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We drink our coffee the same. Light and sweet.

This (Sunday evening) is the first I’ve been alone this weekend since I picked her up on Friday, for what was supposed to be our first date, driving to Baltimore on Saturday to go to a housewarming party for her oldest friend. It was not our first date, however, as perhaps you guessed by the fact I picked her up on Friday. We reached first date level that evening, at a little Thai place in Occoquan, so quiet and empty we practically had to whisper to each other to match the ambiance. She’s got these deep brown eyes and a heart-stopper of a smile, especially if you happen to be the one who brought it out, but that smile emerges on its own plenty enough, her mind, sharp and fast, forever bending its surrounding stimuli, molding and folding the unknown into the known, making rapid-fire comparisons and categorizations and analyses and computations, seeking something to hold her interest, entertain her, engage her emotional core, the end result of which is often a smile, and everything is right with the world.

***

Everything is wrong with the world.

***

She’s as fascinating as a spectacle, but familiar as an old secret. We’ve only just met, but there are strings of her traceable throughout my past. The best illustration of this is the playlists. We made each other playlists and several of our chosen artists overlapped, but more than that several of our songs overlapped. We hadn’t discussed our musical tastes much at all, but the selection criteria seemed impossibly easy to me, and in fact several of the songs came from music shared with me by past girlfriends. So, whereas in previous relationships I’ve been scolded for keeping photos of past girlfriends in the mix when allowing my computer screensaver to pull from my entire photo collection, in this one I don’t feel the divider coming down between my past life and my present, my past and my future. These girlfriends and their music shaped me and now I am this version of me that I wouldn’t have been otherwise and it just so happens Abbey likes this version of me so much. I’m not about to hide how I got here and she wouldn’t want me to.

Her name is Abbey. My girlfriend’s name is Abbey.

She’s funnier than me. Which means she’s smarter than me, which I find outrageously attractive and also just makes her phenomenal company. We don’t have to talk, even. Silences are not uncomfortable. I am fine with giving her brain some quiet space to work its magic. Actually the quiet intervals make me feel even more comfortable, in that when we are talking it’s not just noise, it’s communication.

We actually first met in person the week before our first date was scheduled to occur. Actually, hang on, we actually first-first met on the dating app a year before. Hit it off pretty smackin’ well, to be honest, and we were trending toward a meet-up, but for whatever reason, the gods of randomness, or my inexperience with dating apps and not knowing when it was appropriate to ask someone to meet (although I’d already made it clear I wanted to meet her, I never solidified the date and time), in any event, she found another person who did know when to ask and they dated for most of the year. But when that ended she got back onto the dating app, where I had been lingering, checking in from time to time when I thought *surely* I’ve sifted through enough profiles by now to find, if not my someone, then at least a body close enough to my someone that, when we meet, I would not be afraid to touch them.

Really, turns out, I was just waiting for her.

***

There’s an account I follow on Bluesky which shares the profile of a different Gazan citizen every day, detailing what they had before the war and what they lost, and their GoFundMe. Lots of times when you see a GoFundMe, even if you can’t donate to it you can at least share it, but with these Gazans you share one post and 50 people follow you, probably a scammer or three in the mix there somewhere, but even if they are all real, it’s too much, they’re so desperate for help, I don’t have enough money to spread around to help all of them, despite each person’s story being worse than the last.

Best I can do right now is some mornings before I get out of bed I’ll check that account and see who’s being featured today and see if I can quiet the capitalistic demon within me long enough to donate fifty bucks.

***

I asked my best friend, after Abbey and I matched on Bumble again and I immediately gave her my number this time and a few days of direct texting revealed to me exactly where this whole thing was heading, to help me keep my head. To not go too fast, and hopefully to thereby somehow avoid wrecking it. She agreed, don’t go too fast, I will help you with an abundant supply of logic and caution, and by the way give me yours and her information so I can read your birth charts.

