The Diner

Kris messages me on OkCupid, where I maintain an account out of stubbornness. I was on the site first, almost two decades ago. I don't see why I ought to leave now. I've been there long enough that babies born from hookups the day that I signed up are now able to sign up for accounts.

I hold out little hope in finding friendship there, though I make explicit that friendship is all I seek and can offer. This does not help as often as I would like. I have disappointed a few polyamorous people, who assumed my marital commitment might just be for show. If not them, men who assume that I cannot possibly be heterosexual and will welcome illicit sexual dalliances with bears forty years past their prime, a chain of sodomy reaching back to before the Civil War. (This is not an authorial flourish. I received this message.)

Most people are there for the potential of romance or, if women's profiles are admissible testimony, meaningless sex. Only the bots selling Instagram smut offer this. I do not begrudge most there. I met a woman I love to this day there, though our romantic relationship ended in 2011. Every other date and conversation there turned either into a friendship or a story to tell future friends.

• She was homeless and using the site to exchange sex for a warm bed. She did not understand why I would want to have a real bed or hold down a teaching job.
• She made up an outrageous series of lies to try to gain my sympathy. When I did not reply as she wanted, she stalked me online until I had to block her on all accounts. Then she made up new accounts for me to block.
• He, thickly bearded, felt that his having a vagina compelled me to date him, since all I should need for attraction is my preferred genitals. When I reiterated that I was only attracted to women and he was a man, he insisted I was transphobic. He had a boorish, entitled personality coupled with a mouth and outfit like a long-haul trucker. Not my type.
• When I told her that I was cancelling our promised first date to pursue a relationship, she explained that the 'date' was actually recruitment for an orgy -- for which she had made pie -- and I was welcomed to bring my new friend. I declined with apologies.
• He wanted to meet me immediately and without any solid reason. As in, within the first message. I expressed that I would prefer to exchange a few messages to see if this was a safe thing to do and if we would actually get along. That I had to say this was the first two strikes. He became furious at my getting-to-know-you questions ("You can figure all that out when I get there!"). That was strikes three through twelve. It was not going to be safe. We would not get along.
• She said she and her fiancé would love me meet me, but not yet. She was busy building a porch on her house, but I should check in on her in six months. I did. She fobbed me off with a different reason. I assumed she was a flake with no interest in meeting despite her stated fervor. Facebook suggested her as a mutual friend with someone I met a decade ago. It was her picture, but it was not her name. There was no porch in sight. (I am certain this was a catfish, inexpertly performed, though I do not know to what end.)

Kris did not trigger my instinctual reservations, as some of the above did. She is an hour from my home, and, looking at her profile, it is hard not to want her for a friend. For days, we exchange messages, then days pass between messages. She is witty and easygoing. She works as a proofreader at a family literary agency for fantasy and science fiction. Before returning to her life in LA in six months, she is living at a home her father built. She is self-possessed and confident despite a negative relationship in her recent past. (She may have been in the Hudson Valley to clear her head from this. I could as likely be mushing the story together because it ties up loose ends.)

When I visit the site to reply to another of Kris's messages, I match with a woman a touch over an hour away, Melissa. I message Melissa, asking how she managed to hide her horse from her parents for years, as she mentions in her profile. I suggest she employed disguises, such as lampshades and dressing the horse up as a beloved but otherwise unmentioned aunt. This sets off a series of dozens of messages between us, touching on childhood theft, Reese's Pieces, karma, the downturn of Henry Thomas, before suggesting that we ought to meet.

I told her that, as her friend, I could not in good conscience let her meet some strange man on his turf. I started looking up interstitial eateries. She wrote that she didn't mind the turf as long as it wasn't his house, and that she was happy to make the drive for the chance to see if we could be friends.

I do not like the idea of planning to meet someone the first day I speak to them online. With Melissa, there seemed to be very little reason to stand on principle. She is an introvert in need of friends and I am an ambivert who thrives caring for my flock of introverts. As we are not meeting for several day, I have the opportunity to let her say something horrific to give me a reason to decline.

I wish she were closer so that I did not feel as guilty having her make the drive, but that cannot be helped. I could always use friends who will give me cause to visit new towns, though she makes clear that she does not find Pittsfield to be a place conducive to friendships. Looking at her pictures and her profile, I am astounded that people would not line up to befriend her. She charmed me into suggesting a meeting. I don't understand why Pittsfieldians are not flocking to befriend this compassionate equestrian. Perhaps their resistance to Melissa is indicative of a deep personality flaw on her part that I am missing, though I doubt it.

I finish responding to one of Kris's messages, one curious and detailed, only to discover that she no longer seems to exist. She unmatched with me, which makes her as good as gone forever as far as the site is concerned. We did not get to the point of exchanging contact information outside the site. She seemed like a warm, kind person, but she made a decision for reasons I will never know and are no longer my business.

