Remy #2
The effort I put into my friendships is anything but effortless.
It takes a lot to understand and keep track of what Lin does at work; it takes a lot to empathize with and encourage Melissa’s dream of a nuclear family; it takes a lot to deal with Nova’s lows even with the knowledge that the highs make it all worthwhile.
So, I decided I’d much rather devote time and emotional energy to my friends, rather than to a romantic partner. It had never fully occurred to me that, someday, my friends would not do the same.
The first person to ask me out for a drink on the app is Ishir, the man who scored twelve out of fifteen.
His profile picture shows black hair, thick tufts aimed in different directions, brown eyes, and a subtle cleft in his chin.
He’s a journalist working for the BBC and, while he was born here, his parents are from South Asia.
As messages fly back and forth between us, I hear questions the girls would ask filtering through my head.
Melissa
Does he have any siblings, especially sisters?
Lin
Does he have the medical all clear?
Nova
How much money does he make? Does he know you come with expensive friends?
Well, that’s what they would say if they knew. They’d typically be the first people I told—especially since we had so much fun when Nova was (briefly) on dating apps, casting her phone onto my TV, eating pizza, and swiping through her options. That was before she met David.
That was before the group chat went silent.
A few days later, Ishir and I meet at a bar, and after almost two hours of talking, he asks how long I’ve been on dating apps.
I answer with the truth: thirty-six hours.
He blows air out of his mouth and says that’s impressive, compared to his six weeks.
He’s looking for something serious and I tell him I’m looking for a friend.
“That’s what partners are, right?” He smiles, a dimple digging a crater into his right cheek. “They’re best friends,” he adds. I smile and we cheers with our cocktail glasses.
At mine, Ishir’s hair smells sweet, his tongue tastes of rum and Coke and my margarita that he’d asked to try; his body feels strong and heavy, and it’s a reminder of how long it’s been since I was with someone.
I sleep through the night and in the morning he’s gone.
I know he had to be up early for work, so I reach for my phone to see if he’s left a message but then remember we’d communicated solely through the app’s chat function.
Still in my bed, I fall on my back and open the notes app on my phone.
I craft what I hope is the perfect message, one that perches delicately between eagerness and nonchalance.
Hey, Ishir. I’m glad we got a chance to meet last night. Let me know if you’re free this weekend and we can catch that exhibition at the Tate you mentioned. R x
I stare at the message. It’s hard to convey what I want from him in so few words. My assumption is, if you join an app like the one we did, it’s because you care about making a genuine connection. Besides, hadn’t he said he was looking for something serious?
Ready to send, I log in to the app, only to find that his profile has disappeared along with our messages. A quick search online tells me this means he’s unmatched our profiles. My heart sinks as I look around the empty room unsure of what to do next.
For the first half of the day, I move on. I’ve been ghosted before… but this one I didn’t see coming. I lock the events of last night in a box somewhere and in order to keep that box closed, I stay busy.
I clean my flat from top to bottom. I have lunch when I realize I forgot about breakfast. I take a shower and then go for a walk with my headphones on and an audiobook I don’t really listen to.
I go through the park until my feet are tired and I turn back.
When I get home and face having nothing else to do, I begin to slow down.
If I had a car, I could jump in and drive somewhere.
I passed my test months ago and decide now is a good time to look up secondhand cars for sale, but the sheer volume of options freezes me.
I close my laptop and stare at the TV’s blank screen.
Eventually, my mind returns to Ishir. It returns to the fact that we had sex and then he left without a word.
Everything he said about wanting something meaningful, someone real, was a lie.
Why say that unprompted on a first date?
Had his deception been obvious but I didn’t notice because I’d had my own personal agenda?
I tell myself it’s probably for the best. What would have happened if we’d continued to date and reached the point where I had to tell him I didn’t want the average relationship: I wasn’t looking for sex?
What I wanted was a friend who would always be there; I wanted laughter over in-jokes, conversations that started one day and were picked up seamlessly the next; I wanted dinners with multiple sharing plates, and festive holidays with secured plans.
I had no intention of confessing that to someone I’d just met.
But in the back of my mind, I’d thought, Well, in exchange for all that I want, we could have sex .
It wouldn’t be unpleasant, after all; I may not feel sexual attraction, but my body can still respond to what feels good without my brain getting involved.
Ultimately, I’d decided that I could do one thing in exchange for my list of many.
Facing that thought process in the cold light of day both chills me to my core and makes my stomach roil.
Sometimes when I need advice, I write about myself.
I write as if what’s happening to me is actually happening to one of my characters.
Somehow, this decenters me enough to think logically—because as everyone knows, it’s easier to give advice than take it.
When I put on paper what happened between me and Ishir and think of what my character should do, I see that the obvious next step is for her to realize that she’s offering sex for companionship—and because I can clearly imagine what I would think about this trade if I was reading it in a novel, I take a sleeping pill, crawl into bed at three in the afternoon, and don’t wake up until the next morning.
Despite my empty evenings, I wake up each morning exhausted.
