NG#3

I had my date with NG#3 on Wednesday night. As tempting as it is to keep referring to her as "NG#3" I fear I would be doing her a disservice, because she is clearly so much more than a number. Now I have to think of a pseudonym for her. Fuck. Okay, let's call her Astrid. That's fun. She has star like qualities, for sure.

So, Astrid and I met at the Orbit Room (oh, god, no outerspace puns intended) and I was nervous as hell, sweating in probably a very unattractive manner for a good half hour before I calmed down. She seemed much more collected than me. We ordered a round of drinks and then another. We found a lot of things to talk about--we talked about writing and her family and my family and what I do for work and what she studies in her grad program and other things that are probably a lot more trivial. So, we talked nicely together, but the conversational dynamic was difficult in a certain way. I'll try to describe it. If you read this blog, you clearly know I've a knack, or probably more of a compulsion, to share longwinded and gangly details of my internal monologue (I know, it's sort of the nature of this medium, but I can assure you that this is how I talk in real life, too). It's an obsessive and often tedious, I'm sure, way of communicating which always calls attention--unwittingly self-consciously, I'm afraid--to the dynamics of the conversation. Astrid is much easier than all that. I think she arrives at things to talk about in a much more organic way than I do, and I was feeling, throughout our time at the bar, that I was prodding her a bit beyond her comfort. It's not that I get the sense that she regretted sharing anything with me, it's that I think she thought all my meta questioning was rather like being under an interrogation lamp. And so, when I said to her, after Drink #2, that I was thinking she was cute, and very cool, and I was open to something happening, she got a bit uncomfortable and let me know that she doesn't like to define things in such a rush. I felt somewhat uneasy with this news, but when she suggested another round of drinks, I figured I wasn't in the dog house just yet. In retrospect, I really appreciated this moment, because it reminded me to loosen up and not worry so much about my agenda.

A note on how fucking cute Astrid is: she's got dyed black hair in a Betty Paige kind of a bob, with short bangs. She's got brown eyes and freckles. She's thin but curvy in very pleasing places on her body. I did not mention this to her, naturally, but I spent a decent amount of time looking at her ass while she was waiting at the bar for our drinks (and, since I'm giving her the URL to my blog, I guess she'll now know this fact of my lechery). I think I'm especially drawn by her eyes, in those moments of silence that make me nervous and make me want to fill them with words; she holds kindness in her eyes in these moments. I get that impression, anyway.

So after the third round of drinks, we left the bar and started up Market Street. While we were waiting at a stoplight at the entrance to the bike alley behind the Safeway, I asked her how she was feeling about this thing we were doing. She wanted me to be more explicit, she said, "What are you asking me?" and so I bashfully said, "I guess I'm asking if I can kiss you." And, to that, she said, as if it had been obvious all along, "Yeah!" So I moved closer to her, and I put my arms on her shoulders for some reason. And I looked at her, and I leaned my head in and we kissed, very tentatively, at first; she teases when she kisses, and it's a very subtle business, but it's beautiful, actually. It felt like in that moment, the entire energy shifted between us. I was finally completely comfortable, and it didn't matter whether or not she was going to come home with me. We'd kissed, and it was much sweeter than I thought it'd be.

We began walking again, now toward the Muni stop where she was going to catch the N train home. And that Muni stop is also, conveniently, a half block away from my front door. So when we got to the corner, I asked her if she was going to catch the N, or if she was going to come home with me. And so, she came home with me.

I won't lapse into pornographic detail here, but I do want to relay a few key thoughts about the time we spent in my bed. We kissed a lot. We spent a lot of time looking into each other's eyes; I think we were both searching for something, though I'm not convinced we'll find it. I felt completely at home with her, but it was also really new and unpredictable. We grabbed each other a lot, and really hard, and it felt urgent to be with her. But it was also connected and tender and so fucking lovely. And when we were done, we slept close to each other, and had some intermittent strokes and arms around each other and snips of pillow talk in the morning that were much easier and more flowing than the night before. Never underestimate the relaxing powers of a nice snog, right?

We ended up seeing each other again last night, just for a hang out with no expectations, which was perfect. She invited me to a spoken word/reading event at a bar in the Mission. The rapport was more immediate, at first. She bought us beers, and we listened to the readers and had nice chats between sets. We laughed quite a bit. The readers were excellent, on the whole, and I'm so glad we went to the show. We grabbed some food with her friends afterward, and then I walked her to her bus stop. There was something forced about our final exchange, though, waiting for the bus. I put my foot in it by suggesting that the research she'd be doing the next afternoon sounded boring. It was a lame, flippant comment that I wish I could take back, but there it is, hanging in the ether. At the end of the day, as they say, I think we've got really different sensibilities, and I don't know how it will play out, whether we will be in each others' lives in any enduring way, or whether it will fizzle pretty quickly. I think we have fun together, though, and I think we have really lovely chemistry.

If it weren't for the inconvenience of talking, one on one, in a manner that felt natural to us both...if we could cull our communication to two modes, one with words in print, and one with touch. If we could meet silently and fall into bed and save the talking for later. I wonder if she feels this, too, or if I'm just doing my gangly monologue for the sake of doing it. As I said, she's easier than all that. I don't get the sense that she has great expectations about how we do this conversation thing together. But there's something in her easiness that makes me uneasy. And this disease completely vanishes when I look into those eyes. And it dissolves when I'm writing to her or writing about her. I have no fear at all about her reading this. But the idea of speaking it terrifies.

previous - next