Five Days in the Ether

If only

They met in one of those corners of the internet where nobody is supposed to become a person. It was not a dating site, and neither of them had gone there looking for anything resembling a legitimate romantic relationship. It was the kind of place built around anonymity, fantasy, appetite, and the quiet agreement that whatever happened there belonged there. You could tell a stranger something you would never say aloud because there was comfort in knowing you would never have to look at their face afterward.

For whatever reason, she answered him and that was really all it took.

One message became another, and somewhere along the way she learned his name, that he lived in another country, what he did for work, the movies he loved, the particular rhythm of his humor. He was funny in a way that made conversation feel less like conversation and more like being carried somewhere. They could move from sex to childhood to some stupid joke to what they wanted from life and somehow none of it felt like changing the subject. She had known people for years with whom she had never spoken so easily.

It was, from the beginning, intensely sexual. There was no use cleaning that up afterward and pretending two souls had simply recognized each other across the ether. She wanted him. He wanted her. They talked about bodies and sex and all the things two strangers can say to each other when there is a screen between them and nothing has consequences yet. Then, somehow, consequences began slipping into the conversation anyway.

They talked about marriage and children. What kind of parents they might be. What kind of partnership each of them imagined. They constructed whole little domestic worlds together with the manic ease of children playing house, except every so often one of them would realize there was something underneath the game and become briefly serious.

Usually it was her who tried to pull it back. She would laugh and make some version of the whole thing a joke again, and he would tell her that he wasn’t entirely joking. She would give him an exit, and he would close it. At some point he introduced the possibility of love before she did.

This all happened in five days. Five fucking days.

Still, something happened to her during those five days that was difficult to dismiss simply because the timeline was ridiculous. She felt fucking alive. She felt seen and wanted and interesting and beautiful. Not merely sexually wanted, although it is undeniable she enjoyed that too. It was something more unsettling than desire because desire could be explained away. What unsettled her was the feeling of being recognized across a screen.

He listened to her. He noticed things. He seemed interested in the machinery of her, and she had forgotten what that felt like. She had forgotten the particular thrill of somebody asking another question because the answer to the first one had actually interested him. She had forgotten what it was like for her phone to light up and for something inside her to light up with it. For five days she walked around feeling awake in places she had not realized had gone numb.

He told her things too, and not always in the clean language people use when they have already made sense of themselves. Some of it simply slipped out while they were talking about something else. There were storms in his head. There was anxiety. There were habits he used to quiet it. There were old sexual insecurities and pieces of himself he seemed to regard with some embarrassment. There was the man he wanted to be, the husband he imagined he could be, the father he hoped he might become.

Then he showed her his face and the stakes were suddenly raised.

Bodies are easy on the internet. A body can remain abstract in a way a face can not. Skin without a face has no childhood, no mother, no embarrassing school photograph, no expression you can imagine changing when you hurt it. A body can belong to almost anybody.

A face belongs to someone.

The first photograph was of him dressed nicely, smiling. She opened it and thought, immediately, “Wow. So that’s you”.

She told him he was very cute and very much her type. She looked at the photograph longer than she needed to and noticed his eyes. There was a sweetness in them, she thought, something expressive. His smile reached them.

The next photograph was silly and unguarded. He told her he sent it to her so she could get a “better look at (his) lookers”. She looked at him again and told him that although he obviously looked like a grown man, she could imagine what he had looked like as a little boy. There was a softness in his face that adulthood had not managed to take from him, and that was her weakness.

They were talking about movies when the little boy appeared for real. She told him three of her favorites and mentioned Stand By Me. He loved it too. It had been formative for him. She told him she had always connected with Gordie, and he said he had too. He was the older brother but his parents had worried more about his younger brother. Nobody had really worried about him. The irony, he revealed, was that he had always worried about everything.

The conversation moved on, back into more serious and wonderful topics. A person can hand you the keys to entire rooms inside themselves while discussing the most casual topics.

She remembered what he said about being an anxious little boy.

He also told her that if he ever saw a woman like her somewhere in real life, he probably wouldn’t approach her. At a party, at the gym, in a grocery store, somewhere ordinary where she would be standing a few feet away and he would have to cross the distance himself. He thought he would be too intimidated. He might never say anything and then regret it afterward.

The internet had solved that problem for him. There was no room to cross. She had simply appeared already speaking to him.

