I was not attractive in high school. I’m not complaining. Being homely is an underrated form of birth control. It isn’t necessarily salubrious for a teenage girl’s self-esteem, but self-esteem is a lie invented to sell shampoo. I fancied myself a photographer as a teenager, but I had ulterior motives. All this to say, I knew that the boys I liked in high school would not reciprocate my feelings, unless they were lobotomized and had uncorrected vision problems. I didn’t need to date them. But I could take their picture.

V had long, lustrous hair with natural highlights. It was the kind of hair that convinced you to eat the apple if it meant talking to Satan. Angels have died and become phoenixes over this hair. He was a metalhead, a serial monogamist, and rode a longboard, which all added up to him being basically untouchable, partly because he was claimed and partly because he was too sexy to do anything with someone like me. These were essentially indisputable facts.

On a near daily basis, I told V how pretty he was, because at the time, I loved calling boys pretty. V would, in my yearbook, say he would miss the “constant flattery.” He also wrote: “I wish that I wouldn’t see that camera again, but I know it’ll be in my face faster than I can say CUM SHOT.” In truth, though, he was an exceedingly gracious sport about being constantly objectified. I only wish I had remembered to also compliment his personality. 

I remember a snowy day and a Minolta film camera I was just learning how to use. I plucked V out of class—of course I had memorized his schedule—and into the cold so I could take his picture. 

V took out his lighter and smoked a cigarette. I was flustered by having gotten what I wanted: him alone, the possibility of art. If only all involuntary celibates were this resourceful. If you can’t be with a man in a dark room, try developing one in a darkroom. 

V did not seem entirely at ease. Was that why he was smoking? He looked at me for direction. I looked at him because I was always looking at him. I forgot about aperture. I wanted at least one cheesy but real smile.

“Make me smile!” he said. A playful challenge.

I rose to the occasion. I said, “Titties!”

He did smile. I still use this trick.

◆

On May 13, 2011, I turned eighteen. 

I was not popular in any conventional sense, but people knew who I was: the annoying girl with the camera. I told everyone and anyone about my birthday in advance; you could say I was an attention whore and you wouldn’t be wrong. It’s a law of physics that even your enemies have to be nice to you on your birthday. 

It was lunch hour. I had not yet escaped my friends. They were probably talking about their shared obsession with the Jonas Brothers. I could not relate to these people. V, nearly always flanked by his similarly cool friends, walked towards me. He was alone, which was unusual. How had he even known where to find me? He asked me to follow him. Something was up. 

It was unclear whether he had a specific destination in mind; in retrospect, I think he was only looking for privacy. The location he settled on was not remotely private, but it must have been vacant, if only fleetingly: an asphalt path between the building we’d just left, and the building, referred to as the six hundreds, that housed the metalworks and woodworks classrooms, close to the parking lot. I could not tell you if it was deciduous or coniferous, but there was a tree behind us.

“Close your eyes,” he said. 

“You’re scaring me,” I said. But I closed my eyes.

Nothing computed. Everything he was doing foreshadowed romance-adjacent things, which was clearly illogical. He was beautiful and had a girlfriend. I was as unfucked as you could possibly be. I was his publicly ardent admirer who often took his picture. These were our roles. 

He spun me around like a carousel in need of a surprise. He adjusted my hair. And then he kissed me on the cheek. It was some seriously wholesome shit. Still, though. I would not be kissed on the mouth by a man for an excruciatingly long time, and when I was, it would be anticlimactic, the consequence of mutual inebriation, and not especially romantic. 

But this chaste kiss was from the rings of Saturn, deliciously godless, a shortcut to being drunk; it was capocollo, it was thunderstorms; it was a poem playing the cello.

I opened my eyes. It was not a hallucination. 

“You get a kiss on the cheek for your birthday,” he said. He smiled and hugged me. How long had he been planning to do that? I wish I’d asked him that right then, but I was losing several brain cells and at risk for a serious arrhythmia. There was no way that I could tell anyone about it; the whole thing was too embarrassing, too wonderful, embarrassing because it was wonderful.

◆

The first time I saw B, I was pretending to read The Brothers Karamazov.

It was 2014, I was twenty-one, a one-time college drop-out with aspirations of becoming well-travelled. Dublin was the last city on my solo itinerary. I felt more lonely than cultured. B could not have arrived at a better moment to interrupt my noncommittal sadness.

