Green light.
I breathe in and try not to look at myself, but the screen is blowing out my face to grotesque proportions. I can see everything that five weeks in the same room has done to me. Sleep tucks itself away in the corners of my eye. Stray hairs jut out of my beard after weeks of growth. My webcam does a good job to hide these flaws on the other side, but just about. It will only make the eventual meeting all the more awkward. If we even get to meet.
Without a moment’s notice, the number at the bottom of the screen changes from one to two, and she appears. Compared to my room, it looks like meticulous work has been put into her background. The bed is made, the fairy lights are glowing, and a salt lamp hums to the side of her laptop. Polaroids and photographs of friends and family are organised on the wall in a pattern that I recognise but don’t quite understand.
Her outfit puts my shirt to shame. I’m wearing my best pair of jeans, even though there is no way that she would be able to see them. If anything, it puts me in the same amount of discomfort as I would have been if we were meeting face to face. God, is this what it would be like if we had met face to face? This feels intrusive, just seeing what the inside of her house looks like. I shouldn’t be seeing her room for a while, if I even get that far. What if her mum walks into her room? Would that count as meeting her parents? Am I moving too fast? I think I’m going to scream.
“Hi there”, she says. I did not expect her to sound like that. Sure, we’ve been texting for a while and she told me she was from Dublin but still, I didn’t expect her to sound like… that. Maybe it was that I thought it would be quieter from the pictures she had on her profile, but I don’t even know how I could have guessed what she would sound like. I hope she doesn’t mind my accent. I know that people say that the Donegal accent is the sexiest accent in the country, but it’s usually people from Donegal who say that. And they would say that, because we’ve only got so many things to be proud of. You can only live off the hype of Sea Sessions and the rally for so long before you have to find something else to brag about.
“Hey there!”, I reply, in a tone that can be described as a mixture of shock and relief. I babble on and on about how happy I am that we can finally talk, that she looks wonderful and I especially love the smokey look she’s given her eyes, that maybe video dating isn’t as bad as it seems, but she looks as if she’s trying to speak over me.
“I can’t hear you”, she says.
Oh God, was I on mute that whole time? I look down. There’s a red line going through the microphone icon. I’m an eejit. It’s been thirty seconds and I’m already starting to look like Dad trying to use the iPad for the first time. Hopefully she doesn’t draw attention to it.
“You’re worse than my dad at this”, she giggles.
Well, there goes any sort of sexual chemistry. There is no way in hell that she’ll ever consider meeting up with me in person, unless she needed someone to spend Daddy-daughter bonding time with. Hopefully I can salvage this and upgrade myself from technophobic father figure to cool uncle.
I apologise and make a joke about setting low expectations for the first date, so that I can wow her down the line. It’s at this moment that I realise that I’m completely out of my comfort zone. The fact that this call is even happening is a miracle in itself. I had known her before this whole virus thing had happened, and I think we were bored enough that all we needed was a text to latch on to each other. It went from replying to Instagram stories, to tagging each other in memes, to eventually suggesting a video date. Is this our generation’s version of sending love letters? Am I going to be scrolling back through our messages whenever we’re old and gray? How am I going to give my kids photographs if they’re all stored in the cloud? My parents gave me their photos whenever I was going up to Dublin for college. Am I meant to just give my kids a hard drive?
I thought that dating in a global pandemic would have been cool, in a Mad Max sort of way. Me and Xena, Warrior Princess, dashing through the streets, taking out thieves in masks with our slick karate moves and a rusty car covered in spikes and barbed wire. We would all be fighting for control of oil, and it would end up with one of us sacrificing ourselves to save the other, and possibly a colony of kickass single mothers. The reality is that we text each other maybe eight times a day, and the rest of the time is spent watching Ozark and debating on whether or not to buy a Tinder Gold subscription. It’s hard enough trying to impress someone when you’re sitting across from each other in a restaurant, or shouting down their ear on a sticky floor. Trying to do this over a video call just seems pointless.
We talk about our interests, about how she used to go to piano lessons when she was seven and she hated them so much that she tried to pull the keys out of the keyboard her parents had bought. I talk about how I tried to play football when I was a kid, but I had two left feet so the manager wouldn’t ever let me play without telling me why. She tells me about her ticket collection, and I talk about the books my nana gave me. She studies science, I study arts.
We are actually having a conversation.
This is not how I thought this was going to go. I thought we were going to say the usual; how are you holding up, what have you been doing to stay occupied, when are you going to try and get home. But this is a genuine, real conversation. I don’t even think we would have talked about this if we had gone to a park or a pub. There would have been way too many people around for her to admit that she still sleeps with her teddies or that I haven’t seen any of the Marvel films. It feels like we’re in a bubble, and everything around us has been shut off or put on mute and our only means of human interaction is with each other.
She’s in the middle of telling me about the time her family accidentally ended up in a WWI parade in Nice when suddenly all of the sound stops and her face freezes. There’s obviously been some kind of problem with the connection but I have no idea whether it’s with me, or with her. I’m convinced that she can still see me, so I stay perfectly still, holding a grin. I consider trying to say something to let her know that she’s gone. Maybe she’s gone for good. That’s one way to get out of this; pull the plug on your wifi right when things get boring so that you can text back a while later apologising for your “bad connection” and that we should do this again, but slowly get drier and drier until responses are left ignored. In fairness, what an escape plan to have in times like these. It’s not like we have other plans, or someone has just called over to visit. We have to be tactical in how we choose to ignore people now.
Just before I hit “End Meeting”, she comes back, the image suddenly jolting from her face mid-conversation to looking around the computer screen for answers. “You’re back!”, she lets out. “I was worried you were gone for good for a while there. What was the last thing I was saying? Oh right, the tanks.” It’s only whenever she starts going in depth as to how her dad managed to get on the street and let her sit in a ninety year old death machine that I realise what time it is. We’ve been speaking for four hours at this point. I’ve become way more relaxed in the chair I was sitting in, and I start thinking about whether or not it would be weird if I brought my laptop to my bed. I start thinking about everything that I need to get done in the morning, but I also think about how there is hypothetically no limit on how long we can talk here. There is no closing time, nowhere to go in the morning, and no one to meet. The only thing that can stop this conversation is us.
Does this even count as a date? If this keeps going, can I really say that this was the first time that we really clicked? Because while I’m sure that whatever is happening here will translate into the real world, there is no way to be certain. There can be no place to meet, no bill to split, no kiss goodbye. We can’t talk about holding each other’s hands as we’re going from street to street, or waiting on the bus together, or awkwardly dancing to the tune that a busker is playing.
We’re still spending time together, though. And that’s basically what a date is, isn’t it? It’s just two people, finding an excuse to spend time together, thinking about whether or not they could see themselves growing old with each other. And there’s no point in trying to imagine what could have been if we weren’t stuck in our homes, because we can have experiences like this, and we will never ever have a chance to have a first date like this again.
She yawns, and says that she’s going to get ready for bed, but that she’ll text me before she goes to sleep. We each say good night, and her picture drops from my laptop, the number two turns back to a one, and I’m left looking at my face again. This time, though, I look content. I get a text twenty minutes later from her saying how much she enjoyed the night and that she would love to call again. She signs her message off with a single x, which translates directly to “I like you, but not double x like you”. I tear off my jeans, rip off my shirt and jump into bed. I won’t wake up until two o’clock in the afternoon, but I will have the best nights’ sleep I’ve had in weeks.
