The Pairing

by Casey McQuiston

It took so long to stop wanting him in my life. That feels like such an important, hard-won thing, and I don’t know how to protect it from this moment.

The art I like best is unpretentious, highly saturated, and fully committed to what it’s doing even when it’s bad. Especially when it’s bad. I like B movies and slashers and eighties action flicks, anything with a synth music cue and a cocaine-fueled screenplay. I don’t want to analyze the creator’s intentions. Subtlety is for wine; I want to feel what the art wants me to feel and feel it big.

As far as I know, there are two ways to get over someone: Surrender to the anger that’s already there, or invent something to get angry about. Sometimes it was always wrong, and the only thing to do is stop believing it was good to love them in spite of it. But sometimes they were good to you. Sometimes you go looking for kindling and find that green leaves won’t burn, that the garden was watered too well.

It started with Del Taco.

“Yes.” I picture us in our nicest outfits, eating chili cheese fries out of the back hatch of my car.

Nowadays everyone’s so afraid of accidentally making a gay movie that nobody’s dick is hard, which is why there hasn’t been a truly iconic action hero in the last twenty years.” I spit out a cherry pit and add, “Except John Wick.”