So he moved closer and she moved closer, and every time one of them revealed something that should perhaps have made the whole thing less intoxicating, the other seemed to lean in. A confession, a joke, a fear, a photograph, a fantasy. The strange safety of anonymity was gradually dismantled by the very people it had allowed to become intimate.

Eventually there was nowhere else to go through a screen and they started talking about meeting.

Months away. There was plenty of time for sanity to return. Plenty of time to discover they had mistaken novelty for connection. Plenty of time for one of them to lose interest, or for a video call to expose some unbearable incompatibility, or for the whole strange thing to settle naturally back into the corner of the internet where it had begun.

There was a border between them. He was excited about the idea. They talked about dates and work and time off. She tried, as she had before, to make it smaller than the fantasies surrounding it. They could have drinks. They could have fun. They could have sex if they both wanted to have sex when there were actual bodies standing in an actual room. They did not have to do anything. Nobody was agreeing to a marriage or a child or a future simply because an airplane had crossed from one country into another.

She wanted to know whether he was as funny in three dimensions. She wanted to hear his laugh without a speaker flattening it. She wanted to watch those sweet eyes move around a room. She wanted to know what it felt like to sit beside him and whether the thing that had happened in the ether survived air. That was all. So she bought the ticket and at first, he was happy.

Memory is a treacherous thing after somebody hurts you. It wants villains and warnings and evidence that you should have known. She would have to remind herself that there had been no immediate recoil. There had been excitement. Something almost wonderful in the sudden realization that this ridiculous thing they had been talking about was actually going to happen.

He was happy before he was afraid and then she watched the weather change.

There was no single moment she could point to afterward and say that was when the storm arrived. The excitement simply began accumulating weight. The fantasies that had floated harmlessly between them for days started falling out of the sky one at a time. Sex became pregnancy. Pregnancy became children. Children became marriage. Marriage became borders and homes and the future, and somehow a weekend months away began carrying the emotional weight of an entire life that did not exist.

She tried to make it small again. They did not have to have sex. They did not have to decide anything. They could have a drink. There were months before the trip. There was nothing happening tomorrow except the same two people waking up in different countries and going about their lives.

Visibly, something in him was getting louder than she could reach and eventually he asked her to cancel the ticket so she did.

For a while she apologized. She was sorry she had distressed him, sorry she had apparently misunderstood what had happened between them, sorry she had taken something too seriously that perhaps had only ever been fantasy. She wondered whether she had done that humiliating thing people sometimes do when they are hungry for something and mistake scraps for a feast.

But she combed through the evidence and found that not to be true. There was too much, and eventually there is something undignified about treating intimacy like a criminal investigation. Still, she looked at enough.

The invitation had not come from nowhere. Neither had the intensity. Again and again she had tried to retreat into humor and again and again he had returned them to sincerity. She had not extracted meaning from an empty room. Whatever the thing between them had been, he had been standing inside it too.

There were things on her side of the screen he did not know, things she had not yet told him because she had not known what any of this was going to become. There was a loaded gun on her side too, and she was the only one who knew she was holding it.

There were real consequences waiting in her life if the thing between them survived contact with reality, and she would have had to reckon with them. Her choices were not less complex simply because she had been sincere.

But the loaded gun was hers to carry, and it did not mean she had to accept blame for believing a man who had repeatedly asked to be believed.

Once she stopped asking herself what she had done wrong, a different question appeared.

What happened to you?

There was something objectively comical about what followed. A grown man had spent the better part of a week constructing an elaborate imaginary future with a woman he met on the internet, repeatedly encouraged the possibility of seeing her, watched her buy a completely cancelable ticket for months in the future, and then became overwhelmed enough that an emergency therapy appointment entered the story.

A plane ticket when she wanted to have drinks with him. Admittedly, maybe good sex.

She had not arrived on his doorstep carrying an infant and a stack of legal documents.

There were so many exits that the disproportion initially seemed absurd. They could have met and hated each other. They could have slept together or not slept together. They could have had a wonderful weekend and never spoken again. They could have discovered within fifteen minutes that whatever had happened through a screen could not survive the indignities of being embodied. One of them might chew too loudly or have an annoying laugh or sweat too much through the night. The chemistry might have been astonishing or nonexistent. They could have laughed about the insanity of the preceding months over two drinks and gone home with a story.

