Dash wore a jean jacket. He’s been wearing the same one for 15 years. The one in his Tinder picture. Dash, 29, one mile away. He sent me a screenshot of that, even though I had gone off online dating. Dash has a wallflower reputation, for lurking in the alleys of Hereville and being the once-fuck boy for all the desert girls.
Dash and I never really spoke in high school. I can count our interactions on one hand; Dash just wasn’t my style. I went for men with bigger builds and longer hair. Specifically, a man who wore kilts to school at 6’2” (spoiler alert: he ended up wearing a kilt for all our wedding photos, too).
Dash was of my size. For a quiet kid, he sure played a blaring instrument. I wasn’t a partier. I made straight A’s and fucked an older guy behind closed doors in more ways than one. But we didn’t talk, Dash and I. A few tense two-word exchanges.
Until now. 15 years after high school. After I had a dream about him and told him so. I thought back on all the girls who wanted him in high school and how I didn’t. I wondered what had been different about me. Dash was a young John Mayer. Curly blonde hair and distant grey eyes that matched his mysterious aloof over-it demeanor.
I hadn’t seen him in person since last summer outside the corner bar when J got 86’d for trying to protect a drunk guy from getting too rough-housed by a bouncer who had what Dash called a “sadistic predisposition.” He was keeping sidewalk-watch like I was.
But aside from that, I hadn't seen him since high school, when I had the dream and contacted him online. I was now seeing Dash as an adult, not a super-child student, micro-focused on getting an acting scholarship at Juilliard.
And Dash responded. Boy, did he respond. At first, I was just chatting out of curiosity, and then I fell in whoa. Gushing. Asking Dash to come over and drink a beer in the snow. Asking him to go thrift store shopping for flower pots with me when he told me he was suicidal. And all of my offers to meet up? Declined.
And who was I discovering he was? Self-described, Dash gave, “I’m a bum. I’m tricky. And I’m in trouble.” In other words, he was erotic dreamgas. His vocabulary was such that I had to look up two new words for every paragraph he wrote. On Facebook, his gender was neither female nor male, but “rage. ” He wanted me to go to bars with him to find men. And my hellbent candy drive was just to hear the sound of his voice. To hang out with him once.
“I just want someone to love me all the way with all my shit,” I tried.
“I am willing,” he said.
Made me dream. Dream about what it would be like to actually hang out with, make out with, Dash. 15 years later. I would wear a faded, slightly ripped t-shirt. I’d have to wear only a t-shirt and low-profile jeans to come across as more real. Real, like how the husband having an affair in the show Glow fucks the chick while saying “you’re just so real, so real.”
Now, my listening skills were getting in the way. I was ignoring/forgetting that Dash told me he wasn’t feeling very racy these days. How he was agoraphobic. He was so poor that he was currently very thin.
“Dash?” Reyzey said, " My best gay guy friend. “Yeah. Last time I saw him, he looked like he was gonna beat me up, and then I crossed the street, but the last interaction we had before that, I seriously thought we were gonna make out.”
But I wasn’t really trying to listen to Dash. I was falling for a profile persona on FB Messenger chat during lonely hours.
In my imagination, he would get out of his car, and I would walk up to him immediately to hold his hand. “I’m holding your hand immediately because you are agoraphobic. I would say. I’d deliver him a beer. And then, I’d take that hand to his face, to kiss him. Fuck, would I like to kiss Dash.
Three dots pulsing on Facebook Messenger like blood dancing in my labia majora.
“I like turning people off,” he says. I tell him, “Yeah, you probably live in a bathroom and work at Taco Bell and panhandle on the weekends, And he says,”yr not joking cuz i’m not yr boy.” And he’s right. I wasn’t joking. So I saved him in my phone as “n-o-t y-r b-o-y”.
“I’m telling you”, he’d randomly respond at 2:40 am. "Taco Bell is way above my bar."
If I were to make love with Dash, it wouldn’t matter the hair on my tits or face or toes or happy trail or asshole. I wouldn’t even aim for a perfect shave; I’d just be all “show me the lines on your face, Dash, and we’ll compare.” Openly, gently unfold like a greased, boiled, diamond-laden concentrate.
Because with Dash, it wasn’t about the body. He expressed his disinterest in societal standards of “hot-ness,” never able to get far, jerking off to a doll who acts like a doll, I guess, if that’s who they were. Got it. Anti-society. Deep. Dark. Dash. That’s all fine. But for me, with the way my emotions for him were affecting my body, it seemed necessary to physicalize that/do something about it. This was the exact type of linear “now what” “where is this going” thinking that Dash hated. I was the “get things done girl” in high school. He was loose change. Those carefree pennies at the bottom of a pocket I had always wanted to be.
