It’s not the most significant detail, but I thought Anders was married, or marriage-adjacently cohabitating with a ceramicist when I slid into his DMs. I was twenty-nine, and pathetically afraid that I would never be considered nubile again. Anders was a friend of a friend of a friend of an acquaintance, something benignly distant like that, and he was a hobbyist photographer— the most tolerable kind—who’d recently had an exhibition for his photographs of ears. I had not RSVP-ed to the event and, because of inertia and day drinking, had been too tired to attend.

It was my understanding that the way Anders actually made money, though, was as a stockbroker. There was something pleasingly dissonant about his stockbroker status, and his unnecessary pictures of ears that had, apparently, qualified as art. A person who at least nominally had their shit together, and still found time to make art: it’s not as common as you’d hope.

The photographs were not exactly beautiful, but they were striking in a way that made you feel exceedingly self-conscious about your own ears. For a visual medium, they made me want to listen. I grew up in a family of serial interrupters and was practicing my empathetic, active listening face, which a friend told me created the impression I was constipated. It was, you could say, a work in progress.

There were no photographs of Anders himself on his page, but a few photographs of people (their faces, not just their ears). There were seven photographs of the ceramicist, who was ethnically ambivalent and had prominent bone structure. Her face had a well-practiced expression of feigned annoyance at having her soul stolen, one that belied, albeit transparently, real love. The lighting was phenomenal.

I wondered if Anders had a lisp or a Peugeot single speed bicycle, if he was the kind of person who used fabric softener (I thought not) and said things like “I don’t believe in guilty pleasures” while eating restrictive salads with unsalted chicken.

I wondered if he was Swedish, and if he was stereotypically handsome in that Aryan way that makes you wonder if Hitler, considerable flaws notwithstanding, might have been a good drinking buddy.

I wondered if the breadth of my limited intellect might be better used towards actually remembering to bring tote bags to the health food store that had reasonably priced, less exploitative chocolate.

I was aware that the pattern of my thoughts bordered on objectionable.

But I also thought Anders could somehow be an antidote for my not quite fatal flaws; he would tell me about a heterochromic woman he encountered in Gamla stan who had seen his future and then take me to a metal-themed dive bar where the servers all spoke better English than I did.

Out of principle, I usually resent art that has qualified for mass viewing, but this was an exhibition at a gallery so indie that even most of the craft beer drinking hipsters had never heard of it. In 2023, there was no longer such thing as a hipster; we were all hipsters pretending otherwise. I’d always thought my ears stuck out too much, which is surely why I decided to pierce them both six times, which made sleeping on either side a risky business. I imagined, dementedly, that Anders might want to photograph my ears and be the person to solve my insecurities once and for all, through art. Photography, it seemed, was a strange combination of literalness and subjectivity; you could be homely in reality, but rendered beautiful yet still recognizably your incorrigible self, in a photo.

We would become friends that gave the middle finger to When Harry Met Sally and his wife, or wife-type ceramicist would also become my friend and I would be their most prized third wheel, their ingénue friend that made them feel simultaneously older and younger than they really were, and the ceramicist would die tragically and, in her will, leave me her mother’s vintage Birkin bag of untold resale value. Because we were actually platonic friends, it would never occur to either Anders nor I to become romantically involved. We would mourn the ceramicist together and, a respectable number of years later, I would inadvertently introduce him to his second wife and the cycle would begin again. And so, it was these appallingly specific fantasies that led me to slide into Anders’ DMs.

Hi Anders! I meant to attend your exhibition, which looks like it was wonderful, but due to some questionable decisions, I felt tragically unable to leave my couch, which I deeply regret, though maybe all this is a front for me being intimidated by museums. I’m curious what made you want to photograph ears and whether, in the future, you might consider photographing the ears of animals. In my dilettante opinion, I think a rabbit would be an excellent candidate.