A day or so later, on Valentine’s Day, Abbey said she’d be nearby and should we perhaps meet finally. The way she phrased it, I believe, was “should we meet up and have our first kiss.”

Hot.

I said I’d love to, this however is my Alex weekend and we for sure can’t introduce you to him for the first time at the same time as the first time you’re meeting me in person. That would be world-record fast but more to the point inadvisable, plus the other parent needs to vet the prospective partner first before meeting the child, of course, and probably a whole laundry list of other reasons that she should not drop by—but although, I mean, after bedtime, we could probably, sure, just briefly, yes, gulp, we could go ahead and knock that out, why not.

I should mention, at this point, “delulu,” a term Abbey introduced me to, which means delusional, specifically in the way of relationships and their fantastical optimism about certain topics, “we’ll play this song at our wedding” for example, when no proposal has been made or remotely considered. So a part of this first kiss offer was just that, our “shared delulu,” our inside joke about how well we had hit it off. But how much of it was that, and how much was genuine. Difficult to say, especially with someone whose biological certainty you have yet to confirm with your own eyes.

***

There’s an app for your phone you can use to select an issue and get the phone numbers for your government representatives most involved with that issue. It’s called 5 calls, if you are interested. On Monday I’m going to start using it to make some phone calls, but I’m not going to argue my point with morals or values or hope for the future, because these people in power right now have none of the above. I’m going to speak in the language that they understand, which is power and money. I will describe to them how their dumb choices are alienating their voters, and the only way to alienate voters and stay in power is fascism. I will make a very specific threat as many times as I can: if you do not sack up and figure out a way to stop the dissolution of the constitution, of democracy, happening on your watch, I will personally run against you, and I will beat you. I will find donors, I will run a Bernie-style campaign, collect as many small donations from as many people as I can, and I will collect just as many opinions. I will be representative of their needs without trying to convince them their needs can be easily solved by persecuting immigrants and putting money in the pockets of billionaires, and my message will resonate, and I will, personally, unseat you. Councilman, congressman, senator. I don’t care. Whatever it takes.

Actually, probably better if everyone threatens to run. I should make a script, pass it around. Call your senator, call your congressperson, tell them you are coming for their jobs if they can’t do them properly themselves.

***

Alex had been asleep for about an hour when she pulled into the driveway, and instead of pulling all the way up to the house where I’d left a gap for her car, she pulled into the turnaround. This led to a sort of high-noon situation. I walked down the driveway toward her, she walked up toward me. We met and folded into each other in a hug. We did not let go but I pulled back a little and said, “Hi.” She said hi back. Then moments later, we kissed.

Do you, are you understanding me yet?? Do you get it? Said literally one out-loud word to each other apiece before falling into the first of the relatively large firsts in our relationship. One word! Our only prior connection being via chatting and text! Hardly any pictures exchanged at all! Also it was nighttime! Kind of dark! But even if she could see me, she’d never seen me from behind, perhaps I had been born with a lizard tail and two butts, she would’ve had no way of knowing!

Didn’t matter. No delulu. None.

***

People are dying. I mean of course, people are dying everywhere all the time, including casualties of multiple wars that should never have begun, but also it’s one of those times in my life when people in my general sphere are dying. Eric’s dad. Ben Catalogna, who trailed after me all freshman year of high school under the mistaken impression that I knew what I was doing and was not every bit as lost as he was, if not moreso, because at least he had picked a model to emulate or not, at least he was making informed decisions. I was pulling nonsense out of the ether. Hey what if I wear a Columbo-style trenchcoat to school every day of high school up through senior year, is that, is that anything? Maybe bleach my hair?

I don’t know why he died or how he died but he died and it is a sad thing. He had kids. Kids losing their father is a weak point, for me, it gets me in the guts, ever since I became a dad.

