I have a girlfriend I've never met
Raya is a “Private, membership based community for people all over the world to connect and collaborate.” Really though it’s a chintzy velvet rope that admits single people who identify as Delta Medallion Members. Unlike other dating apps, Raya doesn’t let you stipulate where you’d like to find true love; it waits in Dubai, LA, Johannesburg, Sydney, Berlin; generally everywhere but San Francisco, which is where I live. I am on Raya. So was E. She lives in New York, but that was the third thing I noticed about her.
This was a few weeks ago and I’d been working on an essay about motor resonance, which I thought was pretty good but that morning I sent it to my friend L and she said it felt like work to read. We were on the phone and I cried by way of laughing. No I mean it’s fine, L added, but what if you did something that’s actually fun?
The first thing I noticed about E was her eyes and hair and mouth. The second thing I noticed about E was her profile song. On Raya everyone has to do this, choose a song, which becomes an ostensible stand-in for the profile-creator’s idea of love. I actually like it; people are creative and it’s a non-linear way to get a vibe. Somehow miraculously there’s not a lot of I Will Always Love You.
E’s profile song was 4:33, which if you don’t know is by the composer John Cage, written for any musician or group of musicians who are instructed not to play their instruments but rather sit still and silent for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. I’m not sure what it says about me, but seeing this I immediately fell in love with E. That’s when I scrolled to see she lived in New York. Maybe I could finally dedicate myself to accumulating more miles. I hit the heart and we matched. I messaged her right away.
Wow honestly you win the profile song competition forever
Also wow your eyes and hair and mouth
Lol
Hi hello
It was early evening and this was taking place in the pizza place around the corner from the yoga studio. I was waiting for my slices. E didn’t respond right away. I looked at her pictures again and when I finished eating I changed into a tank top and did my best to teach people how to observe themselves from within. E responded the next afternoon. When my screen lit up I was still working on the essay. L had been right. I could tell it wasn’t exactly absorbing by the way I grabbed my phone the second it buzzed.
Haha. I don’t think of myself as competitive, but I’m suddenly brimming with supremacy.
So thanks for that ;)
Also your eyes and hair and mouth.
Hey hi.
There was a back and forth and when it had clearly matured I asked for her phone number. She gave it to me without asking if I was a murderer or anything. Since then we’ve FaceTimed every day. Suffice it to say that dopamine has been a regular fixture of my internal brain. E is flying out this weekend.
If this were fiction, which it still might end up being, now would be a good time to inject some backstory about my romantic life, if I’ve previously fallen in love at first phone sight or what I’ve messaged various other people about their profile songs. But the interesting thing about writing all of this down, it’s occurring to me now while not writing an essay about motor resonance, is that I can feel my compartments getting leaky, like my imagination of who’s reading this lays bare an internal conflict represented by the people who know me as a serious and spiritual person and the people who know me as a big dumb idiot and the people who know me as both and neither.
I’ve fallen in love at first phone sight before. But not with someone on the other side of a continent that’s soon to be traversed for the dawn of an implicitly potential future. I’ve been alarmingly unanxious about this, but what happened this morning is that I woke up to a poem that E had written me. It was a PDF, and she’d texted it at five o’clock my time, but I don’t look at my phone in the morning until I’m done sitting crosslegged on the floor for an hour. When I saw it was a poem I had an actual moment of collapse, like oh no, because the thing about receiving a poem from someone who you’re super into but have never actually met is that it could be bad, and, again, I’m not sure what this says about me, but that would be catastrophic.
I opened the poem telling myself I wouldn’t read the whole thing, just the first line. I would come back and read the whole thing later when it wasn’t so early in the morning, but unfortunately I’d already started reading it in the same moment I was thinking this, and I could tell from the first line that it was about me, and her, and about what we were doing, and I froze.
Years ago, L said that if I were ever to write a memoir, it should be called I Have Notes. This has become a recurring joke between us and of course it goes both ways, and anyway I Have Notes came up during one of those long dopamine-laced FaceTimes with E. We were exploring our romantic compatibility by way of asking questions about each other’s neuroses. Very evolved. I said, admitted, proclaimed, that I tend to interface with the world as an exercise in creative criticism. This was better than saying I’m a judgmental person. But aiming for the silver lining of my neurosis, I think it’s an act of profound care to pay attention to things and people close enough to be able to have interesting takeaways and give good criticism, to communicate from different angles, clearly, penetratingly. It probably goes without saying that this has been problematic in previous relationships. But I told E this part too because I was being vulnerable, however couched it was in rationalization, and after my soliloquy E just laughed, seeming to be neither surprised nor concerned by this information.
So it was 7:35 in the morning and I was sitting on the edge of the couch with my elbows on my knees and my phone held in both hands. This felt like driving at ten and two but that’s how it was as I read the first line of the poem. It started with the tiniest reference point, something that had gone in passing during one of our conversations, something that could’ve easily been missed but it wasn’t and she took the line and she didn’t try to turn it into something, but it was something, and then continued to be something else, which may have been different for me than it was for her, but I got the impression she knew that and it was on purpose, and I entered into the poem all the way, without question, the language, pulled forward quite urgently as it kept going and all of a sudden I was filling with something, and kept filling with something right up until the end, which then felt like the beginning of my actual understanding of this person, E. I dropped my phone and leaned back and there was an immaculate blue outside my window, the first fog-free morning in several days.
I read the poem five more times. The thought of how to reply was formidable. I didn’t want to cheapen it with a banal string of adjectives. I sat there for a few minutes and nothing came. I stood up and put my phone in my pocket and walked the dog, listening to a podcast I wasn’t listening to. Then I was caffeinated and back in front of my phone, this time at the table, and I sent E a message that, a minute later when she’d affixed a heart and said she was blushing, I knew she’d understood was both totally serious, and also a dumb idiot joke.
I have no notes.
Hello,
Well here we are… I’ve finally moved my newsletter to Substack. An honest thanks for the encouragement/prodding. I promise this isn’t going to be a serial on my love life (or is it?), but more a place to share some of my many notes: on everything from yoga philosophy to the stupidest things on Twitter, with rabbit-holes dug from movies/books/music/news, and, of course, the occasional unhinged diaristic ramblings.
I’m slightly terrified which means this should get interesting.
Nothing is paywalled right now but you can always upgrade if you’re into the sweet rush of patronage (love that for us), or unsubscribe if this feels unwanted (let’s go to therapy first).
I also have a new website.
Thanks for being here, and please do share with friends if the spirit moves.
Yours,
Jason
I hope it was magical!! You deserve all of the happiness!