weeks with a single guy, but how much of that brevity can I blame on not dating anyone until my sophomore year of college? Did I not start early enough? Am I a late bloomer? Do I necessarily have a lot of catching up to do, or are there supplements or steroids I can make up for lost time? Or what if I have the last laugh? What if I’m on the right timeline and everyone else is just overworking life?

Was there something I could have practiced at an earlier age to be better at the dating game? Was there direct instruction that I missed—because of my ethnicity, culture, or the late discovery of my sexuality—that might have helped me develop these skills? Or is it okay that I’m sort of like on the Biggest Loser of coupling, that I’m—for whatever reason—needing to get stronger and fitter this late in the game, that it’s possible even now, at the peak of my libido, to work really hard and get what I want?

Or is it possible that, in a society that privileges merit, achievement, and betterment all the time, that there are actually no skills involved in finding love? That for once, practice does not advance your odds, that perfection comes not with repetition, but with pure luck? And on the dark side of that seeming relief of a burden, how early—indeed, how birth-given—do those chances come into fruition? When excusing love with luck, how do I know it will all work out?

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As a middle school teacher, I asked questions—lots of them—to keep my students engaged. It’s a tougher task than it sounds; you’re never quite sure what your hormone-charged students will say—or if they will say anything at all. One valuable trick I learned to make sure my pseudo-Socratic method worked was called “wait-time.” I would ask a question, and then—the impossible—I’d wait. I’d stand there, watching an ocean of blank or unreadable faces, letting a heavy silence flood the room, anticipating a wave of potentially wrong answers as seconds drip by one slow drop at a time: Did they understand my question? Are they following along? Am I teaching the best that I can? Am I a travesty? Is this lesson a tragedy? Panic! At the Classroom.

Miraculously, at the end of the pause-that-would-last-forever (or ten Mississippi seconds, at the most), the Red Sea would part and reveal a hand in the air. If I was lucky, there might be two. And if I was doing my job, the student I would call on would be close to a right answer. Wait-time allowed my pupils to think and debate about possible responses while I recollected my thoughts about how to follow-up and lead the class. Ta-da: the fruits and labors of sitting—or standing—at the edge-of-your-seat without saying anything at all.

In the dating game, I’ve found a similar phenomenon: the wait-time between your date and your call, between your call and his call, between dates and dates later, between dates and nights and the bent knee proposal to forever. How long is too long? Or, perhaps more appropriately for an antsy and impatient guy like me who operates on five-year and ten-year plans, how soon is too soon?

You’d think it’d be easier when you don’t have thirty middle schoolers staring back at you. You’d think that because you’re an adult and you’re dealing with an adult, that these waiting periods would be less of a strategy and more a consequence of the busy bee lives we lead.

False. In dating, wait-time is a wait-game. It’s not fun, but it’s the rule; it’s a political move to be taken despite everything we say about love. That stuff about listening to your heart and then acting on it? Bullshit. If I listened to my heart, time would not be in the way of me and the people I want to date. My mind would draw unswervingly straight lines from thought A (“Wow, I really enjoyed hanging out with that guy”) to thought B (“I should ask him out again”) instead of tweedling over to paranoia-laden distractions like thought A.2 (“The ball’s in his court, so I’ll wait for his call”) or thought A.83765 (“I shouldn’t seem too excited, so I’ll wait exactly 48 hours”).

The wait-game is torture. Instead of doing what wait-time does in the classroom—giving students and teachers time to collect their thoughts into articulate arguments—all that the wait-game does is allow the butterflies in your stomach to multiply. Is it fair that they get to reproduce while you sit by your phone waiting for the chance to reproduce?

Throwing wrenches into an already sweaty situation is what I like to call the technological hierarchy. How much value should I place on a call versus a text? An email versus a text? An instant message versus an email? A Facebook poke versus a G-chat drop-in? Do waiting periods of non-communication differ depending on how I want to communicate with you next? Can I poke you two days after a date, or is it more efficacious to have a G-chat conversation after three days or a phone call after five days?

I’ve always felt like the wait-game has been detrimental for me. In my first dating experiences, I remember wanting to talk on instant messenger whenever I could; this stemmed out of a naïve understanding of love as togetherness—if not literally physical, then at the very least, conversationally. I soon learned that this was something called clinginess. I discovered that personal space and time was valued in the early phases of dating; love would be something to be planned around later on, but if you were just dating, you were supposed to let the tension between you and your eyed-one come to a slow boil. You couldn’t just jump into the deep end of a relationship; every cup of coffee or glass of beer you shared on a date was but a small contribution of water into a pool you had to fill. And you had to digest before attempting the next serving.

I’ve worked on this. In each of my relationships, I’ve tried to remind myself not to get too excited, not to always make the first moves, not to, as I desperately want to, wear my heart on my sleeve. I’ve been told that the acceptable thing to do is to keep it in my chest where it belongs, under layer and layers of pretense called, “Getting to know you.” (Some people also wear alternative layers called “hooking up.”)

But if love were about chemistry, sparks, and connections that either are or are not, then why put yourself through the wait-game? To prove to yourself that these are feelings that last? To make that which is after the wait worth so much more? Why do we put these connections on hold instead of understanding that what will be will be—and still will be whether accessed now or later?

When I was a teacher, I knew exactly what I was gaining by waiting. As a dater, though, I’m lost for words to explain my purposeful word loss: what exactly do I get aside from lost time?

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You can’t give a response to “What’s your type?” without having to answer to race.

The usual responses I hear include personality traits (like “funny,” “laid back,” or “intelligent”), facial hair attributes (such as “clean-shaven” or “five o’ clock shadow”), and occupational affiliations or interests (for instance, “someone who likes to cook” or “not a lawyer”).

But then things start getting tricky. People try to dodge the question of race by talking about skin tones: “light-skinned,” “dark-skinned,” “brown-skinned,” or “caramel complexion.” They worm around being explicit by mentioning attributes like “blue eyes and blonde hair” or social circumstances like “someone from the hood.” And my all-time favorite circumvention? Straight up without being straightforward: “Someone who looks like me.”

Sometimes, though, people try to be honest: I had a friend begin listing personality traits, interests, potential job positions before glimpsing around and, with his eyes low, moving his lips only oh-so-much to produce in the quietest little whisper, “White.” Why, I thought, should he keep his confident answer to himself? Why are we afraid to proclaim our preferences (and I do believe they are preferences, as opposed to orientations) if we are so, it seems, stubborn about them?