This might have affected me more if I did not have plans with Melissa. We exchange phone numbers and add one another on Facebook. I play it cool, though I poke around, seeing a few posts and pictures than provide me potential questions. In the three minutes of skimming, I see nothing that would prevent a blossoming friendship, no swastikas or celebration over the death of kittens. I scroll through her pictures and think that she looks like someone who is my friend. Not a specific someone, but a companionable type. She reminds me of internet darling Simone Giertz, the Queen of Shitty Robots. High praise indeed.

A few people with whom I assumed a burgeoning deep friendship have ended up only a little better than social media acquaintances. In retrospect, these were likely closer to flings, albeit platonic ones. Friendship is like dating, only monogamy is the more peculiar choice. You are expected to care about other people without hard feelings or much jealousy. No sexual passion, but a companionable fondness that can dissipate without real antecedent. There are few people in my life with whom I have felt the need to break up without having kissed first.

I am friend-crushing (or, as is the unpleasantly sensuous preferred nomenclature, squishing). I don't want to pop that bubble before I know if there is a bubble to pop. I do not care to build Melissa up in my head only to discover our friendship was something I had created to fulfill the demands of the story.

On these sites, most profiles are near carbon copies:

I don't know what to say here. My friends would say that I am a fun and adventurous girl looking for my Romeo. No hookups. I couldn't live without sex. ;) IDK. If you want to know more, you'll have to ask me. I can't see likes.

They might as well tell people to decide based on their pictures. They aren't giving them much else.

Melissa's profile is not that. It gave me topics on which I wanted to know more. Looking at her Facebook profile adds a few more, though I won't show up to our meeting with a notepad full of questions. She is not someone I am interviewing about their relationship with Bigfoot.

I ask Amber how she feels about going on a blind date, but she says it isn't a blind date. I have been corresponding with Melissa for days. I argue that it is still blind to Amber, since she takes no interest in my machinations beyond knowing what I am planning and when. For her to know something about Melissa, she would have to find a reason to read up on her own.

My profile states that I tend to make friends as a unit with Amber, though this is less accurate now that she has a steady job. Amber has friends from work whom I do not know beyond some faces and a few statistics. She socializes with them without me. (I do not have work friends. Work and friendship do not go together for me. I am friendly at my day job, but I need my private and professional lives to have a wall between them.)

It has been a long time since I have made a new friend. Amber's not the type to make friends actively. She is not wanting for company. Today, she asked what we were doing on the 11th. I got excited be asking, "Oh, what are we doing on the 11?" We are not doing anything. She's going out to dinner with her work friends.

I could be friends with Melissa without Amber's direct involvement. Amber will only become friends with Melissa if I spend enough time around her and I make clear that I wish to keep Melissa around. Then, Amber will accept it. (I have yet to have a friend who did not take to Amber, sometimes more than they did to me, and so do not worry about Melissa disliking my wife. If Melissa took issue with Amber, that would be her fatal flaw.)

I roll around the idea that Melissa could have the potential to become important to my life. Thinking this before has resulted in a flash of friendship that faded to phosphenes. I can rarely point to when, with these people, we ceased the growth toward continued friendship. With some, I can name the man or woman they began to date who withered our fondness. (I don't hold them at fault. Given the choice between devoting myself more to a friend or focusing my energy to someone I kiss, I've chosen the latter.)

I consider what I should wear to meet Melissa. I want to let her know that I care about making a good impression on her. I have met a few people who seemed to conspicuously not want to appear to have put in effort. Meeting me wasn't worth a clean, intact t-shirt.

I want to know what Melissa's voice sounds like, but I have no reason to call her at this juncture. I want to be able to connect her to my senses, to make her real. It is strange to have to worry I could spook her. It isn't just that Kris vanished and I do not know why, but it is a small factor in my mind.

Maybe she will be ghastly and boring, though that would indeed be a surprise. It would have to involve a Cyrano, a friend who was messaging as her to reel in a married man looking for platonic companionship. Devious plan, really.

Based on pictures, Melissa is bespectacled and sandy haired. She is cute, because I look for cuteness in my friends no matter their genders. One must keep up appearances and "cute" feels safer. I do not have an entourage of the drop dead gorgeous, as I myself am not. She is in her thirties, though on the other end of that decade than I am. She has had adventures I have not, at one point having volunteered for the Peace Corp in Cameroon for nearly a year. For that alone, she has an exotic tinge. Questions surround her that I am supposed to be tactful enough not to ask in a torrent the moment we breathe the same air.

I will behave myself because she is not the first person I've wanted to know better all at once.

I don't know the exact propriety. I would suppose that, before she agreed to meet me, she could have done a cursory look at what the internet provided about me. I am not hard to suss out. I am open about much and have been since I decided, prematurely, that people might want to read about the goings on in my life.