He wrote back in 23.5 hours, which suggested to me that he was one of those aberrant people who had a healthy relationship with social media. Though it hurt me to exercise self-restraint, I mirrored his response frequency and felt virtuous as a result. That our responses always occurred at night made me feel like a happy version of an Edward Hopper painting—I could picture Anders alone, in a diner, his face illuminated by a screen that offered a tantalizing antidote to loneliness. 

it’s funny that you ask me that because i was wondering whether i should continue on with the ears project. if you know any rabbits unstartled by flash, please send them my way! i started taking pictures of ears because what i really wanted to take pictures of were navels, for a navel-gazing project, but that sounds too damn creepy lol. sorry to hear you might have been too intimidated to attend; i’m an introvert but pretend not to be for these kinds of things haha.

I was not usually charmed by the self-effacing lowercase that seemed a gross homage to e.e. cummings, but I was charmed by his intentional use of the lowercase, for I knew that autocorrect, that much criticized deity, tried to coerce us into the uppercase I, as if that would force us into self-realization. It did not escape my notice that he had correctly used a semicolon.

He was also afraid of seeming creepy and had adjusted his artistic visions accordingly, out of consideration for other people’s feelings. I was not in love; he was a stranger, after all. But I was charmed.

I reminded myself that he was married to a ceramicist with poreless skin and who, to my estimation, had a secure attachment style.

This became the pattern: he would always reply to me at night, usually before midnight. I would reply to him in the morning, which would give him all day to think of suitably clever things to say. His long paragraphs matched my long paragraphs. He used emojis and I didn’t, but as time passed, he also stopped using them. He continued to use the lowercase i. We never engaged in dazzling repartee in real time; we had all the time in the world to be calculatedly witty and flatteringly curious. I had something to look forward to every night. Talking to Anders was like a date that didn’t require cleavage or a fake laugh.

We started talking about our thwarted hopes and dreams from high school—it never occurred to me that a stockbroker hobbyist photographer married to a ceramicist would have thwarted dreams.

He asked: do you think we would have been friends in high school?

The question felt innocuous and loaded at the same time, as though his question was a euphemism for Do you think we’re soulmates? Of course, you couldn’t say soulmates and retain a vestige of dignity; part of me believed every time a person said soul mates in earnest, more rainforest species became extinct.

Anders had been a punk in high school. Now his hair was short and he certainly hadn’t mooned anyone in a long time. He made too much money to be punk rock. I told him in high school, there was nothing I wanted more than a devoted boyfriend, but I read a lot of books and scowled a lot to make it seem like I was perfectly content to be a literate virgin. On some repressed level, a devoted boyfriend was still what I wanted— that was embarrassing, to admit I still wanted the same thing I’d wanted in high school. He assured me that true romantics were a dying breed, true romantics were forced to feign cynicism, and that true romantics were punk rock. That didn’t sound right to me, but I hoped he was right.

I asked him what the bare minimum familiarity was required to wear band T-shirts and we agreed that while memorizing the order of every track on every album was too lofty, you had to be familiar with at least two albums. I knew it was nothing but it felt as though our shared assent with this particular triviality was the equivalent of signing a prenup.

I told him that as a salesperson at a luxury watch store certified to perform Rolex repairs, that I had become haunted by time. When the store was vacant, I listened to all that ticking and thought how easy it was to live a life without ever having had a threesome or sky-dived and while neither of these things particularly appealed to me, I was not living the life I wanted to, and maybe it was precisely because neither threesomes nor sky-diving were appealing to me, that I was in the doldrums of my own repetitive interiority, explaining sapphire crystals to rich people so wealthy they lacked the self-consciousness not to wear admittedly comfortable-looking cashmere sweatpants in public, though, now that I think of it, people of all socioeconomic levels increasingly seemed to lack the self-consciousness to dress better and it was no wonder everyone felt a bit loveless; everyone was wearing sweatpants and using dubious portmanteaus like athleisure and toting yoga mats like guitars that signified not upward mobility, necessarily, but too much free time; yes, definitely, the problem was the world, and sweatpants; it was not me.

