On the best date I’ve ever had

I missed the prompt deadline but I still wanted to write this

“You’re really short.”

I was breathing hard and trying to smooth my clothes back into place after carrying my bike up two flights of steep stairs. I stood with him in the narrow hall of the railroad style apartment typical of older San Francisco neighborhoods.

“You get to say that once,” I said, “And never again.”

He put up his hands, palms out. “Touchy about your height, huh? I would have helped you bring the bike up the stairs, but I figured that since you’re a feminist, I’d let you do it. Anyway, it’s a pretty little bike, I bet it’s not that heavy.”

I didn’t feel like telling him that my 43cm bike was still a little too big for me and, made of cheap parts, heavier than most bikes of any size. Instead I finally got a good look at him, and wondered why I had even bothered trying to do something with my hair.

“I didn’t ask for help,” I said.

His hair was greasy, flattened under a beanie, but mostly all I could see was up his nose. His cargo pants slumped on his legs as if they were melting and his oversized t-shirt left him completely devoid of any shape — not that I thought he might have any hidden under there.

At the time I hadn’t fully curated my list of red flags. Inexperienced, I had naively believed that the way he touted his feminism on his dating profile made him entirely innocuous. So I had agreed to meet him at his place to smoke a bowl.

Which we did and then we started watching TV. Saturday Night Live or something. The dark wood paneled walls made the room seem smaller and more crowded than it was. The space was almost completely consumed with a dingy sunken couch, a wide low coffee table littered with paraphernalia, and a giant flat screen.

I tried to think of something to ask him about himself. I didn’t need to because he spoke up without pause. He boasted about being born and raised in San Francisco, and how that alone—for some reason—made him an “honorary gay” and a “true feminist” and somehow exempt from the patriarchal privileges of being white, male, and able-bodied. He railed about the waves of “brogrammers” crashing onto the city, about their sense of entitlement, and the rising rent. He talked about hanging out with the street kids in Golden Gate Park, telling me how he was “cool with everyone.” I kept hitting the bong, falling back farther and further into myself.

“Is this how it works?” I asked myself, “Is this how dating works?” I looked at him, slumped on the couch like a pile of dirty laundry, trying to suck the last puff from a roach. I had moved to San Francisco about six months ago with a boyfriend I thought was going to be “the one.” He ended up being “the one” to devastate me with a storm of chaotic infidelity, sucking me into his neurotic insecurity.

I didn’t know how to take care of myself. How to draw boundaries. How to think well enough of myself to disregard and discard anyone who treated me any less than what I deserve. My parents, codependent on one another since they were seventeen, taught me that love looked like aching sacrifice—that if one really loved another person, she dissolved herself in him. I took my ex’s betrayal as my own failure to please him. I took this date as my failure to appeal to the kind of people I actually wanted—if only I were taller, slimmer, less brown …

“I’m hungry. Let’s get something to eat.”

“There’s a corner store,” he offered.

So we tumbled out into the street. “You really are short,” he said, lumbering over me, “Like really really short.” He moved to put an arm around my shoulders and I pulled away.

“I fucking told you not to fucking say that.”

I browsed the aisles of the corner store. A soda, a chocolate bar, some chips. I presented the items to the cashier.

“I’d pay for that for you, but, you know … ”

“Yeah — feminist.”

“I’m over this,” I told myself as we walked back and his mouth said words, but all I heard was static. “I gotta get my bike though. And eat these snacks. What is wrong with me?”

I stuck around for the final musical performance on SNL, sitting perched on the edge of the couch, trying to make as little contact with it as possible, inching toward the door. “Why am I doing this to myself?”

I was desperate. I’d never been single. I wanted someone — anyone — the same way my mother wouldn’t leave my father because she was scared of being alone. My value was wrapped up in other people and without someone I was no one.

“Can I buy some weed?” I asked as the guest actor bid farewell to the audience on TV.