When he entered the hostel common room, it seemed to me like he owned it. The walls straightened their spines; he became the only noun in all of space and time. With that face card, he could easily lead a cult. I realized any notion of sexual attraction I’d ever had was immature and incorporeal. He was so handsome that his personality, whatever unknown amorphous thing it was, would doubtless reap the manifold rewards of the halo effect. I was looking at the Platonic ideal of male beauty, an Adonis.

Before his entrance, I was finding it difficult to focus on Dostoyevsky. Why was Alyosha such a sanctimonious prick? What did it say about me that I perceived him that way? I liked Russian literature, but more than that, I liked being someone who was familiar with Russian literature. 

I was also distracted from the fear that I’d squandered a perfectly good opportunity to dispense with my cumbrous virginity to an Australian man I’d met in London. We got drunk on a pub tour and then finished a bottle of mead in my room, which all nicely constellated toward sex until I remembered I was still menstruating. In my mind, period sex was the kind of sex that comfortable couples in possession of blue towels had, not drunk virgins in London. I was cock-blocked by the shedding of my uterine lining. If the Australian was angry about my mind changing, he didn’t show it, which made him even more attractive. 

Only now, though, B completely monopolized my thoughts. As it turned out, B had also grown up in Vancouver, which, as far as I was concerned, was a coincidence tantamount to fate. I had never seen anything—anyone—I’d wanted more. The closest approximation could only be when I first tasted arugula on a pizza, an unbridled pleasure and shock of a spunky mustard green with no qualms about boldness, which becomes utterly sublime with a bit of oil, salt, pepper, and lemon. A drop of acid to temper perfection.

When I shook his hand, I didn’t want to let go. I introduced myself and asked him for his name. 

“I like the name Russ,” he said.

His name wasn’t Russ. 

He could see how vexed I was by his evasion, but also that I was treating his nondisclosure like a knowledge quest, which amused him. He intuited, correctly, how much I wanted to learn about him and took pleasure from withholding information, for it was not his intention to keep me in the dark indefinitely but merely to tease me. And how much sweeter that would be, that delayed gratification. A drop of acid. Perfection, tempered. 

Eventually, another hostel guest, a man relatively unburdened by erotic longing, asked for his name. B answered the man like a normal, polite person but, I thought, he was really addressing me. 

The man who asked for B’s name suggested we all go to a pub. I was relieved that he’d made the suggestion, since it meant I could shelve my courage for another occasion. That evening, at a pub, I bought B a Guinness because that seemed like the advanced, feminist thing to do. I pulled out my notebook because I felt certain I wanted to record everything he said. It was arousing to hear him use words like almanac and stochastic. If he so much as exhaled, that was worth transcribing verbatim. I still did not completely believe he was a real person, let alone talking to me.

B and the man began to talk about sports. 

“Have you noticed,” B said, “that she stopped writing once we started talking about sports?”

B had a knack for speaking to me indirectly. It was as though we had our own inside jokes, that other people were merely props for our communicative purposes. His implication that I was a typical girl with zero interest in sports was, for the most part, true. 

“The Stanley Cup riots weren’t that long ago,” I said. “I’ve sworn off hockey.”

I both loved and hated that B had guessed correctly. I wanted to defy stereotypes simply by breathing, but I relished the recognition. 

When the three of us walked back to the hostel, the man disappeared, perhaps tired of being a third wheel. B and I lingered in the common room, neither of us ready for bed, not when there was still so much to talk about. Almost everyone was using a laptop and wearing headphones. 

“What have you done that you’re proud of?” B asked me.

This felt like an interview with sexual tension. Did he know the answer was, essentially, nothing? But I couldn’t say that. I wanted to impress him. I learned later that he’d earned a PhD in astronomy. In other words, a professional stargazer, a description that would surely make him balk.

“I’ve made some good sandwiches,” I finally said.

He laughed. 

“Really good sandwiches,” I hastened to add.

There are twenty-one-year-old wunderkinds who volunteer in soup kitchens and speak six languages who will, perhaps, do something about the world’s rampant oil use, but that wasn’t me. I had dropped out of college once already. The publicly acceptable answer for my solo travels was, of course, adventure and culture. The real reason I was in Europe, though, was because I didn’t think anyone back home would fuck me. But hearing him laugh, even if it was at my expense, felt like I had finally done something right. 

When B invited me to join him in Belfast, my stomach contorted as though it had grown its own advanced nervous system. I could hardly fathom my luck. I said yes immediately. I would have responded with equal enthusiasm if he’d asked if I wanted to rob a bank or wrestle sharks. 

“Why are you inviting me?” I asked, perpetually in need of external validation that would not come.

“No company is better than bad company,” he said, a rather lukewarm admission. “And good company is better than no company.” Still, a mild triumph—I was good company.