I don’t think I knew how concerned people were about the race of their mates until I went to college. When I was growing up, my parents would indeed make flabbergasting comments about the racial make-up of my friends; I am Asian, and most of my closest acquaintances were black, with a sprinkling of every other race and ethnicity to boot. They would advise me to be careful about whom I hung out with, that I should work more to find a group of friends that reflected my roots. Sometimes, my sister—much bolder than I am—would tease my parents: “What if I came home with a white boyfriend? What if I came home with a black boyfriend?” My mom would shake her head, release a touch of nervous laughter, as if to say, “Why would you say such a thing?” Certainly, I thought, this was a generational gap. My parents were simply too old-fashioned to understand my teenage ideal of a post-race dating society. I would need to go to college to be with peers who would understand.

Surprisingly for me, college provided me with the opposite of my expectation. Same-race relationships pervaded most of my small liberal arts community—so much for being liberal, I thought. “What’s your type?” was more rhetorical than inquisitive. In a social scene dominated by Greek life, I found that most whites dated whites, most blacks dated blacks, and everyone else needed to figure out if they were “more white” or “more black” to see where they would fit in. White European or Australian international students, for example, had for their dating pool both the larger white community and each other; a young Asian woman from the hoods of New York, on the other hand, gained street credibility among black students and was able to socialize in that world.

I remember noticing but two attributes that helped students transcend the prison of mate-racing: language and sports. Students who shared an interest in speaking a language—Spanish comes especially to mind—bonded with other students who also spoke the language; here, race played second fiddle to the assumptions of heritage or cultural awareness that came with linguistic talents, whether by birth or high school AP class. Similarly, students who played the same sport on separately gendered teams achieved camaraderie through practices and long-distance conference tours. While this forged a handful of interracial relationships—frequently between a black student and a white student—this also caused interracial-related drama: Why should a white student take a perfectly good black student out from an already limited black dating pool? Why would a black student give up mating options within his or her race for someone who represented the dominant Man?

From my experiences in college and beyond, I’ve found “What’s your type?” to be even more twisted in gay circles. I tend to fit responses I hear into two extreme poles: there’s almost always white, and there’s almost always fetishist. At one end, there fits the aesthetic type sold to us by Abercrombie, American Eagle, JCrew, Armani Exchange, and the rest of the big brand names: white, usually muscular, men. Yes, okay: sometimes there are tokens. But almost always: white. This is what people end up seeing on most of the major porn networks: Sean Cody, Randy Blue, Corbin Fisher—if it’s popular in gay porn, it’s probably white. On the other end, “What’s your type?” gets very specific: Asian. Thin Asian. Latino. Hung Latino. Black. Dark Chocolate. On this side of the spectrum, minorities become desired because they’re, well, minorities—but specifically, minorities with a certain typed physical presence. Men value them explicitly for everything that supposedly comes with being their race or ethnicity; behaviorally, this may come to obedience, machismo, or strength. While the most popular gay pornography sites may not celebrate these ethnic caricatures to the extent that they sell whiteness, searchable porn databases like Xtube drip with clearly-labeled fetishist options, creating categories like Asian, Black, or Latino. Easy access to whatever color—and stereotyped culture—that you want. The cultural baggage is important: if you fit the color but not the trait, then maybe you won’t be as popular among these ethnicity fans. Or, maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll come off as mixed and straddle two potential ethnic markets—if you can pass as mixed white/black, for example, you might be viewed as a mate with training wheels for someone who wants pure white or pure black. No matter what, though, you still seem to be defined by your relationship to these umbrella categories of primary racial colors.

Obviously, as both my dating and pornography options demonstrate, my teenage dreams of a post-race mating scheme didn’t quite play out as I had imagined. I think, however, that that’s a good thing. Years later, the idea of concocting a colorblind world is not only naïve, but also dangerous; not acknowledging that there are differences in treatment and perception simply based on the color of one’s kin is the absolute ignorance of, well, the history of the world. And to think that love, dating, and attraction are immune from these prejudices—or, worse, hide those beliefs with cushy syntax and fancy hints—is to simply perpetuate this post-race fantasy.

I’m not saying that we should assertively proclaim our mating preferences and publicly narrow our options down to our gut’s raced reactions to “What’s your type?” But what does need to happen, I think, is for us to say, “Well, this is my type…” and then it follow-up with the very personal acknowledgement, “And this is probably why…” For many of us, that will be a hard thing to do. It forces us to shed a thin beam of light on the tightly-stacked structures cemented within our social selves. And even more uneasy is the feeling of, “What now?” after we see what’s been built inside of us, oftentimes without our permission at all. I do not know where we go from there. I do not know what to do with the rubble that unsettles when we realize we’re programmed against our will to love who we love. Our responses to “Why?” will not take care of that; they do not justify what we do, but they do, at the very least, do something. “Why?” steps us toward a more productive conversation than one about the pinning down of necessarily (and, I still want to believe, unnecessarily) essentializing characteristics and markers.
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Ever since I can remember, I have always wanted to be coupled.

When I was five and in kindergarten, I passed Vanessa a note on which I drew some sort of building and scribbled: “Do you want to go to Mann’s Chinese Theater?” (Note: I did not live in Hollywood, nor had I ever been to Mann’s Chinese Theater.) She gleefully agreed, which meant that she would ask her mom if she could hang out with me afterschool. Her mom, for some reason, allowed her (and chaperoned) this oddly premature dating experience. Both of them came to my family’s duplex, and we played on a toy-covered living room floor crowded with Legos and GI Joes. Although the event may actually have been my first date, I don’t consider it that. Not with her mother there.

Six years later, the fifth grade dance churned the pressure to find dates for school functions. Ashley brought Esperanza and I to an empty spot on our school’s concrete playground and made us admit that we wanted to go to the dance together. So we did. At the dance, we promptly split apart, blaming cooties.

Another dance memory: the eighth grade Halloween dance at my middle school. In a packed, sweaty, and dark auditorium, I wrapped my arms around Hillary, she cradled her arms on my shoulders, and we grinded away… only to be split apart by a teacher, shining her flashlight between our gyrating hips. It was the first time I became aware that being coupled wasn’t a private venture; it was something that was also perceived and watched.

This perception of coupling became more important in high school. Students—and even teachers—gossiped about who was going out with whom, and it became a symbol of popularity. It was a microcosm of the real world: power couples from student council, science geeks holding hands, misfits awkwardly finding their fellow misfit—we were puzzle pieces experimenting for our other half.