He moved with groaning effort, reaching across the table for a jar and a baggie. “Of course. I’d charge you less because I think you’re cute, but that wouldn’t be very feminist of me.”

I grabbed the weed from him, throwing the money on the table, standing up. “Well, it’s time for me to get going.”

“But I never gave you a tour of the house.”

I acquiesced out of morbid curiosity. A dirty kitchen, his roommates’ rooms, and his room—the largest—at the end of the hall. My heart ached for whatever Edwardian beauty the house had once been, the bay windows hidden behind black sheets tacked up with pushpins, the walls scribbled across like a roach infestation. He plucked up a guitar.

“Like, how tall are you?”

“I have to go.” I was already hoisting my bike up onto my shoulder.

“Why? What’s up?”

“I’m tired.”

“I’d like to see you again,” he said at the front door. I stared up at him from the sidewalk. I had struggled down the steps as quickly as possible. I couldn’t even think of anything to say, so I saddled up, and took off. My phone dinged with a text.

“was it the short stuff?”

I deleted his number.

I was so upset I started to cry. The fog had descended on the city, muting the lights and dampening my clothes. My fingers felt cold against the air rushing over them, but my face was hot with shame and anger and confusion. I rode my bike fast. I wanted to get home and take a shower—wash the grime of his couch off of me, wash the fog out of my hair, wash the bike grease off my fingers, wash the tears off my face.

I was alone in a new city. I was struggling to make money. I didn’t know what I wanted to do to make money. I flung myself at different leads. I was struggling to make friends and to make lovers. I had left my home and my friends and my comfort in Los Angeles to follow a boy who promised me forever and then slipped out the front door, as quiet as the fog on a summer night that never gets warm.

There had always been someone. Someone to disappear into, to focus on so I wouldn’t have to focus on myself. Someone with tremendous needs so I was always scurrying to fulfill them. Someone who told me I was too fat or too loud or too crazy so that I could confirm everything I hated about myself, convinced that no one else would want me which is why I had to stay with someone who made me feel worthy only when I was no one.

The streets were wide and quiet. The fog horn boomed across the bay. Between strands of fog, the sky was somehow so black the stars twinkled fiercely. I could hear my sobs echoing off the fronts of the houses, their windows all dark, their inhabitants tucked away inside. I realized that none of them would ever know I was out there, alone and crying. I imagined them all in bed, holding their partners, while I rode solo.

I remembered I was listening to music. Portishead’s “Glory Box” came on, slow and sexy and soulful. I remembered the fog was as much within me as it was without me. I remembered my bicycle—thrown into the back of my station wagon when I made the one-way drive up the 101—now faithfully conveying me across the city as she had done in Los Angeles. I remembered my body, my legs, my muscles turning the gears. The boy was gone, but I still had music, I still had drugs, I still had my bicycle, and I still had myself.

On the street it was only the asphalt below me and the stars above me and—me—suspended somewhere in-between. I took the lane. I took both lanes, weaving to the music. “Give me a reason to love you,” Beth Gibbons cooed in my ears, breathy and heavy. I felt the bike against my body, I felt the earth pushing the bike against me, and me pressing down pressing down pressing down pressing down pressing down down down down down down down …

Down.

Heavy and low and slow, the fog within me and without me, pressed damp like a post-sex lover’s body. I realized I’d been holding my breath.

“For this is the beginning of forever and ever … ” The song broke down, grinding and writhing, its electric legs wrapped around my head. The street was wide and I pulsed with the twinkling starlight, drinking in the fog, settling under it, feeling heaven press down on me, the starlight within me and without me.

I didn’t turn on the light when I got home. I moved in the dark. I moved in the dark under the sheets. The music was within me and without me. My breathing slowed under the booming fog horn and I shrank back into myself and sank into the mattress.

The boy was gone—everyone was gone—but there was still me and that was all I needed. I promised allegiance to myself that night. I had found myself on the street and while everyone else slept, the stars and fog watched me dry my eyes, turn up the volume, grind the final few blocks home, and fall in love on the best date ever.