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| Valentine's Day sweet fleet, EvelynGiggles, 2007 |
Before delving into the details of the online adventure, I should remark further on my offline plan from 2013. As much as I want to forget ever sending that card to the girl I knew from school (an era moving further and further into the past), the story (if there ever was one) didn't end with deafening silence. Oh sure it did end in horrible non-reply, but I couldn't just be allowed to forget. Twice I saw her a block away driving past me on the way to work. Then I briefly saw her in July while on the job. Then I was in the local shop one day in August and a girl was in front of me. I was just waiting for her to finish paying when my mind became alert as I recognised that voice. I had about enough time to smile and say hi as I let her by. I doubt she recognised me - cutting my hair in 2006 give me a level of anonymity to people who knew me before then. For a while I was a bit depressed at having blown my chance with her, not in 2013 with the card, but in 2003 not having done a thing - that circular logic from last year filling my head. That said, I was a little later simultaneously embarrassed and relieved when I found out she was a single mother. Apparently she wasn't a cocktease after all, though I thought she'd have known better. I have no interest in, what to me is, a three person relationship so that provided a welcome level of closure to that avenue.
That same week, already not feeling great, I came down with a cold that knocked me right down. I wasn't feeling strong physically and mentally the situation was about the same. The news Robin Williams had committed suicide was something I genuinely could have done without knowing. Several hours in bed unable to sleep, having too much time in the company of your own thoughts. When I recovered I decided to get out of first gear and so I gutted my OKC profile of the more than a thousand questions I had answered. Answering just a hundred or so basic questions refreshed my matches and from there I decided to message as many women as I felt I could. The first day I tried this was in the afternoon having come back from seeing Lucy. I sent out five messages and two replied. One wasn't promising as short single sentence replies indicate she's not really open to conversation, the other was the opposite - a paragraph that engaged with what I asked and then engaged me. We only exchanged a total of four messages in the space of 48 hours before silence descended upon, but it was extremely encouraging.
If I had to identify the problem that killed that conversation I would say it was a failure to ask her out after the second reply. If that indeed was the reason, then it took me by surprise. Firstly because the 'guide' I had read recommended it on the third reply, and secondly because I completely forgot. So much of my time on OKC has been about exchanging messages and never getting anywhere that I didn't notice my cue. I spent the next two months sending out messages in the hopes of seeing that sign of a connection again. I was even sending messages out on Plenty of Fish, though the line rarely snags anything to the point I don't bother. Uncharacteristically, the twenty outgoing yielded two actual replies. They went absolutely nowhere of course, so that's a worse ratio that OKC.
I powered on through September and October at a 1:2 ratio for replies. Then on the second day of November I saw a new girl at the top of my matches. She was from Glasgow, currently living in Spain, and coming back home in December. I liked her profile and remarked to her that December was a hell of a time to move back in comparison to lovely Spain. I asked if being Sagittarius had anything to do with it - in other words, whether she was moving back for her birthday. We were quickly hitting it off (I almost guessed her birthday, out by a single day) and I deployed what little Spanish I could recall to tell her my name. She told me hers, though I'll use 'Andaluza' here because she's in Andalucia. I would have asked her out, but seeing as she wouldn't be back here for nearly two months I thought it had the potential to drop either an awkward silence into the proceedings or devolve into small talk. A week into our conversation she asked what I get up to at the weekend. I could have lied and said I was an astronaut-cowboy-millionaire. Andaluza's profile, however, admitted she doesn't get up to much so I told her I was the same. I thought I had blown it again because after my reply on the 10th I didn't hear from her.
I was dismayed but not disheartened. In this game you mustn't get attached, until that is you're actually going out. She's not the one until she is. So move on and keep sending those messages. I did, and as luck would have it struck up a conversation the very next day with a new match. This new girl had a profile that could be generously described as sarcastic and caustic. I liked it. November the 11th was no armistice - it was Super Tuesday and we exchanged just short of a dozen messages that night. From there the messages each way grew to two and then three paragraphs at a time. After a week I remarked we'd exchanged a few thousand words and didn't even know what to call each other. For the purposes of revealing all this to my decimal point of readers, I'll call her Penny since she was from Pennsylvania.
Penny had 'casual sex' optioned on her profile, and while I was open to that it wasn't entirely what I was looking for. However, the skewed gender balance of OKCupid that would make a Chinese demographer cry was giving her trouble. She went quiet for a couple of days and told me she had to take a break from the site because of the baying legions of douches clogging up her inbox. In apologising for not replying and explaining that this hassle was interfering with talking to people she actually wanted to talk to, she essentially let me know I wasn't pissing up against a wall; although the use of the plural clued me that I must have competition. At this point I ran our message log through a word counter and it topped five thousand. Now that she was back I didn't waste any time in asking her out. I was aware her profile warned she might just want to keep things online so told her, at the risk of looking all 'white-knight', my personal e-mail address if she wanted to bypass all the retards on OKC.
Penny took note of my address as she went home for the annual turkey massacre. Although she was up for a date she never brought it up after that. I tried to keep the question alive for a few messages since it seemed like she was putting it off but I didn't want to press the issue. She was quite flirtatious, though - telling me her cup size or that her parents fucked constantly, but when I would try to steer things in that direction she'd steer it back. The most I ever got from those attempts, like when I queried if she took after her parents was an oblique answer about teenage rebellion by doing the opposite. If you've noticed the use of past tense you may have already figured out I stopped hearing from her. It was almost an exact month and in her last message she told me she had gone to an event in Glasgow. The line that stood out, and I would normally paraphrase, was "Would you believe me if I said that social events in the public sphere like that were rare for me?". I wasn't sure what she meant and I asked for clarification if this was an admission of an anxiety about being in public. I wasn't going to assume and told her I often feel that way - I don't particularly like large crowds and have on rare occasion experienced a mild panic. If it was my question that drove her off it was likely the wording. Penny was quite matter of fact and very open so I phrased my question rather brazenly, thinking nothing of it.
Despite what I said above about moving-on, this time I was a bit set-back because of the sheer number of words sent to and received from Penny - roughly eight thousand as I put them through the word counter now. In a twist of fate, I received a message four days later. I was shocked to see it was Andaluza. She apologised for the delay in replying having been very busy working. Since there was only a week until her birthday and her intended return I asked her out. Even if I hadn't heard from her again, I had been planning to send her a message around the time she'd be back - because there was nothing to lose and everything to gain. She quickly said she was interested but I didn't hear from her again until last month. Turns out plans have changed and she won't be back in Scotland permanently until April. That's kind of annoying as I want to get the ball rolling offline and at the same time experience says to keep the messages flowing online. I want to avoid scheduling two dates to the prom, if I can. On a serious note, I was actually relieved Andaluza came back after Penny went quiet because I didn't want to get into a situation of running dates in parallel and ultimately having to choose. I know that's a bit beyond the situation as it stood. Then again maybe I could have had them together - they both had bisexual on their profiles. If I had any kind of audience I'd be getting so much flack for such flippancy. Alas, I noted this week that Penny's profile has been deleted. I assume she'd had enough and quit.
Now I play the waiting game for another two months. I was hoping to be further down the road by this day. Anyway, back to my thrilling Saturday evening: I have no date. A two litre bottle of Shasta. And my all-Rush mixtape...
P.S. I've been smacking my head off the brick wall that is Flickr for 90 minutes trying to log-in. Brilliant demonstration of how to fuck up what was once a clean and functional website.
[2018 ; 2.5]
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