On my last first date

(Ron Hicks)

I wore a long-sleeved velvet dress, and he seemed lovely. I'd suggested a bar on 13th and 6th because it was next to my office, through the small door under a red awning, warm lights, new patatas bravas slid across the bar, no questions, a waiter who hates me and everyone. The person I met wore a gray sweater and we talked for almost four hours. I noticed his hands, very elegant, liked the way he spoke about his friends with care and admiration, the paintings he wanted to make when he could get the materials, something about stretching canvasses from scratch. We discovered we both used to go to the same bookstore/cafe, and talked about the owner's new baby and how happy we were about it. I kissed him at the bar. He told me he wanted to meet again, and I assumed we would.


My sister was staying with me the next week, so I planned to meet him that following weekend when he ended a bartending shift. I woke up an hour after I was supposed to confirm our meetup was still on. It was fine, he said, also we could just meet later, maybe Thursday. I had rehearsal Monday, and that Tuesday was the last time in over a month I would take the train into Manhattan. By Wednesday I had cancelled my standing doctors’ appointments, and it was recommended that if I could work from home, and felt more comfortable doing so, I should just do that. We volleyed for the next week or so, erratic missives of 8+ texts all at once. A request to hang out soon, he wrote, “perhaps when there are bars open and paranoia has subsided?”

It's been a few weeks, and I wear a mask to leave my apartment and talk to my friends over the phone. One of the stupider but also wholly unimportant in context casualties of this pandemic is the sense of possibility that now feels deeply pointless. I would have liked to see the normal and obvious ways we probably would have figured out we weren’t going to continue seeing each other, would have let the conversations winnow over time because of work or different expectations or emotional residue from other people who left deeper, more lasting impressions. Or maybe we could have hit it off, in a real way. I’ll stop feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t know him well enough to miss him at all, obviously. I wonder if he’s still in the city.