Cheetos and Chopsticks

🌑June 14, 2021

I have decided that I want to have a boyfriend. I don’t want to be one of those girlfriends who needs to have a boyfriend and spends all day chasing stupid boys who have brains the size of an air pod, I would like a sensible companion who will cuddle with me and make me laugh.

Luckily, my full-size logical brain has come up with a brilliant solution to this problem: online dating. What a marvelous invention. Truly spectacular. I will simply input my information, upload some photos, and I will surely be able to find a compatible member of the opposite sex to keep me company.

After fifteen minutes of swiping, I have matched with a dozen guys or so (three quarters of which I regret swiping on in the first place). There is one guys who I think is really cute. His name is Chris and he is SOOO cute and he’s in medical school!!

🌒June 21, 2021

Chris and I are meeting for coffee tomorrow. I am so excited. We have been talking for the past few days and he seems to be really nice and smart.

I’ve done a lot of thinking after my previous relationship, and Chris seems to have all the things that my ex-boyfriend was lacking. He has a good career set up, he seems mature, maybe he would be the kind of person I would consider having a long-term relationship with.

Not that Luke was a bad boyfriend, I guess he just didn’t have everything I was looking for. I hope my next boyfriend treats me as well as Luke did and makes me laugh a lot too. Everyone says not to settle but is it really possible to have it all?

If I end up with a doctor someday, will we have the kind of life where he can come home and make dinner with me or stay up talking late at night?

The whole time I was dating Luke, I had the idea of someone better in my head—someone like Chris. I was in a relationship but waiting for my soul mate.

🌓June 22, 2021

Ahh, he was an idiot. Here’s to another bad date…

To Chris,

Hello. You are uglier than your photos and less charismatic than your text messages. I am very disappointed because I was hoping that we would click immediately, and I would never have to go on another dumb first date ever again.

I apologize because I assume that you are thinking the same things about me. I’m sorry that I am not always a dazzling conversation partner and that my real face doesn’t glow the same way it does with Instagram filters.

I was excited to meet you. Every time you texted me, my heart started beating a little bit faster and I smiled at my phone. Whenever I saw a text from you, I would take note of the time in my head and come up with an appropriate amount of time to wait before texting you back. I assume that if you think I’m busy, you’ll like me more. At what point can I stop putting on this show? Eventually you’re going to realize that I’m a regular person with a modestly busy schedule and usually has their phone nearby.

It was still nice to meet you. Thanks for being kind and sweet but maybe meeting for coffee just isn’t my thing. Maybe I should join more clubs and meet people there… I don’t know anymore.

Sincerely,

-Your disillusioned date

🌔June 26, 2021

           It’s not that I don’t think I’m worthy of love, it’s just that sometimes I feel like my personality is stuck inside of me. Chris liked what I looked like and was impressed by my accomplishments, but it feels like he can’t see me. He sits across the table and looks at me and talks to me, but he doesn’t see me, he sees the person he wants me to be.

           I can’t criticize him for that because I did the same thing to him as well. Just because he’s cute and he’s in medical school, that doesn’t mean that he has everything together.

           I find it easier to love the idea of people I dream up in my head and maybe that’s because real people are hard to love no matter how great they are. And maybe I’m hard to love too. Not in a bad way, and not that I’m not worth the effort, but maybe I need to let people love me imperfectly and try to do the same in return.

           I know that I loved Luke. Not in the way that I’d pined for unavailable crushes in high school, but in the way that he was my favourite person to be around, and I felt safer with him than any other person on the planet. He didn’t just like the idea of me either, he knew all the intricacies of my personality and loved me anyways. I gave him all of me and he didn’t try to fix or hide anything, he just held it as I continued to load more things into his hands. Jokes, ideas, and kisses, they didn’t even need to be good, he was genuinely just interested to see what I would produce next.

           Not that I would ever want to get back together with him. Like the idealistic crushes I pine for, my memory of him is thick with nostalgia and I would be disillusioned once again if I saw him.

           Often, I don’t know what to do about this problem. I think that my fantasies are important because they show me what I want and the ghosts of boyfriends past remind me of what I want to find again. And now I remain in this liminal space between past and future boyfriends, and I don’t know what to do.

🌊

Drowning is silent. When someone is drowning, they don’t splash and flail their arms, they look like they’re trying to climb a ladder. Submerged beneath the water, they reach up, hoping to find something to grab onto, only to have their fingers slip through the water in vain.

I’m always reaching for something to save me when all I really have to do is stop fighting and let myself float to the surface. The secret is that there is no secret. The more I search and fight, the farther I get from being saved. And even if someone were to swoop down and save me, I still wouldn’t know how to swim.

🌊

🌕January 14, 2022

           Ben and I like to eat Cheetos with chopsticks together. I never knew that anything would make me so happy. We just sit on his bed, play chess, and eat Cheetos with chopsticks. It’s so mundane but so perfect at the same time. I worried that the someone like this would never come, and I know that it won’t stay forever but right now he’s here propping up my head with his shoulder, eating Cheetos, and playing online chess on against a 15-year-old boy in Toronto.

           “It’s rare to find people you can just exist with,” he told me once.

           “I know.”

           “I’ve never been this close to anyone,” he told me another time.

           I kissed him.

I get so lost in my daydreams that sometimes I miss what’s right in front of me. When I stopped for a minute and looked around, I realized I already had everything. This is it, this is what I've been waiting for.

I don't want to miss it.