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The absence of individualism; the peaceful acquiescence to mundanity. Young adulthood had quickly turned into just plain adulthood—with its daily list of choices to confirm who I was, how I voted, who my broadband provider was—and returning to the scene of my teenage life for an afternoon felt like a brief holiday back in time.
And the more men I saw, the more I pieced together categories of humans that I never knew existed.
The most simultaneously reassuring and unsettling discovery I made in those first few intense weeks of compulsive right- and left-clicking on Linx was just how unimaginative humans are. None of us would ever fully grasp the extent of our magnificent unoriginality—it would be too painful to process.
How clear it suddenly was that we are all the same organs, tissue and liquids packaged up in one version of a million clichés, who all have insecurities and desires; the need to feel nurtured, important, understood and useful in one way or another. None of us are special. I don’t know why we fight it so much.
He felt like he had to escape something, but he didn’t know what and he didn’t know where to go. I told him I thought that was the sensation commonly known as adulthood.
As I stood in the chasm between who I thought he was to me and the reality of a person who never wanted to speak to me again, I realized just how much we hadn’t known about each other.
“Sort of magic, isn’t it? To know that we could meet the most exciting person in the world, but they’d never be able to recreate the history you and I have. What a unique superpower we have over each other.”
“Was it a game you wanted to complete? You met a woman who had her life together, and you wanted to see if you could pull it apart? You wanted to know that you could get her to fall in love with you, say all the things you wanted her to say, do all the things you wanted her to do, then the game was finished and you could turn it off?”
“You know, every time you ‘change your mind’ in such an extreme way, it takes something from a woman. It’s an act of theft. It’s not just a theft of her trust, it’s a theft of her time.
The tree that lives inside me and is impossible to demolish, only hide or lose through ever-moving mists. The tree that grows up through me, the trunk of which forms my spine.