◆

In Belfast, B asked the receptionist at the hotel for two beds. 

With disappointment, I resigned myself to witty conversation and nothing else. Another blip in my European itinerary, another man that I did not have sex with. It seemed entirely possible I’d die of sexual frustration. 

He pronounced the tiny room to be cute, a funny word coming out of his mouth. He turned the lights off, saying he wanted a nap. For a person that claimed to want to nap, though, he answered my questions with startling frankness, a contrast from his previous withholding. When I asked him how old he was, he said he was thirty-one.

The questionnaire ended when he reached for me across our separate beds and I found myself on his lap. He kissed me, which was nothing short of a cosmic miracle. My incredulity was even larger than my sense of gratitude. 

“What are you doing?” I said. 

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” he said.

It seemed fundamentally ridiculous to be kissed by someone this handsome. When I relayed my inexperience, he was unbothered by my virginity. 

“We don’t have to do anything,” he said.

“Oh, but we do,” I said, which made him laugh.

He already had condoms, which gave me the slightest of pauses. 

“Why are you so prepared?” 

“Because I’m a good boy,” he said. 

And he was good. He was cautiously attentive, used a condom, and guided me with patience. Everyone came and nobody cried. It could have been a PSA for ideal sex. He spooned me for a minute or less before announcing he needed to shower. That hurt my feelings a little, but I wasn’t all that desolate—after all, I’d just come on his face.

We ate dinner at a restaurant called Maggie May’s. He ordered chili, refused to share, and told me I’d been missing out on a lot of fun. 

How peculiar, I thought, to have enthusiastic, probably loud sex with someone and then to sit across from them, eating dinner, all the while wearing clothes. Right now, there was a used condom in a wastebasket because of us. I felt downright lucky to have found someone so perfectly suited for the dubiously weighty task of forever influencing a young woman’s sexual trajectory.

“You’re a quick learner,” he told me.

I had never wanted to study more.

◆

The hotel was booked for one more night. 

The next day of sight-seeing and visiting museums seemed beside the point when sex was an option. B, though, didn’t seem to feel the same way. The only time he touched me was on the shoulder, when I was walking in the wrong direction. I learned that he had “The Second Coming” by Yeats memorized by heart. He told me that the food in a museum, is almost always reliable—not necessarily mind-blowingly good, but never bad. I have found this to be true. 

By the time we returned to the hotel, as charming as Belfast was, I had a whole day of repressed desire singeing my brain. B went on his laptop and played “Sex and Candy” by Marcy Playground. When someone you want to have sex with again has the same taste in music as you, it is a real aphrodisiac. As if I needed one. And so, with no suaveness and zero segue, I simply announced, “I’m horny.” 

“Oh,” B said. This was, apparently, something of a surprise, but not an unpleasant one. He kissed me and really, there is no point in comparing that to anything. He undressed me and wanted me on my stomach. It soon became clear that he wanted anal sex, which was not something I felt ready for. 

In theory, I had no objection. Ali Wong explains the fear well: “Women, they wax their eyebrows, they do all sorts of crazy shit. You’re not scared of the pain. What you’re really scared of is doo doo on the dick. You’re scared that he’s gonna see that, and that’s gonna be all of your shame, your inner evil, all your secrets and lies. Sephora can’t help you now. But don’t worry, ’cause when he puts it in the butt, all he’s thinking about is, ‘I just put it in her butt. I gotta go call my mom, my dad, Dave, my grandma.’” 

But in practice, I was scared and told him so. I could feel the deflation, his barely repressed anger. Now we were sitting and I knew he was frustrated with my reticence. Hadn’t I, after all, just blatantly said I was horny? Wasn’t this, on some crude level, literally the definition of asking for it?

He asked if I could relax. I asked if I could have a hug. He obliged. It was not a very lengthy hug. Shortly after, I must have seemed sufficiently relaxed to him because he kneeled on my bed, a position that looked uncomfortable, and exposed himself. He issued a terse command in the imperative: “Suck it.”

Why couldn’t I relax? 

My feeble, demure refusal likely sounded pathetic and malleable. 

What I can tell you is that Diorshow’s waterproof mascara is dead-ass waterproof, that it was painfully obvious that he’d eaten a bean-rich dinner the night before, that a dental hygienist would be able to detect bruising in my soft palate, that I was being shown who was actually in charge, that the fact that I choked was probably some kind of turn-on. 

When he entered me afterwards, I enjoyed it. A lot. It was, in fact, a relief.