Just look at that emotional bod. If he were a wine, he’d be rum. Intellectual enough to sum me up better than any therapist in two days and sick enough never to block me for more than a 48-hour power trip. At 5’5”, his emotional I-only-read-diagrams-and-listen-to-obscure-underground-German-powerviolence-bands was to me an emotional personality, voluptuous AF. Plus, I felt really understood. “I’m not devoid of interest in you,” Dash divulged. “I’m just attracted to you in a way I would have gone for more in the past.”
To gussy up to typical, I was about to take what I could get. Which was no human interaction. Each time he started communicating with me again was still much more relaxing than melatonin.
I love to gush. So I gushed right on Dash. Telling him he was handsome. How beautiful a person he was. And so on.
Dash, now aware of my spill-all direct talk mania, told me I should hide at least one thing: “The only constant here is your insatiable cesspool.”
He sent me a video of his face. FINALLY. It was about 12 seconds long. Who am I kidding? It was exactly 12 seconds long. In it, he was just blinking.
“You can’t even make eye contact digitally,” I said.
“What you don’t like weird blinking?” He knew how to be funny.
Come on now, Dash. I haven’t felt connected to any adult in years.
There was a daily fresh list of things Dash didn’t like, and people always headlined it. He asked me if I was planning to apologize to my son for putting him here, and I said, “At least I’ll have someone to look in the eye and apologize to in person.”
What are you wearing?
Blues and blacks. Pants half down.
I called Kendrick from Queens. “You’re wasting your time. Why do you waste your time on these idiots? Ok, I gotta go see my girl. I guess I tore her vagina or something last night, and she wants me to come look at it. Send nudes.”
“More of these saggy mom boobs?”
“I love ‘em!”
Day 16. We were still communicating on Facebook like two pubey teens in 2005. “
“He’s always so mean that when he’s nice, it seems special,” my long-term friend Lin said.
Dash offered to provide effortless orgasms by telepathy and telekinesis while I’m at IHOP.
“Didn't feel much,” I texted after 5 minutes.
“You should-a put a little something into it,” Dash mirrored.
Dash, messaging me in the middle of the night, drunk on bottles of wine, about how good he is at sex.
“Are you out of your mind?” says Russet when I tell him about this. “You’re falling for a suicidal man? Dash is nowhere near being ready for a relationship.
“SIMBA!” I said to him, sobbing over the phone. “THE LAND IS DRY! THE HYENAS HAVE TAKEN EVERYTHING WE HAVE? THERE IS NO FOOD ANYWHERE. This is what happens when you grow up in Hereville. AND STAY IN HEREVILLE. WE ARE BOTH SO DESPERATE FOR HUMAN CONNECTION, AND NOW HE WON’T EVEN TALK TO ME. I’M REPORTING BACK FROM THE HOMELAND. DO SOMETHING. AND I HAVE ALWAYS ALWAYS WANTED TO EAT ONE OF THOSE CARTOON BUGS THAT TASTE LIKE CHICKEN.”
My monologue to Russet ended more emotionally than I would have liked.
“You’re forgetting the rest of the movie,” he said. Russet hangs up with an “I Love You.”
“Don’t make it like it was with us, Katie,” he texts a few minutes later. So now, after 18 days of fantasizing about which T-shirt I’d wear, he stopped talking to me.
Like the rest of them.
I’ve sent 28 Facebook messages to Dash since his last response. The last 11, he hasn’t even bothered to read.
“I’m trying to erase myself,” I read, after kissing my son goodnight. Dash has never held a baby.
Statements like “the drunker I get, the meaner I get” worried me.
The end of the conversation goes like this:
Me 3:07 AM: ghosting is not cool. At least say goodbye
Dash 3:07 AM: fu
Me 3:08 AM: ty
Dash 3:09 AM: ty
I figured out the dream. a false environmental familiarity. The grey-clogged fountain of youth. A linkage of nothing that amounts to something nonetheless. an empty togetherness. The immortal disconnect.
“Sorry you are hypersexual cuz you were molested as a kid,” said Dash once
“Sorry you wanna fight people like a rooster and can't love yourself cuz no one held you as a child,” I said.
I’ll probably write to him again.
There’s nothing I can do to make Dash write back to me.
“He doesn’t even comb his hair,” one of my mom friends remarked.
“Go with your gut, I guess,” she says.
“Yeah, right, if I went with my gut, I’d be lying in various dumpsters around Hereville with a sign that said, 'Pick me.”
Connections in your 30’s, man. Beats me.
What even is connection?
A connection is never online. Having to remind myself of this is grim. An indicator of the how loneliness sounds, calls into translucent tin cans.
Dash has blocked me at this point.
You know Dash? Of course, you know Dash.
“Dash?” Emm said over the phone while we planned a mom-and-kid hike in the canyons and exchanged hand-me-down clothes among the kids. “Just saw him the other day. Yeah, he’s hot. I was his number two once, too. His main squeeze is a lovely lady. Homeless? Ha. That dork. He’s right down the street from me in Sherlock Heights. His mom pays his phone bill.”
