I usually begin all of my emails with "heyo." I'm not sure how I got into this habit. That word isn't a part of my spoken vernacular at all, and I can't think of anyone I know who used it with me first. It's entirely opaque. It sounds arcane, like something an uncle would say in some dusty reference to Archie comics. It's breezy and has some suggested energy behind it, like the thoughtless greeting that a friend would give you while preoccupied with the lingering tentacles of some past task. It's also deeply affectionate. With some people I use the word like a casual brushback to show indifference, but with others, it's a little caress, a gentle thumb stroke across the chin.
The trouble is that all these distinctions happen on my side. They have nothing to do with how my words are received by whomever it is I send them out to. I used to have a penchant for saying the word "pap." It's perfectly vulgar, dismissive, and clinical. My friend C has latched onto this word as the singular identifier of a basic revulsion she gets when talking to me some nights. The way I slip it into a conversation about movies or the proper way to batter fried chicken makes her recoil in disgust. "I can feel my vagina crawling up inside my body when you say that," she told me the other night after a thoughtless use of the word.
"Pap" has become shorthand for the nature of our friendship; simultaneously intimate and physically repulsive. She lets me tease her with the word, knowing all of its nauseating associations for her, and it lets us become even closer. It's a concession to the final absence of sex between us. Her revulsion would hurt me if I had any sexual interest in her. I'm sure she would be deeply alarmed by how callous and clinical I can be if we had a physical relationship.
Seeing her disgust at the word, and my relative indifference to it, is a reaffirmation of our friendship. When I use the word with other people it goes unnoticed. It's almost meaningless, falling between the conversational cracks. It's disappointing that no one else seems to get the same meaning from the word that C immediately plucks out.
On some of the dates I've been on lately I've noticed a similar disappointment. I wind up saying the same things over and over again, telling the same stories in the same terms. Going on a string of first dates on exacerbates this. How many times have I told the story of why I moved to San Francisco from LA over the last few weeks? How many inquisitive stares have looked at me while I explain my job. The words bubble out and evaporate immediately. They have no owner.
Being in a relationship is like sharing a secret language. The same words that people use to buy carrots and talk to their relatives are imbued with eros and intimacy. They become fingers that you can touch someone with, tickling them, pinching them, caressing them. With strangers, they're cold, clinical probes, little pebbles you take turns tossing into your date's metaphysical pond hoping one will catch somewhere and skip along the surface leaving a rippling trail in its wake.
I still find myself on dates, after an hour or so, realizing that I'm using someone else's words. I'm still not over the last woman I was seeing. I don't like saying that. I want to be glib and pulled together about it. Moving on. Moving forward, ever upward. Then I reach the point in the night where I realize I'm using her words. I'm sending all those verbal gestures and little touches to someone who isn't there.
Which is usually when I lean in to kiss my date. It's easier to pretend with my eyes closed.
Previous Posts:
Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction
Sex Machine: Listening to the Neighbors Have Sex
Date Night: In Which I Try To Believe In Aliens
Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines Redux
Love Machine: Loyal as a Dog
Date Machine: Rate My Politics
High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies
Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends
Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux
Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN
Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For
Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings
Love Machine: What Work Is
Sex Machine: Sleeping Naked
Love Machine: Breaking Up in a Text Message
Date Night: The F U Date
Sex Machine: Shave My Bush
Love Machine: Taking A Break From Dating
Date Machine: The Celebrity You Most Resemble
Sex Machine: I Kissed A Boy
Vote Machine: No Gay People Can't
Sex Machine: Let's Have an Orgy
Sex Machine: My First STD
Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV
Crying In Public: Some Corner in Brooklyn