Too tired to exercise and therefore without enough reason to shower, I get out of bed and put on what I’d once lovingly nicknamed my writing dress —stolen years ago from Melissa’s wardrobe—just to excuse how often I wore it.
Tomato soup and toothpaste stain the royal-blue fabric that hangs below my knees, and every night I throw it into the laundry basket, only to fish it back out the next morning.
Then, I go straight to my writing desk, the surface cluttered with half-finished notebooks, loose sheets of printing paper, an assortment of Post-it notes, and a rainbow of pens and highlighters.
Hitting a creative wall makes you want to drive your head through one.
Some days I spend hours staring at blank pages, and other days I realize, just before bed, that I’ve written characters with no motive and scenes with no purpose, my imagination haunted by the fact that my story needs to have a plot, and I don’t know where to find one.
This morning, in my unwashed dress—a stale odor clinging to the heavy fabric—I avoid my desk completely.
Instead, I make my bed three times. I pull everything out of my wardrobe with plans to declutter it, only to balk at the extent of the task and throw everything back in.
Somehow it doesn’t all fit, and I close the door on a clothes cascade in motion, vowing never to open the wardrobe again.
I’ll make do with my trusty blue dress and whatever else currently lies on my bedroom floor.
I think about the girls daily because my flat is a constant reminder of them.
The hallway is narrow, which presented many problems when moving in, but we’d made an event of it, with Melissa roping in Felix on one of his sacred days off, though Lin insisted on doing the heavy lifting.
Nova assigned herself to carrying the cushions and cutlery because she’d just gotten her nails done and didn’t want to chip them and had just done her hair so didn’t want to sweat out the fresh partings.
We were done within a couple of hours, and I treated everyone to pizza and cocktails.
We’d laughed so much that day, but I couldn’t tell you what at.
Who knew you could take forgettable laughter for granted?
The kitchen is small but the rest of the flat makes up for it.
I have a desk and built-in shelves by the window in a colorful living area: dark-green walls, a blue velvet couch, and yellow curtains.
On the balcony there’s a hammock Nova would use to sunbathe in a bikini, even though she was always in full sight of my adjacent neighbors.
She once stuck a piece of paper with an OnlyFans account written on it to the side of the hammock facing the windows of said neighbors.
Melissa downloaded the app only to discover that the username belonged to an inactive account.
I move my frantic pacing downstairs, opening and closing the doors to the fridge and cupboards.
I don’t know what I’m looking for. The crescendo builds by lunchtime and I need something to eat.
I’ve spent the last two weeks existing on toast and takeaways, and maybe the smell in the air isn’t just my dress, but the mountain of old containers I’ve left in the sink.
I finish the tub of ice cream I started yesterday morning.
I’ll start fresh tomorrow, buy some fruit and veg from the market with good intention and then let it sit and rot in the fridge. Rinse and repeat.
I stand, vibrating, stranded in the middle of the kitchen, and start to cry.
Then I call myself pathetic and it stings.
With a history of depression—first diagnosed after a year on the pill, only prescribed to me in an effort to tackle severe period cramps—comes a history of picking myself apart, calling myself rude names until I start to believe them.
After coming off the pill, my cramps went from a nine down to a five on the pain scale, but the spontaneous bouts of depression stayed.
It was the price I paid for a less agitated uterus.
I started therapy when, after using her spare key, Melissa found me lying in my hallway in the fetal position, but today my mind goes blank when I try to remember the techniques I’d learned to fight against this.
I can’t think of anything, so I slip on my trainers, grab my keys, and leave the house, wrestling with my jacket’s arms until the sound of a passing truck drowns out all the interior noise.
I’m halfway down a street I don’t recognize when I remember I’m not wearing a bra or socks and I haven’t washed my face this morning and the reason my eyes itch is because the sleep from last night has crusted into the corners.
I sit on a bench as it begins to rain, but because I can’t lift my feet any further, I lift my hood up instead.
No one questions me, even though with my head bent low I see many shoes walk by.
That’s the beauty of London: Most people don’t care about strangers.
Rain seeps into my trainers, turns my toes cold, and though I don’t enjoy the numbing sensation, I appreciate that it gives me something new to think about.
“Are you all right?”
I look up to see a lady, likely in her seventies, a slight hunch in her back and a tartan shopping trolley behind her.
“I think…” I pause when my voice cracks and my throat grasps at the realization that I haven’t spoken aloud for seventy-two hours. “I feel like my friends and I have broken up,” I finally tell the stranger.
She furrows her eyebrows and if not for her own hood, I’m certain I’d see lines buried into her forehead. “Your friends?”
“My boyfriend,” I say instead.
She nods at this alteration. Lamenting the slow and unmitigated disintegration of female friendship is no reason to be out in the rain, but to flirt with pneumonia because of a man, a potential life partner? That just makes more sense.
I stand, the soles of my feet now submerged in rainwater. “I’m fine,” I tell her, wiping under my nose. “I’m only a few minutes away from home.”
She pats my sodden arm. “Cheer up,” she says. “Look at you. You’ll find someone new in no time.”
I smile politely but whisper to her retreating back, “I will? Who?”