Our eyes met across a crowded
room, or at least that’s what I would always tell people when they asked how we
met, because ‘Brendan88 has viewed your
profile’ doesn’t quite have the same romantic appeal. Not that I was
embarrassed to have met the love of my life on Guydar, but having to explain to
co-workers and cousins exactly what kind of app it was made the whole thing
seem unnecessarily seedy. And I’d had enough of seedy by then; take the last man
to send me a message before you, ‘Shy_Guy_6’, who communicated solely via dick
pic and emoji. I tried engaging him in polite chitchat but that just got me a
close-up of his anus followed by a winky face.
Thank god, then, that you replied
to my message. You’ll never know how long I deliberated over what to say,
before finally settling on an unimaginative but reliable ‘Hi', hitting Send, and holding my breath. In my head I call it
‘the last hi’, because I deleted the app immediately following our first date.
Amy called that move ‘a little keen’ but I preferred to think of as ‘quietly
confident’.
We spent a fair portion of that date
sharing war stories from our respective experiences of online dating, laughing about
the various deviant requests we’d received, both of us aware but unwilling to
admit just then that we were drained, that loneliness is infectious and if we
were forced to spend any more of our lives typing out gambits to strangers in
text speak then it wouldn’t be long before our messages became tainted with the
same desperation as all the others. We were each other’s saviour.
You were the most serious
relationship I’d ever had, and even though I never said it in as many words I
think you knew. You’d had a couple of proper boyfriends before, none of this
was new to you, and that bothered me sometimes, but mostly I was just happy. Amy
thought that the six month mark might be a bit early to move in together, but
we joked that in gay years we were an old married couple. Not that we bickered
much; mostly I hated it when you stole my aftershave and you would turn the air
blue whenever you tripped over a pair of my shoes in the hall. It was tiny stuff
though, silly stuff, because we were in love and we trusted each other.
And I did trust you. I wasn’t
spying, I swear, but my phone was dead and I needed to check my email so I used
yours, and while I was scrolling through work memos a notification popped up with
a familiar little chirp. A message from
Guydar; ‘VersFunSW4 has viewed your profile.’
And that was when morbid
curiosity overtook me, and I opened the app which was still on your phone almost
a year after I deleted it from mine. Maybe you just forgot it was there, I
reasoned with myself, but then I saw your updated profile pic, tanned and
gorgeous in Barcelona. I took that photo myself, had even remarked afterwards how
handsome you looked in it. Was that what made you choose it? It was certainly a
success with the men on Guydar, judging from all the messages complimenting you
on your eyes, your smile, one even saying he was captivated by the chest hair
peeking out from under your shirt collar.
I felt sick. Sicker still when I
saw your responses, all LOLs and winky faces at first but then less coy.
Lengthy, intimate exchanges where you implied that you and your boyfriend had
an ‘arrangement’, where you described in detail exactly what you would do to LondonSub22
and TroyBoy and all the others. And I realised that I hadn’t been your saviour
after all, because you had never been lonely, you had a phone full of men just
gagging to keep you company. I was crying by the time you walked in, that awful
messy kind of crying where the words don’t want to come out, but you pieced it
together quickly enough, grabbed your phone out of my hand and stormed out.
The thing with fights is, they
usually end. Whether it ends with shouting or tears or sex or exhausted
indifference, there’s always something. But
that was the last time I saw you. Hours later when my phone rang and it was
your name, I ignored it. I ignored it the second and third time too. When I finally
did answer, it wasn’t you on the other end. It was a nurse who had been trying
to get through to your emergency contact.
‘It was incredibly quick’, she
told me. ‘He wouldn’t have felt a thing.’
That was a year ago. Just over,
actually. I stopped counting the days after the first anniversary. Amy has
finally convinced me it’s time to move on, maybe even to go on a date. But the
thought of walking up to a guy in a bar and starting a conversation makes my
stomach hurt, so I compromise, and say I’ll think about downloading Guydar
again. It’s another month and a half before I finally give in and actually do
it.
Shy_Guy_6 is still doing the
rounds with his smut and smileys. They’re not even up-to-date photos; he’s
spamming me with the same picture of his penis that he first sent over two years
ago. This fills me with white hot, utterly irrational rage. I’m typing out a
message to him, a furious demand to show his face or get the hell off this app
forever, when my phone vibrates with a notification.
‘Brendan88 has viewed your profile.’
At first I think I’m reading it
wrong. But there’s no mistaking the picture in the profile; not the one I took
in Barcelona, but the one you had two
years ago. The first glimpse I ever got of you. It’s you, or at least a few
thousand pixels of you, and I’m so deliriously happy to see it that it doesn’t
register at first that this is impossible.
It’s a catfish, I think. Some scumbag
found this picture of you in a dark corner of the internet and fancied taking
it for themselves. ‘Despicable,’ I mutter. But what if it isn’t? What if this
is really you, and you’ve found a way back to me? I have so much I want to say.
I might even finally get to break up with you, and it would serve you fucking
right.
I look at my Guydar tracks. The
last person to view my profile before you was a Belgian in a gas mask. I
realise with a sinking feeling that I could actually do worse than a cheating
ghost or an identity thief. So I type out an unimaginative but reliable ‘Hi’,
press Send, and hold my breath.
~