In the eleventh grade, I caved into this pressure and made a big deal out of a simply having a crush. I told everyone that there was someone I wanted, someone that I wanted to write songs for, someone who would help me realize the American Dream of having a high school sweetheart. Look! my move screamed, I’m just like everyone else! I can have a crush too! Maybe I’ll even end up in a couple!

It didn’t. My year-long infatuation with Anna deflated (she poked the hole in my balloon, and I was devastated), and for the first time, I learned the pain of singlehood. I didn’t want to be alone, and I didn’t want to be perceived as one who couldn’t be with another. My desire to couple grew even stronger. In the way that only a teenager could, I posted emo-tinged lyrics in my instant messenger profiles; I longed publicly—perhaps through accepted shame and embarrassment – for someone to love.

College didn’t seem different. When Barbara put her head on my shoulder while riding back from a formal, and her best friend Sara trotted to my room the next day with a cutesy hand-drawn card, I read these performances as coupling opportunities. When I came out a year later, within a month I asked a guy out on a date; the pressure to couple apparently transcended sexuality. Indeed, maybe there was even more pressure in this new gay world: I had to prove I was gay enough for it! And in a way, my official public switch to homosexual identification enabled me to continue my surge toward coupledom. I wasn’t going to achieve my objective as a straight man—and so I had to come out.

And it’s been that way ever since. Through mutual friends, at parties, at clubs, on and offline, I’ve been on the look-out for some sort of completion of a void, convinced, at times, that I was actually feeling incomplete. This blog has tracked my journey, providing a post-adolescent space for my stuck-in-gear adolescent emo-guery. I don’t interpret my desire as desperation—otherwise, I’d just hop into bed with Tom, Dick, and everyone else as they come; instead, I think a true and deep belief in coupledom as the materialized version of Platonic ideals, as a fulfillment of some sort of coming of age’s manifest destiny—this hardened belief of a larger and more gratifying interaction with another human continues to drive me. As I age, the specter of a coupled future only becomes a greater haunt: weddings, anniversaries, and even the political advent of gay marriage institutionalize for me the pressure I’ve felt all my life.

Which is why I find it very unexpected, after all of this time, energy, and effort I’ve spent searching for The One in my relative youth, that I’ve come to a turning point.

Two weeks ago, as I picnicked in Sharon Meadow at Golden Gate Park, I felt it for the first time: the happiness and quietly sweet satisfaction of being single. I detected no clear impetus, have not been able to self-psychoanalyze any rationale for why this and why now. I just know that since that afternoon, I’ve felt not only a contentedness with being single, but also a strange tinge of aversion to putting myself on any dating market of sorts. I cherish my time alone. I’ve declared my newfound independence to my colleagues. I feel unburdened and sexy and still very normal. Life goes on, and for once, I’ve asserted emotionally that it’s all mine: my life. Not my and someone else’s life.

I gladly shake myself free from the expectations I’ve carried since I was five. And this feeling of renewal—though I suppose it’s less of a renewal and more of a first acceptance of singlehood—is something I plan on hanging onto for as long as I can.
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With Hurricane Ike dominating national front-pages early this weekend, it became very easy to glide over another domestic catastrophe, one whose tragedy has more gravity, I think, because the fault was not nature’s—it stemmed from human mistake. In case you’ve been mesmerized by Ike, here’s another bit of news: a Los Angeles commuter train headed out of town during the height of Friday afternoon rush slammed directly into an oncoming freight train. Currently, two dozen people are dead, more than one hundred are injured, and there are bodies that have yet to be found. Included in the toll: the Metrolink engineer who ran two yellow warning lights and a final, fatal red light.

I scrolled through the facts, numbers, and images provided by major news websites, but found the most compelling account from the Los Angeles Times, where three writers combined eyewitness accounts to construct a narrative of the moments before, during, and after the crash. I found my most visceral reactions to “A sharp turn left, then muffled screams” as I navigated between graphic descriptions of twisted wreckage and bleeding bodies. There, poignant, intimate moments briefly silenced the otherwise jagged landscape of the article’s imagery; I imagine that if the article were a movie, it would’ve zoomed in and faded the sound of metal, fire, and chaos into the background. There, we would hear the human pulse.

Firefighters assigned [a bystander] to a man whose head was gashed. The man asked her to call his wife; she did, while holding his IV...

[Nearby, Frank] Haverstock, 64, of Simi Valley, said his wife, Norma, 53, the manager of a custom drapery house in Burbank, was a regular commuter on the train. After the collision, he said, she had called him. She told him that she was bleeding from the head, that she "hurt all over." "That was about it," he said. "The phone went dead."

The victims here—undoubtedly in pain, abruptly ripped from an unimaginable disaster—were practically in the middle of a warzone where I would think survival of the fittest instincts would kick in. On the contrary, the one thing they could think about doing was not to escape, but to call their respective significant others.

And it struck me that maybe that is love. That maybe love is the first person—if not the only person—you call when you think your time may be up. I remember the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when transcripts and records of final phone calls were released, revealing not necessarily screams for help, but promises of love, fitting the most meaningful messages possible into three-sentence conversations of closure. The screenplay for the movie Love Actually opens with this exact thought: “When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love.” Indie alternative band Death Cab for Cutie also finds love at its odd intersection with death, positing in its song What Sarah Said, “Love is watching someone die.”

They continue after an instrumental meditation: “So who’s gonna watch you die?”

Which leads me, of course, to ask—who would I call?

I didn’t really hesitate with a response. I’d probably call my mom, even though my relationship with her hasn’t always been the best, nor would I classify it in even the top fifty percent of my “deepest” relationships. And although she’s not the closest person to me, the significance of this final call takes into account a sense of duty, responsibility, and obligation—she would absolutely need to know my situation. Love, in this case, is when you can unquestionably recognize necessity with the mention of someone’s name: Mom.

I’ve frequently considered my friends my family although I realize that there are differences—family relationships, I’ve discovered, are not as temporal or fluid as friendships can be. Even in thinking about “close” relationships, I realize that “close” is all relative, whereas my immediate relatives are, for the most part, permanent. Whether that immutability is something to be appreciated or to be haunted by is relative; their presence is not.

This is true despite actual, physical distance. I see my friends much more often than I see my family, and even in my new Bay Area home, I’ve designated a friend up here—an ex, even—as my local emergency contact. He has never met any of my family to be able to reach them in case of actual, dire emergency, but I’d entrust him to figure out how to reach them and deliver any life-threatening news. Would he be the last person I’d want to speak to if I were in a train crash? Probably not. Maybe he’d make my top thirty. But ultimately, he’s not the last one. And maybe that’s what makes him an ex.

