Relationship Status: Catching Fireflies With My Fuck Buddy
I’m in love with my fuck buddy. Wait, let me start over. That’s not quite right.
It’s freezing outside. He turns over the logs in the fire pit with a metal poker and chats with the neighborhood kids, showing them the appropriate distance to stay from the flames while keeping the fire alive. In his winter coat he looks oddly small, his exuberance buried under so many layers of puffy fabric. When he sees me watching him, he throws me a private smile, and I return it. This is weird, but the good kind of weird, the kind where you don’t fully understand what you are feeling but you know you feel a lot of things and they might be important.
I turn my back to him and his cluster of tiny acolytes. The sky is so clear out here, and it is busy with hard, glittering stars. Above the soccer net, a remnant of his childhood, a meteor crests the sky. I know I should make a wish, and there are things I could wish for: the ex on another continent who I think I want back, the anthology I’m hoping will accept my short story, that elusive thousandth Twitter follower. But the wants that consume me on my daily commute don’t come to mind, not tonight.
His voice wafts across the yard, along with the swinging of doors and happy kid laughter receding behind the walls of his parents’ house. And then he is standing next to me in the grass, and I am a little drunk, and he asks, “What are you staring at?”
“There was a shooting star,” I say, pointing up at the stationary pricks of light in all that winter sky.
“Why didn’t you say anything,” he whines, and that smile flickers across his face again. “I haven’t seen one in years.”
“It was gone before I realized what it was.”
A few months earlier we’d caught fireflies right here, before climbing across the wobbly wooden playground set. He kissed my shoulder even though it tasted like bug spray, and we agreed we were on the same page: This was good, whatever it was. Whatever that might be. For a writer and a lyricist, we aren’t great at words for each other.
After the party ends we have sex in his squeaky twin bed and he dozes off by accident in my arms, exhausted from playing host. I count the freckles on his face, his long eyelashes, and I am terrified. It is the quietest revolution, the softest chaos. Would you believe me if I told you he wasn’t supposed to matter?
I’m pretty sure friends-with-benefits is a myth. Fuck buddies are one thing: humans are perfectly capable of fucking one another without forming emotional attachments, and I’ve had sex with friends and escaped without catching feelings just fine. But to care about them, and to have sex with them, and not wind up in some weird neither-here-nor-there place of confused intimacy… I’ll speak for myself and say I don’t think I can dodge that emotional bullet. I also don’t know that I would want to.
Here are some of the reasons we are not together: We don’t live in the same state. We are in different places in our lives. We genuinely enjoy being single and committed to no one. We are both independent, and impulsive, and moderately damaged in the way most people in their early twenties are. That’s not to say we haven’t talked about it, a relationship, but it hasn’t happened. I think I’ve made peace with that.
But as someone who considers being introspective among her strengths, I struggle with not knowing how to define how I feel about him. I’m not in love with him — no really, I’m not. I know what it is to be in love, to set your clocks by the sound of someone’s steady breathing at night, to scream up at windows, to drop hundreds of dollars on a train ticket to tell them in person that you still need them. This is not in love, this is something different, something less destructive and maybe more honest. We live our separate lives for weeks, even months, just fine. But as soon as he’s right in front of me again, this warm, loose feeling radiates through my torso. Maybe that’s trust, or comfort, or safety, but it feels like coming home.
So we aren’t in love with each other, but we love each other, but it’s not really platonic because we joke about how we’ve never just been friends. We’re fuck buddies who make love, or maybe that makes us lovers, or maybe that’s how it seems to me. Sometimes I worry we’re in separate books, let alone on the same page. But I think that’s how it is supposed to be: I’m the heroine of my novel, a coming of age tale about a young woman in the New York new media world. Meanwhile he’s the hero of his.
I jokingly refer to him as my “consistent bae” on Twitter and he doesn’t mind if I screen-cap our text messages and include them in blog posts. Occasionally he reads my essays but never to earn brownie points; he only mentions my writing if I bring it up first. I know he worries that I will expect things from him that he cannot give me, but I don’t. We weren’t supposed to meet at all, as these things often go. I’ll only ever be grateful that we did.
It’s summer now. I’m closing in on two thousand Twitter followers, and I’m not sure when I’ll see him next. This weekend we picked up takeout with his little sister and his parents asked me how work is going. At the end of the night we had slow, gentle sex and I wasn’t self-conscious as he watched my face move. On the way back into the city I think about how much I want to see him graduate, to give him a big, embarrassing hug as he beams against his better judgment about everything he has accomplished. I hope I get to see the man he grows up to be. I’m really proud of him.
I’m really proud of us.