But then he flipped me into a prone position and I knew what was going to happen. He was going to have everything he wanted, and I was going to be the person who made that possible. There was an inevitability in the air. There was no point in protesting; whatever that was, I deserved it.

◆

The next morning, I did not acknowledge the blood I saw in my urine. It was easier to flush the toilet and eat breakfast with him.  

I was obviously terrible at communication; it wasn’t like he was a mind reader. This couldn’t be rape; this was a rite of passage; this was another girl’s average Friday night. 

I did not acknowledge that I had been raped because I still liked him after the fact.

◆

Before going our separate ways, we went to a coffee shop.

B ordered a hot chocolate with marshmallows and I enjoyed the contrastive sight of him with a childish-looking drink. The marshmallows were pink. I had a ristretto; I haven’t had one since.

I asked to take B’s picture. I already missed him, even though he was right in front of me. Instead of responding, he spoke about his excitement for Glasgow. I hadn’t been invited to Glasgow. Had he even heard me?  

When we left, he said, “You said you wanted a picture.” So: he had been listening.

It’s a good picture, though it is not how I remember him.

◆

For years, on and off, I sent B lengthy e-mails, managing a tone both nonchalantly conversational and deeply obsessed. They are, I’m sure, incriminating. 

Without fail, he always changed the e-mail subject title and his responses were always shorter than mine. I tried to mimic this level of concision; sometimes I even succeeded. In one response, he advised me not to be so eager. Are you warning me about yourself, or about other men? I wanted to ask him, but I didn’t. 

Periodically, I check if B has succumbed to social media. When I met him, he was smug about not having a cell phone. I found one of his sisters on Instagram. Her account was—still is—public. I learned that she travelled to Iceland with B. His beard has become greyer. I’m surprised to see that he sometimes wears a hat backwards. 

He is, to my irritation, still handsome. A poor man’s Jon Hamm. I don’t know if he is single; I am afraid to know, but I have to know.

I’m frustrated by how little he exists on the Internet, as if learning that he is stultifyingly married with children or miserably promiscuous in Toronto will help. My curiosity is an inevitable perversion. I read an obituary for one of his grandmothers. I am strangled by the conviction that there is something irreversibly wrong about me. I disgust myself; I don’t know how to stop.

Finally, my efforts are rewarded with an Instagram account that might well be his. It has not been updated for years and seems to have documented B’s preparation for Catalina Crossing—some kind of boating event. I watched a video of him licking strawberry ice cream. What the fuck. The captions were written in third-person like a bad author bio. It’s unbelievably lame. This is the man I idolized, the one who raped me? 

I didn’t know what to do with this information. It was never, I suppose, really about the information. I needed to know he still exists. I have imagined meeting him so many times—he would acknowledge what he’d done, cry as much as I have, and apologize. And mean it. The forgiveness would be transcendent. We’d both be moved and I’d get rich after penning a highly stylized trauma porn memoir that would be heralded as timely and urgent; I would forgo quotation marks in dialogue, make excessive use of negative space, and juxtapose the rape with humor, as one does, and it would all seem worth it. 

Or something.

◆

A year later, I run into V.

I was leaving Bandidas on Commercial Drive. V wore sunglasses and a grey western style shirt. He now worked at an upscale seafood restaurant. According to him, one of the girls he worked with was especially beautiful. It sounded like he was overwhelmed by her beauty. I understood the feeling a little too well. And, to no one’s surprise, she liked him back. She also happened to be his boss’s daughter, which did somewhat thicken the plot. 

I thought, as I always had: we lived Rather Different Lives. V always got the girl and I listened to people like V talk about those girls. Cool story, bro. 

I had nothing remotely similar to relay to him. It was not exactly a propitious time for a rape story, on the sidewalk in front of a 24/7 vegan Mexican restaurant. I still did not think of anything B had done as rape. I was in denial land. The truth is, I miss it from time to time. 

V lit a cigarette. He looked like he was in a band. I wanted to think I’d developed an immunity to this aesthetic, but seeing him, I realized I had not. I took his picture. An old man nearby, perhaps with an itch to be photographed—the desire to be seen—who maybe saw himself in V, joined in. The photo is a perfect advertisement for intergenerational mischief. V and the old man appear to be friends rather than strangers; there is no darkness. 

◆

I don’t see V again until 2024 when life and the Internet conspired, in a good way, for us to meet. I ask him if I can take his picture and receive an enthusiastic response. When I suggest he’ll be most comfortable in his own home, I half-expect him to object but he doesn’t. 