So is this what I’m on a search for? Is this what dating—something that connotes frivolity, materialism, and inconsequential pleasure… are these its ends: finding the potential last person to register into my memory before it fades away forever? Someone who is more family than family itself? How incongruous are the sexual games and playful politics we play with the gravity of the ends we want to meet—that ultimately, what we do when we date shapes our taste in such a way that leads us to make definitive decisions tied to loss and trauma at our final bows. Maybe this love thing isn’t romantic in nature; after all, if I had to choose now, I’d call my mom. Maybe this love thing isn’t even directed by attraction; after all, I don’t even like spending time with my mom. Indeed, I’m not even attracted to her sex.

If love is watching, hearing, or saying goodbye to someone who is dying, then whatever it is—romantic or not, gendered or not—it’s a force to reckoned with, in itself a bigger news story to our lives than a hurricane, as gripping or as potentially corrosive as a train wreck. So news flash: what are most of us doing by pretending that dating don’t play that?
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Tony looked around my new Bay Area studio apartment.

Wow, this is really coming together.

Candles, paintings, nice furniture, and a layout perfect for entertaining. Lighting to accentuate any and every mood. Yes, it was coming together. But it wasn’t done yet.

I didn’t know you were this gay.

I paused. I decided to take it as a compliment.

Why didn’t your Texas apartment look like this?

Because I let my roommate decorate that apartment. This—this has to be me.

And in asserting my apartment as an extension of me, I realized how much of this was, as Tony pointed out much more bluntly than I ever could, gay. There, showing off my new place, I realized that I hadn’t really counted on my sexuality intersecting with how I created home, but I guess it made sense. Indeed, my gayness played much more into its design than the (awfully good) taste Tony was noticing.

I think it began to hit me as I signed my lease three weeks earlier: OMG. This is my bachelor pad.

I suppose you could dim the lights and cue the seventies porn music. But before we get too far ahead—some background.

I’ve always considered myself pretty independent; as soon as I turned 18, I was out of my parents’ house, but never have I lived alone for an extended amount of time. In college, I had roommates. During summer internships, I leased studios but never furnished them with more than a mattress and a fold-out table and chairs. And in my last apartment, I had an apartmentmate, which afforded both of us the privacy of our own rooms while retaining the collegiate atmosphere of having someone always around. And yes, we decorated it as minimally as possible. It was College Lite.

Now here I am: my own studio. With real furniture. With real privacy. With utilities that will be all mine to pay. Blare the trumpets: My bachelor pad.

And with this awesome realization came responsibility: if this was my mid-twenties bachelor pad, then it had better get pimped out.

I’m not going to lie—I’m picky about furniture and design. Two weeks before I moved into my new apartment, I created potential apartment layouts on my computer; I surfed Ikea.com, Target.com, and lots of fancy, nameless European furniture store sites; I even debated color combinations and schemes with friends.

I came to my move-in day prepared—only to be caught off-guard by some ratty red-brown carpet, an old-fashioned yellow oven, plugs that were all two-prong, and JCPenney burlap-looking curtains that couldn’t decide whether they wanted to be the color of copper or dirt. It wasn’t the apartment I remembered when I visited a few weeks before, but then again, the whole thing was furnished… which told me that I was the one who had to turn this place into (music) my bachelor pad.

I found that, in both style and function, my choices had to go through a dating filter. If this was going to be my bachelor pad, then I had better deliver my best first impressions all the time.

In terms of style, nothing could look temporary. I am not a college student. I don’t do posters taped on walls, futons that look like futons, or desks with a reading lamp. No: things had to have a sense of permanence, like I had established myself as a man… after all, that’s who my mates are going to get. This meant more expensive furniture made of darker woods and metals. It meant frosted glass and leather instead of plastic and actual canvassed art instead of whiteboards. There would be no institutional fluorescent lighting—mood lamps and candles at various heights and intensities would create separate spaces out of what would otherwise be a one-room studio. The messaging behind this: I have my shit together, and you’re going to love it. If I had a loft space, it’d be damn sexy; I don’t but this is as close as I can get.

The centerpiece of the new space, a huge bookshelf stacked with photographs, books, DVDs, CDs, board games… things that are all about me. Perfect conversation fodder for dates that somehow make it back home with me.

In terms of function, I had to be comfortable bringing those potential mates to my new digs too. I had to have seats tiny enough to fit my small living area without giving up potential cuddling opportunities. A twin-bed was a no go, even if a studio space blooms with less furniture; I settled for a wide full. And, in lieu of a TV (which I find to be a huge distraction from work and extra bills I could go without), a projector, screen, and sound system made possible the almighty excuse, “Wanna come back to my place and watch a movie?” I even bought a variety of DVDs to suit any suitor.

So now here I am, a gay man in an apparently gay-friendly apartment within reach of the gayest city on earth. I’m sitting on my new sofa with the lights dim and floating to Coldplay’s newest album. There’s a candle lit on the table. I’m writing about my life and pretending it might be interesting to others. It’s sort of like being the male Carrie of Sex and the City… and in a place like San Francisco, I feel like I’ve got no excuses—I’m going to nab me a man.

Then again, it took Carrie six seasons and a movie to nab hers. And while the city was her playground, I think that when my apartment is complete, this place will be mine.
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When we figured out, sometime after 2:30am, that your car had gotten towed, I didn’t hesitate at all: I would help you get your car back that night if it were possible. In retrospect, it may have seemed like I was just being polite or nice, but I think I was being purposeful—I have a habit of trying to impress people I like with favors or, at times (albeit unproudly), with materialism. I hate it because it reminds me of the way I understood my parents’ love for me—through unconditional favors and obligatory payments in goods. I want to believe that there are more genuine and personal ways of showing people that you care.

I suppose, however, that staying out until 4:30am to unsuccessfully get your car back from a tow lot demonstrates some sort of care… though I’m pretty sure your interpretation of “I’m a nice guy who you should take an interest in” might’ve been “Gee, he’s being really nice about this.” And that’s that.

Over the next few days, at least two of my friends noticed, at the very least, the appearance of something going on. We were seen together a lot—chatting, having drinks, etc. I think had we been anyone else, this would’ve read to others that we were simply two friends. The context clues that pushed their suspicions to the next level: we barely knew each other and all of the sudden we were hanging out; there was a lot of giggling; and we were the only two gay guys left at our summer work. 1+1= too obvious, according to them.