Keilaina, whom I have not seen for the better part of a decade, messages me in part to wish me a belated happy birthday. Despite the years, the physical distance, and the infrequency of our conversations, we remain friends. We always will. I love her as I have loved few people. Daniel is the same. There are others for whom I care, but they cut the friendship off. Part of my caring will have to be respecting that they have. If I ever loved them, surely that includes letting them go without resentment.

Irrespective of the outcome -- it would be rude to presume Melissa could end up a new friend when I have not yet met her in the flesh -- this is the least emotionally burdened I have been when meeting someone. I do not need a friend. I am self-contained. My mental health, while not perfect, has certainly been worse than it currently is. I would like more options to do things, particularly on nights Amber gets home late, but I am not lonely. I get my work done, I write, I do chores. I have animals to keep my company, though I do not want not rely on nonhuman animals for companionship. They do not hold up their ends of conversations in a way to which I care to admit.

I prewrite much of this before the meeting, in part because it saves me from having to remember the chronology. Mostly, though, it is because it invests me in telling this. Having gone so far as to having used my writing time, I will need to have follow-through. Otherwise, the words are wasted and the story is flaccid. "I met a woman. She was okay. I'm sure there is a moral in there somewhere." You, my unlikely readers, surely demand fireworks.

Amber and I arrive to the diner well ahead of Melissa, in part because holiday traffic has delayed her. I text that we are seated beside a giant fork. It should be impossible to miss us.

We hold off in ordering, though I text Melissa that she can send her order and I can have it waiting for her. I tend to preplan what I will have when dining out so I do not have the stress of it. Tonight, partially in deference to her vegetarianism and my lack of clarity as it if others eating animals offends her, I decided on a vegetable omelet, wheat toast, and hash browns (grilled, not fried). Amber does not care for the etiquette of having a vegetarian present and gets bacon.

Melissa does not reply. Amber is becoming antsy. She doesn't want to be here. She has work in the morning, which she knew in advance, and now is bothered by my having planned it this way. I offered Amber that she could stay home, that I would make her dinner, but she declined. She didn't want to be here, but she wouldn't be left home while I went out with a strange woman.

There is someone outside the window and I walk over to see if it is Melissa. Amber states that I look peculiar doing that and that I should remain in my seat for everyone's good.

When Melissa arrives, I know her at once. I would know her down a street in heavy traffic, the way I know my friends.

She sits and we talk as though we have long been friends. I hand her a box of Reese's pieces, at which she laughs, because we already have an inside joke. I still ask her getting-to-know you questions because, no matter this sense of bonhomie, I do not know her in any solid way. Our conversation does not need this, but I cannot resist.

Amber says later that Melissa seemed nervous, but I notice nothing much of this. Amber knows nervousness better than I would.

Afterward, I couldn't describe Melissa's physical appearance in any further detail than I could before, but I have memorized the shape of her glasses: rounded lenses connected and attached with thin triangles, vague cats-eye corners. The rest of her is hazy, but I am confident I could sketch out her glasses well enough that I might get the prescription right.

After an hour and a half, Amber says it is time for her to return home to sleep. Once Melissa has left, Amber asks where she lives. When I tell her, she expresses regret that we left so soon, as though Melissa may not have gotten her money's worth in this brief meal. Amber says that she could have taken the car home and I could have walked the ten minutes home.

Melissa has to travel to her parents' home down in Virginia the next day. It may not be so onerous a thing that we ended the evening early. Still, it seems like too short a time for her to have driven over 2 hours in total, though I paid for her dinner in deference of this.

The next day, Melissa sends me a picture of the Reese's Pieces in her hand on the plane, thanking me for the in flight snack. We chat a while longer, as friendly in our banter. I do feel as though we are a friendship that will grow, but I am in that platonic infatuation stage where the other person is amazing. I am not to be trusted. This happened with Daniel and Hannah, but not since. It makes me smile to correspond with her. I have an instinct with her, but I don't have much on which to base it. She works with horses, she volunteered for Peace Corp. She cared for a horse named M&M (or Eminem depending on the tastes of the owner), but the owner says it is hers in essence. She started her barn career shoveling shit, but no longer must. Her ex ate meat and this does not seem to bother her or be his worst fault. Ask me much else about her and I would falter, but I would still assure you that I like her and she is good people.

She is looking for someone with whom to spend the rest of her life. She recently (I don't know how recently) found it necessary to get out of a relationship. She is too shy for dancing, but I have offered myself to serve as a wingman to help her find someone. I like the idea of this, the implication of further activities.

It seems like an adventure, getting to know a new person.

Soon in Xenology: Magical thinking and witchcraft.

last watched: The End of the F***ing World
reading: Mogworld