I invented a mythology for V and now, twelve years later, I find the mythology is eclipsed by reality. He lives in a green house. I hug him for way too long. He’s grown a beard and his hair is short now. “Better for LinkedIn,” he explains apologetically. This all suits him. He no longer smokes or drinks. He is a passionate sound engineer who loves his job, his sisters, and his cat.           

V meets my dog; I meet his cat. My dog is in love with his cat. His cat is indifferent. 

When he hands me a carton of oat milk to pour in the coffee he’s brewed, I look at him with feigned disgust and say, “I’m a guest.” He ends up pouring the oat milk for me. He starts saying something about how some people like to pour their own milk but starts laughing instead. 

An involuntary symptom of a crush is to laugh a disproportionate amount at one’s love interest’s utterances. But that’s impossible. There is no world in which V fancies me. Men always think I’m funny and proceed not to sleep with me. 

At one point, I ask him if he remembers running into me on the bus when we were nineteen or so and telling me his father died. He doesn’t. 

I decide to ask a pressing question: “Was your dad hot?” 

Emphatically, V says, “Yeah!” He isn’t perturbed by the question in the least. He shows me a film photo. His dad was hot as a ghost pepper. Figures, really. 

V asks me if I am sentimental. I don’t recall what prompts the question. Maybe just my presence, after all this time.

I say, “Have you met me?” 

He tells me he is also sentimental. The leather jacket he used to wear in high school belonged to his dad. I recognize it immediately when I see it hanging on the wall. I try it on and it feels like a hug from a broken man who, nevertheless, understands affection.

V’s car is named Red Car. He is, to my surprise, a total dork with an outsized fondness for Sonic the Hedgehog. When I’m unfamiliar with a reference he makes, he becomes self-conscious. Was he like this in high school? He mentions NASA-funded research that led to a woman having sex with a dolphin. I explain why male ducks have corkscrew penises. We are covering very important conversational ground. It is far easier to talk to him than I might have imagined. I notice he never sits beside me, but always opts for an armchair. I sit on the coffee table instead of the couch to be closer to him. Does he notice my gradual proximity increases? We’ve talked about so many things but we’ve been skirting around one thing in particular.

“What’s new with you?” he says.

His question is terribly broad and I tell him so. 

“Are you … are you married?” he finally says. 

V seems mortified by his reluctantly uttered curiosity. 

“That doesn’t really seem like something I’d do, does it?” I say. 

I want V to think I’m too outstandingly original for traditional institutions that historically have worsened women’s lives. I don’t know how convincing that is. 

He compliments me, many times, but never on my appearance. I can’t tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing. He refers to me as “the only professional writer I know.” I fear I have somehow tricked him into thinking I’m impressive.

He says, “You are as I remember, but with a nice evolution.” 

I try not to read into this.

◆

I was on Swedish television once. A crow once landed on my head and I thought: oh, so this is what it’s like to be chosen. But what is truly melting clocks surreal, though, is when I ask V if he remembers giving me an unorthodox gift. I never thought I would be in his living room, both thirty, talking about something he did when we were both extremely young and stupid.

V does not remember. Drug use will do that. Conversely, writing shit down and incessant photography will burn everything a little brighter in the hippocampus. I don’t know which is preferable, but at the moment, drug use seems to be coming out on top.

“Are you trying to embarrass me?” 

He isn’t. 

I tell him what he gave me on my eighteenth birthday, which, however forgotten, was also premeditated to some degree. It turns out, you don’t usually die of embarrassment. I survive. Barely.

He doesn’t laugh like I expect, but looks perplexed. Troubled, even. You would’ve thought I told him he once farted in my face on purpose.

“That’s a weird move,” he pronounces of his former self. He does not remember the kiss but he does, of course, remember that I liked him. “I’m sorry for weird gifts. Oh God. What was I thinking?” 

“I was going to ask you that,” I say.

“This is cringe,” he says. “But kind of cute.”

“I honestly think you were just being nice,” I say. 

He doesn’t seem convinced. Is it possible he thinks he enacted a sinister power imbalance, given our then vast attractiveness discrepancies, that he was all but egotistically guaranteeing I would never forget him? But I really do think he was just trying to be nice, acting on an impulse he must have planned at least an hour beforehand, if not longer. I amuse myself with the idea of teenage V, likely stoned, deliberating on an appropriate present for the girl with the camera: what can I do that doesn’t involve jumping her bones? A card would have been fine or hell, a Kleenex he sneezed on. What a thoughtful weirdo. No wonder I can’t tell anyone this story. How can I still be this embarrassed after all this time? 

I decide to text him later. The melting clocks sensation hasn’t stopped.