And their flags raised my own; things didn’t quite add up to me. It was as if you were vibing with my attempts to be impress you—and you were returning the attention: you were touchy. You called. You found ways for it to be just you and me. Though you hadn’t really known me too well, you always seemed open—even eager for some time—to hang out. I knew you were dating someone, but why, then, would he make up such a small part of your time during the last part of the summer? (A projection of mine, I’m sure: if I were dating someone, I’d be wanting to see them as much as possible.) Whether this extra attention was flirtatious or simply friendly, though, I couldn’t tell. I really couldn’t tell what your intentions were when, after seeing him for a bit, you called me at 11:45pm to call you when I got back to the hotel… and when I called you at 12:30am expecting you to want to hang out in a more public common space, you invited me to meet you in your room.

You’ve got to understand how that might’ve read to me. Especially in the moments afterward, when tipsily, I took the elevator to your floor, knocked on your door, you said hey, and then motioned me to sit on your bed. And influenced by too many mojitos, jack and cokes, and beers, I decided to get touchy-feely myself and lean on your leg as we talked. And you didn’t shake me off or even attempt to create distance. For almost an hour. Maybe this was a projection on your part—people get touchy-feely when they’ve had a few to drink, and it means nothing. The projection on my part: I only get close if I want to be close. It’s possible that we were both reading the situation two completely different ways. It’s also possible that we were both in the same page but didn’t do anything about it. It was all so uncertain.

Eventually, closer to 2:30am again, I went to my own room, half-kicking myself that nothing happened, half-lauding myself for respecting your boundaries.

And no sooner than I had signed online to check my email did I receive a g-chat message from you. I, apparently, in some pure coincidence (I swear), had left my phone in your room. You were going to bring it to my room. It was as if I were granted some sort of second opportunity to redeem myself, assert my control over the situation, get my balls in check, and make a move.

You knocked on my door. You closed the door behind you. (You could’ve just handed me the phone at the door.) You came inside for a bit. We chatted. You handed me my phone. We chatted. You left.

Nothing. And again, I found myself half-kicking myself that nothing happened, half-lauding myself for respecting your boundaries.

And the next morning, we said goodbye. Just as uncertainly—almost as unceremoniously—as things began.

Only you left an opening. You said you had never been to the Bay Area before. And I was moving there. You had some time before your next big venture. You would come visit.

Yes! I offered. That would be so much fun, I thought, half-knowing that promises to visit were riddled with the hassle and unpredictability of planning and expenses.

But you pulled through. About two weeks ago, you booked your tickets. You’re staying for six nights. And I’m going to be excited to see you.

Here’s the thing, though: I’m going to pretend nothing ever happened; I’m going to start from scratch. Because who am I to say I even really knew you in those last few days of summer? Because what else can I expect from a little visit? Because, last I heard, you were still very much interested in your other male friend. Because I was, at the most, on the periphery of the picture to begin with, and over the course of the month and a half between our goodbye and your visit, I could—heck, you could—fade out past the picture frame and into, really, nothingness. You were a great new friend accelerating your way to new labels, but time and distance have put the brakes on. When we see each other in a month, maybe the propellant will resurface; maybe there will be no chemistry at all.

In the end, I’ve decided that sparks—uncertain as they may be—are exactly as they are in science— in-the-moment flashes, completely temporary and minute in the scheme of things. Though I still think fondly of past flirtations because they’re fun and they’re with fun people and they’re definitely worth writing about, the moment has passed. And that, thank goodness, is something I can be certain about.
(...to the full post)

Dear Ethan,

I’ve debated in my head about whether or not it would be a good or bad idea to write a blog entry about someone who may actually read the entry… like you. You may be reading this now. And if you are reading this now, I’m going to ask that you stop reading unless you want to deal with the consequences of what you’re about to read. Or, I suppose you could continue reading and then a) tell me that you did read it and then be perfectly okay with the consequences or b) pretend that you never read it and keep things going exactly where we left off. Or, you could stop here and simply deal with uncertainty. But then again, that’s really where we left off anyhow. At least the way I see it.

At the beginning of the summer, my colleague and friend Jen told me I should meet you. Why? I wondered, Why would I have any interest in meeting one of our college interns? Unless I had some sort of task that required an intern’s assistance, I’m not sure I had any desire to relive my college years and gallivant with the same folks who, at one of the earlier summer parties, ripped their shirts off and ran into the middle of the street downing beers before tossing them into some neighbor’s bushes. Yes, I thought at that very moment, that’s exactly the kind of presence I need in my life.

I ran into you at various functions through the summer: at a meeting after a panel or performing errands at our office, for example. All in all, however, you were in the periphery—just one of the many people running around our busy summer headquarters.

Then, on our last Thursday of the summer work calendar, I arrived at a bar to have a drink, and you were sitting with my friends. I sat beside you because it was the only seat empty, and in my polite small talk, you found ways to grab my interest. After comparing ever-so-superficially German and United States court decisions, it was pretty obvious: you’re very smart. And mature. I hadn’t met a smart mature gay man in a long time. I mean, I know a handful of smart mature gay men—most of which I met in college—but most of them aren’t in Texas. And most of them aren’t in their early twenties. In my two years of Texas living and bar-hopping, I hadn’t met any smart mature young gay men at all.

But what impressed me most was that I attempted to box you in as this elite private school academic snob and you kept breaking through that type. You ordered more drinks—not a cognac or wine as I wanted your type to order, but girly drinks: cranberry vodka. You forced me to take stupid online quizzes. You gossiped. You didn’t laugh; you giggled. And when you left early that night, our table grew a little more boring.

With our summer work calendar coming to a close, I thought that that’d be our only interaction, but the next day (and the day after that, and the day after that…) proved me wrong. The next night, I met up with some friends on your team at yet another bar… and there again you were. You were there, however, with another guy. Ah, I noted, of course. The smart ones are either awkward or taken. You were the latter. So I chatted with my friends and caught up with some folks who I hadn’t seen through the busy summer, and the next thing I knew, your man was gone. And so we talked. And it was, as was the night before, a good talk. I found out more about this balance that you strike—this socio-political scientist who also preys after donuts like nobody’s business. Again, you broke through the box. I wanted you to be vegetarian—maybe even vegan! Neither. To my disappointment, you were pretty normal. The intelligent kind of normal.

I found myself wishing that I hadn’t just met you in our last few days of work, but I checked myself. I knew you were really friendly, and it was in my best interest—and your best interest—that I read your behavior as that. In the closing days of our work calendar, I couldn’t think of our interactions as anything but. And also… you had a guy. I wasn’t going to interfere with that.

