Concision
My husband hates my blog.
"It's just too... long," he said to me one night. "And it's cringe. It's like the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Like Fast and Furious. It's just not my thing."
I hadn't written it for him, but it's hard not to care about this kind of feedback, coming from the person who repeatedly insisted that I just start a damn blog in the first place.
I'm not verbose when I talk. Precisely the opposite. He's the verbose one, frequently encircling his own ideas with contradiction and uncertainty until they trail off into frustrated silence.
Recently I submitted an entry to a writing contest that had a 1,000 word limit. Nicolas had told me about the contest, and encouraged me to send something in. After I finished mine, I went to reread the instructions and realized that all of the named individuals on the panel of judges were men. Mostly white, several in tech. I felt the color drain out of my face. I had written about childbirth, and babies, and breastfeeding. I thought about ripping up my submission.
Nicolas read my piece and had generally good things to say about it.
"It's quite good. It kind of ties together what you've been working on lately, but without all the lengthiness, and cringe."
I couldn't sit with the positive message, could only nitpick at the underlying dig.
"So all the other stuff, it's just flat out bad? I shouldn't have written any of it?"
"Well, no. It's just, this is clearly better."
I sighed. Two months ago, I had started out on this journey envisioning some sort of lengthy manuscript to work towards, for my own enjoyment if not for potential publication. I had been thinking of all the authors I had read of late, but most of all fixating on Ferrante. I wanted to write like Ferrante. Had been secretly yearning for it since the moment I picked up her book when I was pregnant with my first.
I thought about the love stories I've been writing, the ones from a past life, from before I met my husband. How patient he's been to sit alongside me excavating all this.
I found the journal entries from when he and I were first falling in love, and I wondered at what a 'concise' telling of our story might sound like.
"Put your hands up in the air! Step where we can see you! We will release the dogs! I REPEAT, WE WILL RELEASE THE DOGS!"
A police helicopter hovered nearby, its loudspeaker blaring. I was walking down West St on my way home after dinner and a movie in the city with Nicolas.
It had technically been our third date – we had first met over an app months prior, but I had doubts about my first impression of him. Loud, a bit clumsy, very awkward. We sat in a French restaurant, Aquitaine, named after the region of France he came from. He rambled on endlessly about his work at a startup, and the meeting with Bloomberg Businessweek that he had been to right before he showed up, late. I smiled politely, bored out of my mind and drained from onboarding a new employee earlier that day.
The only hint of an emotional connection between us had been when we left the restaurant and took the BART home back in the same direction. He told me about his long relationship that he left behind in France; I told him about my ex who I had continued to live with for the better part of a year. In the train I was pitched forward, toward him, for the briefest of moments. His smell intoxicated me. I shook it off, embarrassed as the accidental intimacy.
When he asked to hang out again, on two separate occasions, I politely declined.
Then two months later, he texted me as I was getting off a BART train, in the middle of a phone call with my mom. He had recognized me. I was off the app by this point. We decided to go cycling along the Bay Bridge, to Yerba Buena and Treasure Island.
This time there was no noisy restaurant, no rambling. We made dinner, chatted about books. He played Mini Metro on my iPad, and it was deeply satisfying to witness his childish delight.
So that night of our third date, a week after Yerba Buena, I walked home alone, confused and a bit disappointed. Half of me was expecting only to be friends. But the other half of me wondered if we were just being polite.
I texted him about the helicopter and the dogs, which I secretly took to be an absurd sign from the universe. I went out on a limb and texted him that I hadn't wanted to say goodbye at the station, not really.
He felt the same.
Within a half hour, he had biked over to my place.
He took off my dark green dress that I had worn on our date, the one that made me feel mildly ridiculous at the office, because it had been so out of the usual Friday dress code.
I took off his shirt. A soft gasp escaped my lips. Beneath was chiseled marble, lengthy tattoos snaking up and down his long limbs.
We didn't sleep together that night, but he touched me as if I had already given to him all the deepest parts of myself.
"You're mine," he whispered in my ear.
His gossamer kisses confessions, not conquest. Our eyes riveted to each other in the dim glow of my bedroom.
And so I had been, from that moment on.