Eric’s dad did have recurrent and momentous health issues most of his adult life, so his passing was less of a shocker to his family and loved ones (also he was much older than Ben), but I should mention I’m indebted to him for a couple things. First, Eric, what would I have done without him throughout high school and college and beyond, but second, more recently: Eric’s dad Nick started over. He had a family, a wife and a daughter, and for whatever reason that family did not go as planned. I don’t know how he came to be with Eric’s mom, but this time around he was able to make it work, make it stick. He got a do-over and he did not waste it. Ever since we decided to go through with the divorce, Nick has been a source of inspiration to me, in the now-and-then when he crosses my thoughts. A divorce is not the end of the world, or even the end of romance, of hoping to find a life with a partner who’d sit in rocking chairs with you on your porch until the heat death of the universe, holding hands.

I’m waiting on the third. People always die in threes.

***

Maybe we said Hi first, then hugged, then the kiss. I don’t honestly know, my mind was on fire at the time, I’m just pleased I remained conscious.

Two days after our first real (autocorrect turned that word into “feral,” which it was, a bit) meeting, my best friend got back to us about our birth charts, and if we didn’t already know we’d have to redefine what it means to “go slow” at the start of a relationship, well, this cemented it. I won’t go into all of it, mostly because I couldn’t if I tried, but the overlaps and portents of our respective planetary alignments were… strange. Strange in the overly coincidental, too-perfect kind of a way. The stars were not only saying we should probably get together, but it should happen now, right now, the most ideal of times.

I wouldn’t say this astrological reading revealed to me my future or anything, but it did become kind of a marker to look back on as we go along, the point where my path drastically changed. I told Abbey it had felt like I was on a roller coaster careening downhill and then all of a sudden, bang, the carts smash into an obstacle along the way, immovable and imperturbable, and the track you thought was the only track is blocked, inaccessible, and so the whole kebab hangs a 90 and it is revealed to you how your own tunnel vision was complicit in the crime, keeping you alive at the expense of your awareness of what’s possible.

Did you know this was really possible? Have you looked for it before, like really looked for it? And not in movies, not in books. Actually, as a fictional plot device, this doesn’t work in just about any genre outside of romance and fairy tale. Jason Bourne has to cross half of Europe in a Mini Cooper four inches from LITERALLY THE ONLY PERSON HE KNOWS before he gets to fall in love with her. But it was fiction, it had to be that way. If they’d fallen in love in the first five minutes, people would’ve walked out of the theater.

I’m not telling you it was love at first sight. But I am telling you: I’m in love with her now. Truly, madly, deeply. I fell in love with her and it happened swiftly, deliberately, like someone somewhere had a battle plan and subjected me to a series of pinpoint, synchronized attacks. Our texting conversation had pummeled my forward defenses so thoroughly that by the time she arrived alone at my doorstep—irrationally, dangerously even—I was vulnerable, and I got flanked, broadsided by love, by coincidence, by happenstance, by fate. The barrage upended me, and with my belly exposed, love did not waste time. It went in for the kill.

I have been in training to meet this woman my entire life.

Q: What the hell does that mean?

A: It means that I am regularly struck by how our interactions mimic past interactions I have had and usually invoke lessons learned from those experience that inform my current behavior or will in all probability inform our future together.

Q: Can you maybe give us a less abstract response, you obtuse twat?

A: Hey. Whoa. Ease off, keep your beef in check or I will end this press conference early.

Q: How hot is she?

A: Inevitably. Like the hand of death itself. Now, you’re distracting me, I had something for the previous… oh right. What possible reason could I have for being afraid of horses, oh, turns out, she’s allergic to horses. Why on earth would I have spent the better part of three years with a girlfriend who was manipulative, spoiled, and selfish, but who also happened to have MS and sometimes pointedly refused to take care of herself? Could it be so that I would learn how to tend to the chronic illness of a most difficult partner/patient, so that after that boot camp, no future chronic condition could scare me away? Why did I sign up to go learn, arbitrarily, the Czech language in Europe one summer if not for the fact she did the exact same thing? Why did I play soccer—well okay, probably other people play soccer, but you get what I’m saying. It’s like Slumdog Millionaire and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure had a baby. It wouldn’t surprise me if we’re ever in a situation where I need to, say, pilot a helicopter, and all I have to do is concentrate very hard and force myself to remember to take flight lessons ten years before.