The next day was our organization’s end-of-summer party, and our overlap of friends decided to go to the same post-party at a local gay club. Your man-friend was going to meet you there, but in the time we passed waiting for him, you again proved to be good company. We talked about homosexuality and identity construction, and you asked me at some point if you had won the debate, and I said no, but I was just too afraid to say yes you did and admit my rusty sociological theory. I think I pushed your buttons too much and dropped the subject, and when we went inside the packed club—your first gay club—I dropped all thoughts of academia more permanently.

We danced. I hadn’t danced with a guy in a long time. I had forgotten how good it felt. You weren’t some random drunken guy. You weren’t looking for anything else aside from a good time on the dance floor. It was just us and the dance floor, the pulsing of the lights, the onset of fog, and the energy of the music.
It felt good to be dancing with someone who I knew was an even better person on the inside.

When your guy finally showed up, I backed off. Or, in your words, you asked me to Leave room for Jesus. I did. I avoided you for the rest of the night. And when I drove off with our friends and left you there with your guy, I can’t say that I wasn’t disappointed that I hadn’t met you first.

Less than an hour later, you called our friend Keena. She was sitting across from me at a late-night diner, and you didn’t know where your car was. She passed the phone to me, and I gave you directions to where you parked. We hung up, and three minutes later, you called again. Still, no car. She passed the phone to me, and this time, I said I’d be right there.

And at 2:30am, I drove back to the club and to your parking spot, and you were right: your car wasn’t there. That’s when I unlocked the passenger side door and let you in. This wasn’t the late night I was anticipating…

To be continued…
(...to the full post)

BEFORE
My ex is single again.

After he broke up with me in March 2007, he somehow managed to pick up a new boyfriend within a month’s time. They clicked, apparently, in a way we never could. They clicked so much that he followed his new boyfriend across the country to San Francisco and moved into a phase of relationshipping that I have yet to explore with anyone: “I Love You.”

He tried to make the quick turnover as painless for me as possible. He wanted to be friends, and I wanted to be friends, but I couldn’t get myself to be in friend-mode again until July, when he said he was moving west. By then, I had discovered that he was seeing someone else; Facebook and MySpace tell all. At our coffee-as-friends date before his big move, he refrained from mentioning his new boy—I’m not sure if he knew I knew, but I knew, and so I refrained from mentioning him too.

When he left, I was sure that our relationship would dwindle into random G-chats and occasionally-obligated holiday text messages. It did. Until I found out in January that I, too, would be moving west to—as fate would have it—San Francisco. I convinced myself that I’d be fine, and when I visited to look for new housing prospects in March 2008, almost a year after we broke up, I had dinner with him… and then we had drinks… and then we danced… and then we reminisced… and left it at that. There was a comfort in being with him despite knowing he had this other intimate life—again unmentioned. We promised when he dropped me off that night that we’d have great nights of friendly fun when I moved more permanently in August.

A few weeks ago, he called— it was one of those calls where a friend of yours reaches out to catch up with the subtext that something had just happened to him and he needed to talk to someone who would tell him that it would be okay. I never picked up. He left me a voicemail. I detected the concern. But maybe purposefully so, I shoved it away as nothing and merely G-chatted him back. He never responded.

Then two nights ago, a surprise text message: You gonna be going go to Asteroid tomorrow? :-P I’m gonna be there!

I was in the middle of a meeting, but I didn’t hesitate. I stepped out and called. It was true. He was coming. For one weekend, home to Texas to visit family and, yes, he wanted to see his friends.

I was hesitant. I never really got along with all of his friends—they were high maintenance, I was a workaholic, and not there aren’t high maintenance workaholics, but we just didn’t’ mesh. I said I’d let him know if I couldn’t make it while, in my head, I began thinking of good excuses. I would see him in August anyway. Everything would be okay then, and we’d hang out one-on-one. It’d probably be better that way. He passed on details for where to meet him and at what time. I wrote them on a post-it and stashed it in my pocket.

When I got home after work, I found the post-it again and remembered the phone call. I decided to check up on him via Facebook to see what his San Francisco ventures had been like since I met up with him in March…

And there, aside a tiny broken-heart icon, was that dangerous, dangerous word: Single.
I refreshed the page. No. He couldn’t be. He couldn’t… single. He’s single. No, it’s just Facebook.

I had to double check. I checked his MySpace page. Single. I checked his boyfriend’s MySpace page. Single.

Single single single.

And now he’s in town.

And he wants to hang out.

And I’m single.

And he’s single.

And we’re still friendly.

And I think I may still be attracted.

If not for real, then at least for fun.

So what do I do with this tension of wanting to work out that never did? I’m almost positive he just wants to be friends, but how do I drag that confirmation out of him without bringing up the boyfriend that now is, according to cyberspace, his ex? My gut says to stick to what’s tried and true: refrain from bringing it up. But with me moving to his neighborhood in two months, doesn’t refraining now actually mean postponing the inevitable anyway?

Whatever happens, I have a feeling that tonight begins a new chapter of my life two months too early. ManontheSide in San Francisco. With his ex. Uh oh.

+++

AFTER
I am too much of an optimist. Coming into tonight, my memories were nothing but romantic ideas; I had forgotten all the reasons why I wouldn’t want to be with him. Tonight, those reasons all came sloshing back: the ridiculous silliness; his need to be the center of attention; his focus on the physical—all things that don’t really blend with my own desires from a mate.

My ex is single again. And I bet his newest ex is celebrating too.



(...to the full post)

“Wait, what?” I stopped. At my office desk, in front of my computer, my work came to a halt. I pressed my head into my open palm; I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Chu, the guy who had flirted his way into a month’s worth of online conversations before meeting up and then inadvertently hooking up—he was now coming clean that he was not gay at all?

“I think that, before we started making out, before we went into your bedroom… do you remember when we were talking?”

I struggled to keep my patience. “Yes…”

“Well, I remember you brought up a lot of things that were of concern to you.”

I flashed back to the moments before our hookup. We were in my living room, talking across from each other, building tension through body language, eye contact, and the space between us. Somehow, we began talking about the idea of moving too fast, and I brought up a few scenarios that my overly-analytical mind warned me to be cautious against: What if he just needed a homosexual outlet from his chaste Arkansan seclusion? What if he wasn’t really attracted and just needed an easy way to get off for the summer that we’d be working near each other? At the time, though those questions surfaced, he assured me that—despite the nonsensical part about knowing each other for just about a month and having met for just a few hours—he actually did like me, especially after finding out that I was a pretty decent guy not just online, but also in real life. And that’s when we started making out.

