I am hesitant to meet you.

I am hesitant to meet you.

Mostly it’s the weather. I can’t imagine a lunch date in August, me trying my best to seem sane while the sun radiates all rational thought from my mind. When I picture it, I see us sweating like cans of soda, or blasting the AC in our faces so loud that it’s hard to listen. Or maybe both. There’s nothing delicate about a rendezvous at 95°.

Then there’s the lockdown. My go-to places for first dates are movie theaters and coffee shops, so it should be apparent that I’m a little out of my element. And masks feel like a big obstacle to me, a necessary hurdle. I struggle to understand half the things folks say when we don our KN95’s. But on the flip side, I’m so used to wearing masks I’ve started making silly faces in public. So there’s the possibility of us sitting there with naked faces, with me unconsciously scrunching up my lips and crinkling my nose at you. It would make a good story I suppose.

And how do I socially distance when I’m first making your acquaintance? Should we sit on opposite sides of a park bench and speak loudly at each other? Should I call you on Zoom, and show you the apartment I hastily cleaned before your virtual arrival? Or should I set up separate couches in my deluxe at-home theatre/living room, where we can eat popcorn and watch Lovecraft Country or The Irishman or whatever it is the kids are watching these days?

I don’t know. It all seems so bizarre to me. 

But at the end of the day, I would totally weather the times to spend an evening with you. 

You look cute, and not in a dismissive, love-you-like-a-sister way. You seem like a compact ball of good vibes, and a complicated soul. I can’t tell from your photo that we would match, and I don’t think I would want to know without meeting you. I prefer it this way, leaving some unknown chemistry in the formula for relationships. We’re not pieces of a jigsaw puzzle after all, where every edge is delineated and the journey is in finding your place. To my mind our winks and nervous tics are 4D topologies, best experienced and then explained. But maybe I’m overthinking it.

I’m having trouble not thinking of you. Some mornings I wake up and remember your face, and I wonder what you might be like. And at other times you’re a little annoying, bothering me when I’m trying to write a blog or finish some chores. It’s not a problem of course; that is, it’s the best kind of problem I could possibly have.

So why don’t I cook you dinner some night? I’m not a bad chef. I could make something elaborate at my apartment, and we could eat on the couch with our TV trays like it’s 1960 and the nukes are dropping. Or maybe we could have a picnic in Echo Park Lake. That sounds nice, to me. So what say you? Shall we have a go at this awkward, disaster-prone proposition? Or shall I pick up my head and my heels and be on my way? I await your response.