Q: …

A: I have had my values tested. I have lost faith in myself and my instincts, only to gain that faith back stronger. Even before this it’s been creeping back, calling attention to itself. Yes you can believe what you see. Yes you can rely on evidence and your own power to interpret it. I know what I want. I know the type of partner I’d adore, the type of person I’d admire, the type of citizen I would—

Q: ‘Like the hand of death itself’? What on earth are you on about? Just, scale of 10, be normal for once.

A: She’d get it. When she reads that, she’ll get it. Oh, also she doesn’t mind if I write about her in this little blog, here. And I can take pictures of her without her rushing to my side to demand immediate review and rights to terminate if the picture is not to her liking. And for all of these things that make me mad for her that I’m mentioning now, she’s got an equally lengthy list about me. This is a two-way street, this seemingly unbounded affection.

Q: Like a 9, is what you’re saying. A 10? I don’t know if I believe in a 10.

A: You don’t have to believe. This isn’t supposed to be believable, this isn’t intended to make sense, to sway you with evidentiary support that this is plausible, because it’s decidedly not plausible. That’s the point. She calls this experience we’ve had so far, and sometimes also calls me, a unicorn. (Also the playlist she made me.) It’s beyond the scope of what you know you can believe in. We are limited only by what feels like literal physics, by the physical capacity of space-time, by the fact we must exist and have cells and gravity. Beyond that? Limitless. So we will go through the required/recommended steps as best we can, we will hit at least a few of the milestones that we feel are important. But I’m telling you. Our future feels every bit as miraculous and inevitable as this startlingly informed past I’ve been describing. We will probably get married. And it will not take too long. We will probably have kids, and that will not take too long, either. Do you understand what I am saying to you now?? Do you yet comprehend the treasure I have found?

Q: I mean, did you at least get to second base?

A: What’s second base?

Q: What’s first base?

A: …I think that’s kissing. So yes, I’ve already told you, I got to “first base,” as you so callously—

Q: WHY ARE YOU BEING SO COY ABOUT THIS. C’mon, you know you want to brag, what did you two get up to this whole long weekend when you weren’t driving to Baltimore or—

A: My abs hurt.

Q: Beg pardon?

A: My abs hurt. That’s all I’m gonna say.

Q: Huh. Like bruised, or…

A: Sore.

Q: From all the—

A: Yeah.

Q: …Okay then. Well, good on ya. No further questions, your honor.

***

I told her that a part of my recent despondency is how it feels impossible to do anything about all of this. Some may call that ‘impotent,’ your word, not mine. Short of running for office, getting in there, and literally fixing it myself, I don’t know how to combat the influence of money in our politics.

She said, I’d support you, if you did run.

I said, Huh.

I feel like I have to do something. The gap between my happiness and Gaza, my happiness and the 300 babies in Africa who didn’t get their preventative HIV medicine yesterday because of cuts to USAID funding and now today have HIV, my happiness and the millions of people about to have their Medicare cut to shreds so that the billionaires can get the tax cut they paid for, my happiness and 4400 National Parks workers who got laid off and the resultant neglect of these priceless resources sure to come, my happiness and the citizens of Ukraine who’ve been defending themselves against foreign aggression for years only to have their primary ally suddenly switch sides, my happiness and the people now having their marriages threatened as a sideshow distraction to keep the press busy while democracy dies, right out in the open—it’s offensive. It’s too great. It’s not right. Why now? Why did I only just find her right now?

I just don’t think the occasional phone call to my senator is going to be enough.

***

A fucking 10, though. On top of everything else, an absolute knockout. Perhaps it shouldn’t matter, but it’s true. Drop-dead gorgeous. A number-one stunner. I have to put on knee braces before she walks into the room.