“Yes, I remember…”

“When well you asked if I was using you as an outlet because I had none in Arkansas, it got me to thinking...”

Had I opened my stupid mouth again?.

“…and I think that I’m not using you as an outlet in place of my Arkansas experience; I think I’m using you as an outlet because I have a hard time with women.”

I remained silent, waiting for him to explain. He didn’t. I prompted him for more.

“Well,” he continued, “when I was in seventh grade…”

MAJOR PAUSE. When you were in seventh grade? You’ve been thinking about this since you’ve been in the seventh grade, you’ve roped me into this years later, and now you’re saying you’re straight? UNPAUSE.

“…I started getting really shy around girls. I’d be friends with them, but I wanted to be more with them. But my self-esteem was awful—it still is. I couldn’t approach them in the way that the other guys could. I liked them, but I was so worried about what they’d think and how I looked and how I behaved that I couldn’t get myself to act on my attraction. So I think that’s when I turned to guys. I began looking at the other guys and how well the girls reacted to them. I began to get jealous, admiring the other guys for the things they could be and the things they could do and eventually the things they could get that I couldn’t. And so I began looking at them as reflections of who I wanted to be. My self-esteem issues kept me away from the girls and deflected me to the guys.”

I tried processing what he said, which was tough given that he had just shattered the only potential for actual dating that I had had in almost half a year—if not more. “Okay…”

“So,” he pressed on, “I think that reaction has been embedded so much within me that I’ve just gotten scared of approaching girls. And so I go with the next best thing—which is—well, guys…”

I didn’t know how to react. On one hand, he was obviously aroused when we were making out on Friday night. How do you fake that as a straight man? Random, accidental friction could not have been enough to bring about that strong of a reaction. And on top of that, how do you pull me along on a string for a month and go as far as hooking up when you have all of these doubts in your mind? In conversation, he even asked a mutual friend about what kinds of things he could say or do to impress me—that type of pre-meditated flirting is not at all indicative of doubt.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to bring you into this. I just obviously don’t have this completely sorted out for myself.”

“It’s okay,” I forced myself to say. It obviously was not completely okay as much as it just had to be okay. “It’s just… you know… it’s just a lot to think about.”

“Yeah.”

My gut feeling was not to believe him. No, I thought, this had to be some deep-rooted psychological reply steeped in heterosexism; at the same time, who was I to impose my own theories on his own obviously confusing sexual journey? I was in no place to tell him he was wrong or not; if anything, I could throw him into much more of a maelstrom than he perhaps needed at the moment.

But I wasn’t done. I couldn’t be. So I had to throw a litmus test at him.

“Can I ask you a really blunt question?”

“Yes, please,” he said, wanting to make sure he entertained what I had to say so that he could feel better about throwing this on me.

“Well, if we are to understand sexuality as heterosexuality, homosexuality, and other sexualities—we have to talk about sex. And if we’re talking about sex, Chu, then—can I ask what turns you on?”

“What turns me on?”

“Yeah: dick, vagina, what…?”

“Do you want to know the truth?”

“Yeah.”

“Boobs and ass.”

I took that in. It wasn’t what I expected until he asked if I wanted to know the truth. “Okay, well, so what’s gotten you off with guys since the seventh grade?”

“Well, when I’m with guys, I enjoy the stimulation. But I don’t like stimulating. It doesn’t turn me on.”

“Okay,” I acknowledged. I didn’t want to question him further. I had to accept this, maybe because I could empathize: maybe if I were blindfolded and a girl was providing adequate stimulation, then maybe… maybe it’d work. Maybe the self-esteem is such a huge issue for him—as it has been for me—that it’s had this huge of an impact on dictating his actions and interactions with the world. Maybe, when I boiled the types of people in the world down to the sex they were having and enjoying, maybe he was best defined by his feelings and thoughts rather than his actions.

But maybe he’s just overanalyzing himself. Maybe he’s just digging himself into a bigger hole by rationalizing his apparently deviant actions. He was telling himself that this wasn’t like him, and who else could tell him who he was aside from himself? Not me.

The problem is that I understand it all. I see both sides. The only thing I don’t get though: the making out—the scratching of scruff, the redness that remains only after male or male tongue twisting. How did you come to enjoy that stimulation, Chu? Doesn’t that count as stimulation? Stimulation that I doubt replicates the guy-girl experience whether you close your eyes or not? How did you rationalize that one?

The next day, Chu changed his all-important Facebook interest from undefined to very definitely, “Interested in Women.” And I—hundreds of miles way—still could only wonder, “What if?”


(...to the full post)

That first night together ended up being our last. As quickly as Chu’s interest in me had materialized, it had disappeared—and not for reasons that I’d have ever imagined.

There were never any clues that anything was wrong—or maybe wrong is too judgmental of a word. There were never any clues that anything was not right. His passion seemed clear and true. The evening we met, we made out on my couch and moved to my bed; there were no doubts about it: I observed physical proof that he was—well—moved. He had worked hard for this, had been forward with expressing his interest and flirtatiousness for more than a month prior to the evening we locked lips. Finally, at our serendipitous meeting, he was getting what he wanted—and I, well, I was reaping the benefits: a Friday night frolic for my sheets, the attention of a guy who seemed to have a good head on his shoulders, enough sparks to hint that butterflies could’ve been waiting at the end of this moment.

I don’t know how long we were there or how long it took me to come to my wits. After his scruff brushed against my clean shave and our hands began to wrinkle our clothes, he positioned himself atop me, both of us still decently dressed, but with our minds wandering elsewhere. I hadn’t found this in months; a resident of rural Arkansas, he hadn’t found this in longer: the sought-after temptation of lingering fingers and tongues, lost to reason, surrendered to “Why not?” It would be easy to keep going, to feel good, to make him to feel good, to light the easy lust of here and now…

That’s when I did the unthinkable: I said stop.

Wary of moving too quickly and the potential of the moment to be a simple vent for the unsexed, I drew back. I opened my mouth and let my rationality dribble with hesitation and righteousness: I liked the promise of this situation too much to let it explode on the night it first began. We had to slow down. We had to stop.

I thought about the excuses that he’d use to retort: A fear of risk. Prudishness. Blue balls.

Instead, he reciprocated perfectly with an equally reasoned, “You’re right.” We brushed our wrinkles off our clothes. I drove him back to his hotel and let our respective Jiminy Crickets cut our night short… but not without a final kiss goodnight.

The next day, like any evolving crush, he texted. He called. We talked on the phone for an hour. By Saturday night, I was convinced: the butterflies were coming. Although he was boarding a flight back to Arkansas the next day, I knew he’d be back in two weeks for another conference. This was not over yet.