Or so I told Anders.

I thought, certainly, this invective on sweatpants was going to be the thing that would make Anders realize I was not a wholly mentally stable person, that I was probably someone he should carefully withhold elongated contact from, that he could ghost me without seeming rude, and I would be grateful for the time we’d had together; I would occasionally think about the Birkin bag the ceramicist would have wanted me to inherit and I would feel an intermittent pang of yearning and then go back to doing things like making double batches of chili and wondering why I couldn’t prep more variegated meals.

you’re right, sweatpants are the worst. i’m less clear, though, on your resistance to threesomes and sky-diving haha. would you like to elaborate?

I told Anders I was afraid of venereal diseases and catching feelings, which were basically venereal diseases in my book. I wondered if he was alluding to a threesome with himself and the ceramicist and observed that, not once, had he ever said anything about a wife. Often, romantically partnered people mention their ostensibly better half as a pastime. I tried not to think about the implications of Anders not mentioning the ceramicist. Maybe he was that rare person who didn’t make a kissable entity their entire reason for becoming boring; maybe he was private.

That didn’t last long, however.

Was he trying to seem available when he wasn’t? Had I been mistaken in my cursory sleuthing of his romantic status? Was there the faintest chance that, in my last year of ever being potentially viewed as nubile, that he thought I was attractive? All pictures of me on social media featured either other people’s dogs, or skylines; it was not very original, but it was inoffensive, and sometimes that’s all it takes to appeal to other people. Usually, I assumed, it was my personality that got in the way of relationships.

Or was it just as I’d imagined—he wanted to be my friend, no genitals attached. Yes, that seemed likeliest. And arguably the best case scenario. When genitals get involved, sorrow follows, at least in my ungainly heterosexual experience.

A couple months like this passed. I dated two white men in a row and thought, Never again. The first white man was the son of a furniture store magnate—another way of saying he didn’t work—and as I amassed a coffee table, a fruit bowl, and surprisingly expensive clothing hangers, it became more and more impossible to extricate myself from his painfully earnest sentiments and sweaty hands. He always said I was just like one of the guys because I always announced that I was going to fart before I did and it occurred to me that being one of the guys didn’t strike me as a compliment so much as disguised misogyny. Moreover, his cunnilingus technique made me wonder if my vagina was an ice cube so cold that prohibited any licks longer than a millisecond. But his car had amazing speakers. And his younger sister was an equestrian and a model and I wanted to become friends with her, or at least find out what brand shampoo she used, but one day, while he was gently lubricating my asshole with a silicone lubricant that I knew cost $27 from Amazon, I turned around and said, “I can’t do this anymore.” I put my shirt on backwards and decided it was apropos to leave it that way.

“We haven’t even started, though,” he said, trying to disguise the fact that he was crestfallen. It occurred to me that he had probably never had anal sex before and I almost pitied him for his unoriginal, unfulfilled desires. All I can say is, if you’re afraid your shit stinks, just ask a man if he’ll have anal sex with you. It might help.

The second man was a vegan accountant who liked video games more than penetrative intercourse, which was a new form of male indifference towards me that, in the beginning, I found sufficiently interesting lest I reap an anecdote out of it. My reasons, I know, are not very good, but they are reasons. There was nothing all that wrong with him, but one day he asked if I could pretend to be a geisha and not speak English so fluently, and while there probably was a way for this to have been an appealing proposition, in light of the fact that he had, more than once, tried to teach me about Buddhism, I declined and left his apartment, leaving behind an umbrella that I’d stolen from a dental office after I couldn’t afford to have a root canal, as though one could substitute for the other. I miss that umbrella.

