5/19/2016 0 Comments Generation Why... but the mood is different this time round. He's accompanied by his friend, which I wouldn’t mind so much if he didn't completely ignore me. He's a French Fine Artist working in Advertising, so basically an A-hole. The only time he speaks to me is to ask whether I’ve heard of him, and if I have a lighter.
Here I am, propped between my date and his aloof sidekick, in a garden dense with mosquitoes and moths, preparing myself to sit through three hours of documentary shorts unified by the theme: female subjugation and abuse during wartime. Sipping on a pint seems inappropriate while watching re-enactments of mass rape. I feel uncomfortable and ashamedly hipster. Evocative portraits of tortured African women are projected onto the garden screen, accompanied by grim voices recounting extremely violent events. Shocked, I cry silently in the darkness, and then, I let out a scream – not from the footage but from a giant moth that whips my face with its dusty, terrifying wings. I call it a night. --♥-- My first encounter with Y was in a newly renovated restaurant of a boutique hotel in the second arrondissement. At the table, his opening words were: “Bonjour” followed by “I hate the small talk”, and then in a serious tone that suggested I would be judged no matter what I answered, “The sanctité of marriage, what are your thoughts?” Being progressive and of The New World, I shrugged and said something insightful along the lines of “meh”. This clearly wasn’t the response Y wanted, and sensing this, I went in for the kill and asked him whether he was a homophobe. We hadn’t looked at the menus yet. It turned out that Y was indeed a homophobe, a fact that became apparent at a Thai restaurant, which turned out to also be a Trans joint. I discovered this first when I went to the bathroom, where, découpaged across the toilet walls were graphic photos of homoerotica - ladyboys with hardons bulging through tight skirts. I returned to find Y upright in his seat, his half eaten Tom Yam Goong abandoned, and his gaze scurrying about the room. “Ca va?” I asked. He leaned across the table and whispered, “The waitress, there at ze bar in halter top, she has a big back, like a man, non?” Coincidentally, a shrill burst of laughter came from a nearby table occupied by a clique of men who, at the risk of sounding presumptuous, were quite obviously Thai and gay. This seemed to be the missing piece to the puzzle that Y was trying to crack. His eyes widened. “Here. Is. A. Gay. House.” After calling it off with Y, for a plethora of reasons, things festered. He spammed my phone with a never-ending chain of messages. His tone was poetic, needy and defiant, which, written in broken-English, read like a sad haiku. The unwanted attention lasted about two months. At first my ego was intrigued. But as the messages became monologues, and Y took to paraphrasing A$AP Rocky, my curiosity turned into cringing, and finally remorse. --♥-- A: Just finish working… wanna cut my hair? Me: ? A: I’ll go home now. I need a haircut. Two different sentences not related. And just like that, I’d slid from bae to barber. Any serious dialogue I attempt in person is met with anecdotes about Danish girls or complaints about not being able to wear jeans to work. All of our magical dates flash before my eyes as my fantasy loses consciousness and dies a violent death. I cough up its last words, “Long-distance – Meet. In. Asia.” He runs his fingers through his hair with both hands, and says, “Look, a Mohawk!” I remember that I have the dregs of an almond croissant at home and this fills me with instant joy. He mistakes my smile as being directed at him, and in response his face contorts into a big toothy grin. I have an urge to pat him on the head like the farmer does in the movie, Babe. “That’ll do pig, that’ll do.” The next morning, I discover, with a shock, a handwritten note lying on the floor. It must have been slipped under my front door during the night. Uneasily, I wonder how someone got past the two security doors. It is ripped into two strips, each scrawled with black texta. Either it was written by him, or a child retard. The message makes no sense – just half-formed sentences and a story about climbing a mountain. I can't figure it out. Not any of it. But whatever. The 30-year-old teen was already an anomaly. A spazzy riddle. I'm not in the mood to decipher another one. I take a photo of it to send to friends and then roll it into a ball and drop it into the bin. --♥--
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