At work on Monday, I was completely distracted. The possibility of something fun, flirty, and maybe even meaningful on the horizon was one that I couldn’t shake off. In the middle of the day, I decided I’d take a page from his playbook and email him something completely raw, honest, and forward, a simple line to echo the sentiments I perceived from him during the weekend: Hey Chu, Can’t stop thinking about you. Give me a call back and let’s plan a date for your next visit. I figured this was something he’d appreciate. He had been transparent over and over again; it was my time to try his strategy. Maybe my walls of shyness and safety had been wrong all along.

4:30pm. Cell phone rings. Caller ID: Chu.

I pick up. My voice: careful to be nonchalant.

Me: Hey.
Chu: Hey, how’s it going?
-Good, just here at work, still—working.
-Yeah, I’ve had a long day too. I got back in late last night and still made it to work today. Sorry I didn’t call you last night like I had said I would.
-It’s okay.
-I just got in too late and didn’t want to wake you up.
-I was up, but I understand: you’re still recovering from that big conference. You need your sleep.
-Yeah.
-But hey, you’re calling now, so it’s all good. Oh, and hey, I sent an email a few hours ago.
-Yeah, I saw—
-Did you read it?
-Yeah, and that’s why I wanted to call you.
-Uh oh.
-Don’t give me that uh oh.
-Well you sound like you’re about to say something important.
-Well…
-Just say it.
-Well, okay. I thought about everything we talked about on Friday night and on the phone on Saturday. And I had a lot of fun hanging out and talking with you. I think you’re a great person, and I really look up to you with everything you’re doing your life…
-Mmhmm…
-But, um, I think that when we decided to slow down—
-Yeah?
---that was the right decision.
-Oh?
-Yeah. I’ve been thinking about what you said—about making sure I don’t do this because I don’t have anyone here in Arkansas…
-Yeah?
-…and, I think you were sort of right.
-What do you mean?
-Well, I think—that—I’m not quite sure—that—I think—I’m more – into women. And… it’s complicated. I’m sorry.
(...to the full post)

A half hour from midnight, I peered into the back seat of my Toyota Camry and thought that if anything could be more of a turn-off to a hyper-organized, almost-OCD workaholic like Chu, it’d be this: a portable dump of file folders, broken backpacks, old Playbills and magazines (with the occasional scattering of uncapped pens and—more dangerously—markers). I could not let that be my first impression. I scrammed into my bedroom and stole a sheet to cover the whole thing up.

Ten minutes later, I pulled alongside our local Holiday Inn and called him down. In the next minute of waiting time, I set the scene I wanted him to see: I looked away—out my window—instead of waiting to see him at my passenger side door (so that I didn’t look too eager); I programmed my iPod to a playlist of a mellow Sufjan Stevens selection (his Facebook page claimed he was a fan); and I checked my back seat one more time for anything that remotely gave away my messiness (just in case the sheet shifted). All was ready.

As I was looking in the other direction, he arrived at my passenger door. I acted sufficiently surprised that he was there. I unlocked the door, he sat down, and we pulled away from the hotel..

On his part: Small talk. Hesitant eye contact. Nervous laughter. At the time, I didn’t know whether to attribute the awkwardness to him, to me, or to the overall furtive aura of our rendezvous; it even could’ve been the reasonable shakiness of a first live date from an online friend. Heck, the probable truth was that this was a case involving all of the above. All I knew, as I searched for a place to get midnight ice cream, was that we needed to get out of the car, get something to eat, and shake the shakiness off. ASAP.

And then we got caught by a train at a railroad crossing. Stuck in my car. For a good—oh—ten minutes.

And in those ten minutes, he spilled.

“So… is this a date?”

I froze. What was I supposed to say? I laughed out loud, while my mind screamed, “WHO SAYS THAT?!”

I continued with my shrugging, and he continued: Over the past month and a half of conversations, he found himself getting more and more attracted to me. He clearly had been thinking about it: he knew he’d be working in my area this summer; our professional goals were very much aligned; and the conversations we had in the past—although they were online—flowed quick-wittedly. It was a good match to at least explore. His intentions for this random late night ice cream trip: to gauge whether or not the chemistry he perceived online carried over into reality.

With this out of the way, the balloon of tension and unease deflated. His bout of transparency pointed out what should’ve been obvious: our earlier awkwardness was because we had never acknowledged an attraction between us. The lack of definition in whatever it was we were doing—talking online without direction, then meeting up in real life without explicit purpose—left us to inferences. Yes, it was fun to flirt on the internet without relenting to pressure or worrying about risk, but when our LOLs became audible, when there were physical consequences that couldn’t be clicked away, the need for honesty became not only necessary, but also palpable. His confession—as abrupt and forward as it was—was what we needed to get anywhere.

The railroad crossing gate lifted, and with some of the weight removed from the whys of our late night meeting, we had a more comfortable ride to my nearest 24-hour Starbucks (decidedly the closest thing to ice cream). There, I neatly evaded answering his earlier question of whether or not this was a date, deflecting discussion instead to my newly-acquired knowledge of his interest. His willingness to be open opened the door to my own: How long have you been thinking about this? What experience do you have meeting relative strangers on the internet? How do I know you just need an outlet for your homosexuality—something you clearly don’t have in rural Arkansas?


After our drinks were ready, we couldn’t find a seat at Starbucks, so we brought our conversation to the next most convenient place: my apartment. And there, on a loveseat across a table from me, he returned to his question: “Is this a date?”

“Well… I paid for you drink.” As much as I had learned about the evil of forcing inferences, I couldn’t help—out of nervousness or fear or lack of clarity of thought—but be indirect.

He probed further. He was very clear about being interested in me, but what did I think about him?

And I had to admit: I enjoyed this—the back and forth banter, the surreptitiousness of whatever it was we were doing, the interest of someone who actually was pretty much on the same page as me as far as work ethic and goals.

There was a smile of satisfaction.

“So… would I be crossing the line if I kissed you?”

As I did earlier, I laughed and shrugged. But this time, I was able to utter out a small, secretly-confident, “No.”

And as he came over to my couch, I thought about the junk in my car, our awkwardness at the railroad tracks, and the Java Chip Frappucino in my breath. And when he leaned closer, it made sense that I didn’t need to make sense of any of those things at all. He wanted me. He wanted the me that he got to know and not the circumstances surrounding it all.

A half hour after midnight, within hours of meeting Chu for the first time, there it was—our first kiss.

To be continued…
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