I told Anders these things, perhaps in excessive detail, because I thought he was married and might be entertained by the requisite despair concomitant with being a single person who dated. He still had never mentioned the ceramicist. I imagined a future where I would be a single person who didn’t date, and this, I thought, would probably be a preferable fate, but I still had quasi-romantic notions like sharing a mortgage and the equitable distribution of chores. I wished I could easily dispense with the detritus of lifelong brainwashing, but they get you young and, several sliding scale therapy sessions later, I have more awareness, disappointingly sporadic actionability, and, I’m not proud, an unbecoming tendency to blame Venus in retrograde.

To his credit, Anders did sound entertained. I started wondering if our friendship, if that’s what we had or were going to have, could live off the fruits of my shitty dates. Perhaps I was only worth as much as my anecdotes. That this was a thought I entertained seriously says something about me, I’m sure, but we don’t need to get into that.

Because we were both unavailable to each other—he with the never mentioned ceramicist, and my so-called aspirations to become an atheistic nun—I thought it might be safe to ask him to spend time with me in person. I liked our conversations and I was curious about his face.

It would not be a date. It would be so clearly not a date, that I wouldn’t even have to specify. In fact, it was only a date if you used the word date.

Or something.

I wrote: Would you be free to take a picture of my ears sometime? Or for me to photograph yours?

I wondered if this sounded provocative, but given that he’d had an exhibition with ear photographs, I quashed this thought.

He wrote: any time!

I knew that this was not something I should interpret literally and test by asking him to meet me at 5:42am on a Monday, but it did, I thought, suggest a more open schedule than I previously would have hypothesized for a stockbroker hobbyist photographer.

How is this Friday? I wrote back.

He took longer than 48 hours to respond. I began to wonder if he regretted ever being so amenable to my correspondence, if it would be worthwhile for me to comb through our messages to each other to try and discern a feasible pattern for how long he took to respond to me. Was it my imagination, or was he starting to take more than 23.5 hours?

And had he started taking more than 23.5 hours after I talked about the vegan accountant, who was probably doing things like watching porn starring thirty-six-year-old Asian women who looked eighteen and making tempeh taste like meat and using my umbrella without realizing it used to be mine? What had possessed me to tell Anders about the vegan accountant, or, for that matter, the son of the furniture magnate in such encyclopedic detail? I was clearly a poor candidate for rebranding sluttiness. Where was my sense of timing, and, for that matter, my sense? Couldn’t I just do the respectable thing, which was to casually mention Martin Heidegger or some other philosopher and then confess I didn’t understand Martin Heidegger and somehow that ontological ignorance would smoothly segue into a very sexy, adult cocktail party with marble coasters and simultaneously loose but tight dresses made from silkworms?

I knew that people were busy and that it was eminently admirable to try and use one’s phone less—I was one of those people, in theory—but if you were really excited in a conversation, wouldn’t you defenestrate such abstemious principles? If you wanted to fuck, why wouldn’t you respond in 23.5 hours or fewer? This wasn’t the goddamn era of the carrier pigeon. This was the era of silence being a telegram.

The window for fucking is smaller than people think—one booger, one racist remark, one less homely stranger with better timing; these all have the power to skew a bangable person into a repressed, and later forgotten memory of your poor judgement.

But maybe Anders was newly busy, or was neurodivergent in a way that could not be easily detected, or maybe all the times I told him it was okay for him to take 23.5 hours to respond made him think that I wouldn’t notice if it took him 48. I knew that, whatever the reason, I was not necessarily to blame and I shouldn’t even be noticing how long it took for Anders to respond, that even just a lol from Anders—who I noticed had stopped saying lol, perhaps because I myself never did, which suggested to me an empathetic mirroring that revealed I was more influential to him than my self-esteem would permit me to think—was a gift from the world.

I reminded myself that Anders was not single, and that even though I was technically single, I was a newly abstinent nun considering a rose-shaped vibrator my neighbor, a PhD in mathematics whose name I have forgotten, told me was life-changing, by which I mean she had dumped her long-time boyfriend, a professional kayaker, shortly afterwards.

Naturally, nothing I thought was remotely reassuring. The only thing that would help would be for Anders to tell me, directly, that I was absolutely revolting, in every way possible, and he would prefer it if I left him and his ears the fuck alone, forever.

