A girl I made friends with in the smoking area told me she was going to set me up with someone, which sounded fun until I realized what she meant by that.
“He’s cute,” she said, pointing at the other side of the bar where a guy was leaning against a pillar. Held alone, none of his features were notable, but they were so equally matched that a harmony erupted in them that made him satisfying to look at, like puzzle pieces slotting into the right place. With his half-opened eyes and slow glances, he radiated the sort of calming energy people say they get from long baths—or maybe it was just sadness I was seeing? He was hard to read, and I could tell he would be even from closer up, as though his skin were a wall no one could get behind. The sort of guy who says “let’s not argue” when you try to resolve an issue. But I like challenges more than I like winning, so I nodded at my new friend, “You’re right, he is cute.”
This is the part where I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me into it: She walked right up to him, whispered something in his ear, and pointed back at me. When I agreed to the match-making plan I thought it would just be a case of dancing near him until he noticed me, not something that left me so wide open to rejection—one I know I’m currently too resigned to explain away with made-up excuses like “he’s intimidated” or “he definitely has a girlfriend he’s not telling me about.” But he didn’t shake his head, he walked over, put his hand on my arm and said, “What’s your name?”
I drank the rum and Coke he bought me that I definitely didn’t need. Licked it off my knuckles when he spun me around under his arms. Watched as condensation rolled down the walls of the room so that other people’s sweat landed on strangers’ bodies, dropped into drinks. We kissed and our lips were so dry they caught on each other. He shouted something in my ear and I couldn’t hear, so shouted back at him, “What?”
“It’s warm in here.”
I nodded, then asked: “How long have you lived in London for?”
“What?”
It was too frustrating so I gestured a cig motion, and he nodded and followed me to the exit. I was at the top of the stairs when the floor really did open up for me. The worn-down sole of my shoe skidded on the smooth wood of the stairs so that I landed on my ass and then skidded right down to the bottom. Around me people gathered up the make-up brushes that had scattered across the floor, the cards, the keys, and as I watched them, I felt as though my insides had been turned out and put in a glass box in a museum so that everyone knew my secrets.
He didn’t seem to mind the fall, which should have made me feel better, but it didn’t; it actually bothered me. “I got the ick that he didn’t get the ick from me,” I said to a friend the next day when I told her about what happened. “I wanted to say to him, ‘You need to love yourself, you can do better than a girl who just stacked it in front of everyone at The Old Queen’s Head.’”
“Maybe he just liked you?”
“Yeah—gross.”
“You’re always complaining about being single but you’re always going for men who aren’t into you; you’re never going to meet anyone when that’s your type.”
At first the comment annoys me. Yes, the men I fancy often don’t like me back, but the ones who do fancy me are weird. Like the one I was on a date with two nights ago who said he was thinking of moving from his parents’ house in Edmonton to Clapham “to try something different,” as if Clapham offers anything but a bland soup of ASOS blazers and rugby boys that you find in most places. All the men who are hot either have girlfriends or too many better options. There aren’t plenty more fish in the sea—there are no fish, like there’s been an oil spill or something.
But the next morning I think about what my friend said and see that she may have a point. I thought the guy in the club was nice until he was nice to me. That’s when I wanted to shove him away and ask, “Are you the guy from You or something?” But he was still the same person I was with before. The one with big hands and kind eyes who liked it when WizKid came on. If he’d have distanced himself from me after the fall, I doubt I would have gotten that feeling. I would have worked to redeem myself in his eyes, dancing with slick, purposeful movements to prove I wasn’t too drunk, wiping the mascara smudges away. Why do I—why does everyone—only fancy people who don’t fancy them when they could have a nice man who doesn’t care that they now have a bruise on their arse so big and intricate, so suffused with purple and yellow, that it looks like the Milky Way?
After getting over a series of one-sided relationships, Susan Sontag reminisces in a diary entry from 1968: “I always fell for the bullies—thinking: if they don’t find me so hot they must be great. Their rejection of me showed their superior qualities, their good taste.” She expands later on: “Of course, I don’t love myself. (If I ever did!) How can I, when the one person I ever trusted has rejected me—the person I made the arbiter, + the creator of my lovableness. I feel profoundly alone, cut off, unattractive—as I never did before. (How cocky + superficial I was!) I feel unlovable. But I respect that unlovable soldier—struggling to survive, struggling to be honest, just honorable. I respect myself. I’ll never fall for the bullies again.”
I never identify with people like Sontag who say they don’t love themselves. I love the way my nose turns up a bit at the end, my weirdly bent back that makes my arse stick out like a shelving unit, and I think I’m smart and funny and blah, blah, blah. I just wonder why no one else can see my loveliness. But that’s not love, is it? Because if I need someone else to prove it then I can’t truly think it. That’s why I’m attracted to men who aren’t interested in me, because then it’s like I’ve proved myself deserving, I can love myself for the love I inspire in them. I don’t know when this loss of my sense of self-worth started. Maybe boys at school calling me “Annie Red Face.” Maybe a therapist would say it was my parents (because everything seems to be about that). Or, maybe, as with Sontag, it is to do with the ending of my relationship, of having the person I thought loved me the most leave, the one I relied on for my self-esteem.
I had another date planned on Sunday but I bailed on it, because his WhatsApp picture is him sat behind a plate of sushi, which made me think, Why, as a man, are you getting your friends to take pictures of you at dinner? But also, because I think I need to work on liking myself before I’ll ever accept someone who likes me. I spend the time I would have spent asking him how many siblings he has, hearing about the annoying flatmate who always leaves half-empty mayo bottles in the fridge, on my own at the Natural History Museum. I walk past the ginormous whale skeleton, through the rooms filled with stuffed animals, up through the red-hot planet where there’s all the stuff about volcanos. Apparently when volcanos explode, the ash they give out burns down everything in its path, destroying crops, buildings, roads. But as the ash breaks up, it creates a material that is excellent at bonding with organic matter, creating nutrient-rich soil. This soil is also low-density, porous, and good at storing water, making it ideal for growing crops. I wonder if I could be like one of those plants, growing from the wreckage of something that fell apart.