okay, cupid.

Over the summer I had decided to try online dating. “Decided” = Casey sat me down in front of a computer one night after we had been drinking and talked me through writing a profile (“You have to say at least one nice thing about yourself. Laura. A nice thing. You’ve already talked about how messy your apartment is, you have to take that out.”) and then took over the computer and picked photos from my facebook to upload.

I texted Karen the next day and told her that a bunch of spambots were messaging me.

“Those are real people,” she said. “Jesus, Laura.”  But then she told me to add a code word to my profile and ask people to say it so that I’d know they had actually read it.

So I did, and there were still a bunch of messages except now they also had my codeword.

“They aren’t spambots,” I said.

“I TOLD YOU.”

“It’s really weird.”

--

Casey said that I should find people I liked to message, but I felt really weird looking at other people because it reminded me that other people could look at me.

--

I went on one date.

It was fine except that he was so! upset! that the last girl he’d been on a date with had had an abortion at 28 (but he was pro choice) and he had a shit job that he hated and angst angst angst until he drank himself horny and wanted to sit beside me and put his hand on my leg and make out in public a lot.

I told Casey about it the next weekend while we were making nachos with sweet potato, black beans and corn.

“It was like his mouth was a beak and he opened it really wide and inside there was another beak that was his tongue.  I think I got one of his boogers in my mouth.  It was the worst kiss I’ve ever had.”

“It’s funny that your worst kiss was now, and not like when you were a teenager.”

“He was thirty,” I said unhappily.   I didn’t have any terrible kisses when I was a teenager, not even when I was nineteen and newly single and made out with more people than I can count now.  All week long I kept accidentally remembering what it felt like to kiss him and grossing myself out.

--

On Friday I went to Marshall’s over lunch. A man was standing in the line up area, but further back from the cashiers. I waited behind him, but he said to go ahead.

Shortly after that, he came up behind me, so before it was my turn to go to a cashier, I said, “You were here before me, do you want to go?”

He said, “No, no, you go.”

“I’m just returning one thing. I’ll be quick.”

I returned the blazer (which I liked, but felt slightly tight in the forearms of all places) and headed to my car.  He must have been quick too, because he followed me out of the store and called for me.

I was stuck with one foot in my car when I realized he was talking to me, so I got out again.

“You were so nice,” he said.

“I felt bad, I didn’t mean to budge.”

“Are you taken?” he asked, but I didn’t know what he was asking at first.  “Are you taken?”

“Haha, I’m just heading back to work,” I said.  When I don’t know what someone is saying, I usually just say what I’m planning on doing next, because it’s a reasonably safe bet.

“Are you taken?  Can I call you?”

I gave him my number, but when he texted on Friday night, I didn’t text back. And when he called on Saturday night, I ignored it.

I was skyping with my little brother G, and he said that I needed to text back and say I wasn’t interested, but I just didn’t want to.

Over brunch on Saturday, I asked Casey.  She said, “If you’d sounded at all interested when you told me this story, I would have said to go for it. But you were just like, ‘He followed me into the parking lot. He was wearing sweatpants.’”

“There wasn’t anything to be excited about,” I said.  “We didn’t even talk about anything.  When I was in the steam room at the pool last week, this buck naked woman started talking to me.  I know more about her than I do about him.”

She harsh tanlines from a very small bathing suit, and said that it was so good to be sweating out the sins of the prosecco last night.  We talked about the buildings we lived in and the area and the gym.  I finally left the steam room when she put on gloves and started exfoliating herself.  

“You don’t owe strangers kindness,” Casey said.   “You just have to be polite, and even then -- not always.”

“Yeah, politeness, not kindness.  Though I think I had to be kind to that woman in the steam room.  That was an intimate situation.”

Casey gave me a look.

“I guess she might have made some people uncomfortable,” I allowed.

--

That evening I went to Sunday dinner at Karen’s house, and polled her as well.

“No,” she said.  “You’re fine to ignore him.”

“It’s funny because it happened like 12 hours after you and I had the conversation about how I thought I wanted to start dating again.”

“You’re psychic,” she said. “But you don’t have to date a guy wearing sweatpants.”

“I love how everyone how knows me is like, ‘You’re not going to be into someone wearing sweatpants.”  I laughed.

“You would be like, ‘What’s happening? Why is this soft cotton talking to me?’”

“The soft cotton is talking to me!”

--

When I was driving to work today, Creep came on the radio.  I remembered being seventeen, driving back from the potholes at six in the morning with Andre, who was my first boyfriend and longest relationship. He was delivering pizza that summer, and he had worked the late shift. He came to my house once he was done, at four am, and woke me up so that we could go skinny dipping in the potholes before the sun rose.   The water was too cold, so we just went in and out, then had sex on a towel by the shore. On the way back to the car, I was still naked and wrapped in that towel.  We passed a man who was out for a jog, and he looked at us in a way that made me think it wasn’t the first time he had seen us that morning.

I remember sitting next to Andre in the car and listening to him sing, You’re so fucking special. I wish I was special.  The year we graduated high school. Andre had won the award for music theatre, and I had won the award for band. My hair was short then, and his was long - almost down to his shoulders: longer than mine.

I could still hear his voice this morning, even though I was half a country away, driving alone in my own car.  He lives in Japan now and I never think about him anymore but sometimes I miss how it felt to be attracted to someone.