It was becoming, you could say, a little harder to deny the fact that I like-liked Anders. I became convinced the ceramicist was just a good friend. Of course Anders would have an attractive ceramicist woman friend that he might, drunkenly, even have slept with once and there would be no tension, only affection and no fewer than seven photographs on social media.

The only thing, I realized, getting in between Anders and I was my unneutered personality, balls swinging uncouthly. Is there a vasectomy for the personality equivalent of balls?

More than 48 agonizing hours later, I’d sold fewer watches than usual and delivered unconvincing fake smiles that prompted a work meeting with my avuncular boss, who had recently shaved his beard, which was, aesthetically speaking, a grievous mistake that somehow resulted in him looking like a baby-faced pedophile, though I knew better than to tell my boss that, and then, finally, finally, Anders wrote: sorry i’ve been so busy! maybe sometime next week?

I was relieved. He had used an exclamation mark and apologized and even suggested rescheduling, albeit unspecifically.

I told him that I was free any time after five every day except Friday, and though I considered using an emoji, I feared it would stick out too much in our generally emoji-free correspondence. I had no Friday plans, of course, unless massive vegetating qualified, but I couldn’t sound too available. In any case, having no Friday plans were, in and of themselves, technically Friday plans.

I felt optimistic, like a young-ish woman in a yogurt commercial that emphasized her body’s limber flexibility and gut microflora. I texted a friend I hadn’t really been friends with since high school. I bought a snake plant because I’d heard those required very little light. I considered whether maybe it was time to try menstrual cups again. I ordered the vibrator that my neighbor had rhapsodized about and found that, all in all, I’d rather fuck her kayaker ex-boyfriend. But overall, life suddenly had momentum; I sold watches with real zygomatic smiles and I began to feel I had the power to compel anyone to talk to me, which was fanciful but generated a confidence that did, in fact, seem to provoke favorable responses.

If I was neither irresistible nor beautiful, I still did, somehow, have people that appeared convincingly happy to spend time with me. Including Anders.

But another 48 hours passed.

I thought: I’m too old for this shit. Too egotistical, even. Unrequited love? That’s for high school, maybe your early twenties, max. Fuck Anders. He probably wasn’t even as symmetrical as I’d imagined. Our conversations were probably only good because they were asynchronous and, in real life, he might be an ineloquent mess of poorly strung together tedium. Anders was, I decided, the grossness of banana strings and e-mails that, due to egregious social niceties, ended with Best. Yes, I thought, Anders was the kind of person who would end an e-mail with Best because that was the socially acceptable, polite thing to do, and Anders was socially acceptable; that was probably why he had responded to me at all and this entire time, he had been trying to find a conversational exit, but I was relentless; I was a conversational villain trying to become a co-star in his life when I shouldn’t even be an extra. Though I wanted to blame the vegan accountant for his anecdotal but relationship-sabotaging value, I knew that the most actionable thing I could do, really, was to order sushi, contemplate crying, realize if I had to contemplate crying then I didn’t really need to, and move the fuck on, maybe give that vibrator another chance, because there is nothing like the risk of mercury poisoning and electronically simulated orgasms to change your outlook.

It felt bad to be thinking poorly of Anders, who was certainly not the grossness of banana strings, who likely was hauntingly symmetrical, who had done nothing but respond, with believable enthusiasm and loquacity to me, a person that was ultimately a stranger with a propensity for asking invasive questions and oversharing. But you know what else feels bad? Having your entire view of yourself and ability to gain commissions be contingent on the speed with which a probably Swedish man responds to you.

I was about to write a final message, something like Don’t worry about ever responding to me; I harbor no ill will towards you and I have enjoyed our conversations immensely, something wonderfully sane-sounding like that, but of course, that was when he wrote:

i’m so sorry i took so long to respond to you! work has been stressful and i broke my phone. would you like to try sometime next week?

And I was, again, a goner.