and bathed myself in the computer’s bluish glow. I opened up the text files Tessa had made and realized that it was going to be more of a nightmare than I’d anticipated; each email was in its own file, some of them with the earlier exchange clinging to the bottom of the message but never organized into conversations. I could sort them by date, which split conversations up over weeks, or by subject, which glommed convos together but strung them into a senseless timeline. Shit.
Instead I searched for “Modern Love” and found three sad little emails, each ending with a polite rejection, two form letters and one that seemed at least a tiny bit more personal (“Sorry to say I don’t think this is quite a fit, but thanks for trying me with it”). Even all these years later, rereading these replies sparked a mix of disappointment and self-consciousness. I opened up the piece that got the longest answer.
I Don’t Want to Be Sedated
A very determined cricket has chosen the tree outside my window as his podium. I love him and pity him and feel for him as he chirps his question mark over and over into a dark street. There don’t seem to be many other crickets in Bushwick, and with the odds against him, I worry that his trills will slow, that his optimism will flag.
My own odds ought to be much more favorable: The city holds millions of single men, and the company I keep—beautiful, creative young Brooklynites—pretty much comprises the graduates of gifted and talented programs from high schools all over the world. The options are excellent. The problem is me.
I don’t mean to be difficult to impress. I didn’t pick this particular pickiness. It’s the butterflies in my stomach, I tell you. It’s like they’re sedated or possibly bound up in cocoons.
It’s so very easy to get dates in New York City. Anyone with an internet connection and mild self-portraiture skills can line them up in a few quippy sentences. It’s so hard to get good ones. When I came to the city six months ago, I felt nervous before each first date, sipping a cocktail and listening to Beyoncé and swirling on bronzer as I fought down the urge to vomit. All those nerves, not the good kind of eddying in my torso, but motion nonetheless.
Now I don’t get nervous at all, a change that strikes me as a little sad. He’ll be fine, I predict, and I won’t really want to see him again. I’m almost always right. At night, I lie awake and wonder why the butterflies refuse to stir. I fear they know something I don’t, something dark and jagged about me. The skeletons in my skeleton. The reason I don’t quite deserve it.
The last time they showed any movement was when I met Jonah, a cute bearded fellow, at a concert in the fall. I liked his wide grin, his unbounded enthusiasm. He’d moved from the Midwest to Manhattan only three weeks before, and I was into the idea of an unspoiled specimen, too fresh and transparent to be over everything already. He and I sat knees to knees at a bar, and the little moths showed movement, an unfamiliar, almost-forgotten rustle.
He ghosted after the third date.
It’s nice to know the butterflies haven’t calcified, but I’m not entirely sure I’m glad I met Jonah. It’s made hollow first dates even hollower since then, two strangers in a mahogany booth deciding to become estranged. But I keep going to shows and parties, keep setting up dates, keep entering bars with a smile and a question mark on my face. Like the cricket, like the bird in the children’s book who keeps on asking and asking and asking. Are you my lover?
I must have written it before I fell for Lloyd. Aw, little awkward Lindsay. A girl I’d like to reach back and hug. Except that I wouldn’t have too many soothing words for her, I suppose. If only she knew the trend wasn’t temporary, that in a decade she’d be as old as Jesus with a list of sex partners exceeding her age but no identifiable capital-B boyfriend in the ensuing years.
And Jonah—him I just barely remembered, a dull “Ohhhh, right.” That idiot.
Time to start reading emails then. I attempted to sort them by date but accidentally brought them up by size, so the one at the top had huge files hanging off of it as attachments. Edie’s subject