Micro-Aggressive | Chapter II : Swiping Right on Fetishization

“That’s an interesting sweater,” I said to the Ordinary Guy sitting across from me. Ordinary is being generous. What’s the opposite of extraordinary? Picture a hardboiled egg. What’s the word for that?

Anyway, this guy was a hardboiled egg.

I don’t remember his name. I forgot it the second he told me. John? Jake? Sam? Mike? David? Will? You get it. Just a friendly neighborhood white guy that you meet on Tinder. I kept zoning out while he spoke, which was subsequently followed up by a guilty refocusing.

“Thanks,” he said. I’m assuming he grinned. “I have one for every day of December — up until Christmas, that is.” I furrowed my brow and stared at the beige reindeer on his chest. It was December 1st. What kind of sociopath…

“You have twenty-five Christmas sweaters?”

He laughed. I relaxed.

“Yes.”

My next thought was a pretty blasphemous swearing, but in my defense, I just found myself on a date with someone who had twenty-five holiday specific sweaters, so… you know.

My phone rang and I smiled apologetically to [… Aaron?…] as I reached in my bag for it, which was a little out of character. I didn’t actually care if people were offended that I answered my phone, let alone a guy I didn’t know on a cavalier first date at a mostly empty rooftop bar. But the weather was nice and I was having a good hair day, so I figured I would do what first dates called for and pretend to be someone else. So I acted like I cared. “Sorry, it’s my mom — just one second, alo?”

My mom, an ’80s immigrant, responded. In Turkish. “Alo kizim nasilsin?” She asked how I was. I gave her a brief rundown. The last time we had spoken, I was curled up in bed on my side, whimpering into the phone that was balanced on the up-side of my face. My hands were too busy clutching a heated blanket to my lower abdomen.

I responded in Turkish that I was feeling much better, I hadn’t thrown up since that morning, and after I took a shower I felt good as new. “Evden cikmadan Midol aldim,” I added, before cringing a little at my mistake. People love to point out the words they could understand. Midol, Fayetteville, garbage disposal. I glanced over at [actually, Will sounds right now that I think about it], who was staring right at me.

‘Jeez,’ I thought. ‘Not even pretending to be on his phone. Why is he smiling at me?’ Giving him an unsure smile in return, I briefly questioned whether maybe he was a fellow Turk and this was all an elaborate ruse before my common sense came back to me.

My mom was still talking, her tone indicating her worry over how bad my cramps would get and how she was always so concerned that I would pass out again. “What if you hit your head? Is your roommate home?”

“Evet, evdeydi,” I lied. I don’t like to make her worry so it was easier if she just thought my roommate happened to be home that day. After a few more words, we hung up. I turned back to [who I thought was Will… but now that doesn’t sound right either].

“Sorry,” I said, putting my phone up. “She was just aski — ”

“What language is that?”

I didn’t look up. “Th — ? oh, Turkish.”

“That was so sexy.”

I turned back from my bag, mid-zip. It wasn’t until this point that I realized that his smile was actually creeping me out. “Uh… thanks?” I laughed awkwardly. It wouldn’t be until later that I realized how much I would regret my response here. I should’ve told him how weird it was that he was sexualizing a conversation with my mother. I chose the dummy’s route and just tried to brush it off — hindsight, man.

I offered small talk, hellbent on getting this conversation back on its normal, boring track. “Yeah, my parents are both Turkish, and — ” The rest of my sentence didn’t matter. At this point, he was leaning forward in his seat, that stupid reindeer pressed against the edge of the table.

“I could listen to that forever,” he said in a low voice. I frowned slightly, missing my daydreams of this guy being some advent calendar serial killer. “Just… wow.”

“We were talking about menstrual cramps.” Well, I tried. I shifted uncomfortably. Why was a conversation with my mom being ushered down this weird path?

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard Turkish before.”

“Sometimes I get ovarian cysts and they rupture and I basically just throw up and pass out.”

“Oh. That sucks.”

“Yeah, sometimes simultaneously. Gets pretty messy,” I laughed. It had been awhile since the last time that happened so laughing about it was super easy at this point in time. It was also a fake laugh, so… even easier.

“Sorry to hear that,” he said as he glanced at the time on his phone. “ So, have you spoken Turkish your whole life?”

“Yep.” I would win this with one-word responses if I had to.

“It just sounds so… exotic.”

I didn’t say anything at this point. I pressed my lips together and just looked around, hoping he’d pick up on an iota of negative body language or something. He did. Sort of.

“Sorry,” he said, leaning back and running a hand through his hair as if he had just been broken out of a weird trance of fetishization. “It just… wow, that’s really sexy.”

Later that night, I deleted both his number and the Tinder app.