Emergency therapy, for that, seemed extreme even if clearly responsible.

It was funny until she decided to believe him for who he said he was. He told her that what was happening was much more about him than anything she had done wrong. He told her there were intense feelings he had been trying to work through even before he knew she existed.

That was when the disproportion became dark and tragic.

She remembered the storms and the habits meant to quiet them. She remembered the man who said he could see a woman he desperately wanted to approach and remain frozen several feet away from her. Most of all, she remembered the little boy nobody worried about who worried about everything.

She had heard him describe his anxiety before, but there are things you do not understand until you watch them happen. Someone can tell you there are storms in his head and you can imagine rain. Then one afternoon you watch the sky go black and realize you had no idea what weather he meant.

There were parts of him she could never know after five days through a screen, and perhaps her interpretation was completely wrong. Maybe he was simply a man who enjoyed constructing elaborate fantasies with women online and had encountered the unfortunate novelty of one of them believing him. Maybe there was some enormous fact about his life he had never told her. Maybe the tenderness had been performance. Maybe he would read whatever she eventually sent him and show it to somebody with a laugh. She could live with that possibility.

What she could not do was make the ugliest possible explanation of another person the only one available to her simply because he had hurt her.

She had enough material to humiliate him if she wanted to. She could have called him crazy. She could have mocked the emergency therapy appointment. She could have taken the things he had trusted her with and rearranged them into evidence that he was a disaster she was lucky to have avoided. There were moments when some part of her wanted to do exactly that, because contempt is wonderfully efficient at cauterizing humiliation. Instead she found herself thinking about the little boy.

She thought about what it meant that the internet had allowed him to circumvent the thing he had already told her frightened him. He did not have to cross a grocery store or a party or a gym. He did not have to approach the beautiful woman and wonder whether she would reject him. She was already there, talking to him, and every time he moved closer she moved closer too. Then the ticket put a room back between them. Eventually she wrote him a letter anyway.

She told him she had listened carefully to the things he trusted her with. She told him that perhaps for five days there had been something safe about being seen through a screen, about having a woman tell him she saw somebody wonderful and gentle and capable of profound connection while she remained safely incapable of appearing beside him. She told him she could imagine how frightening it might have become when all of that suddenly acquired an arrival date.

She told him she had not wanted to evaluate him. She had not bought a ticket so she could administer some test and determine whether the man in front of her deserved the future they had joked about. She had wanted to meet the ordinary man.

Then she collapsed time. There was the man now, the one whose mind could become so loud he could not sleep. There was the younger man carrying whatever had happened to him while learning his sexuality and himself. There was the little boy nobody worried about because everyone had apparently assumed he was fine, while inside he worried about everything. She had listened to all of them when he spoke. She told him she had wanted to know how she might hold those parts of him.

There was something almost insulting in the idea that love, or whatever this was, required looking past the difficult parts of another person, as though the human being were hiding somewhere underneath all the inconvenient evidence of being human. She had wanted to see the whole and let the whole remain whole.

Then everything had gone badly, and for the first time she was given something more than a confession about his difficult parts. One of them had reached through the screen and hurt her.

She looked at him differently afterward because he understood him less and she trusted him less. Unfortunately, she did not find him less human and that surprised even her.

When she wrote to him, she found herself returning to something that had been threaded strangely through those five days: choice. He had spent so much of their brief time together talking about the life he wanted as though he almost wished life would simply make the frightening decisions for him. If circumstance chose the future, perhaps he would never have to stand at the threshold and choose it himself. There had been something almost comforting to him in imagining events becoming inevitable, in imagining the decision already made.

Then she bought the ticket, and suddenly it seemed to him that a decision had been made for him after all and he imploded under the weight of it.

The irony was painful. He had spent days fantasizing about surrendering himself to circumstance, only to become terrified when circumstance appeared to move even one inch in his direction. So she handed the decision back and told him

his life was his.

Nothing she had done had chosen it for him. A ticket did not choose sex. Sex did not choose a child. A child did not choose marriage. A weekend did not choose a future. Even fear did not have to choose what happened next simply because it had become loud enough to make itself sound like fate.

Whatever had happened to him before her, whatever wounds had taught him to anticipate catastrophe or distrust the things he wanted, none of them had been granted permanent authorship of his life. He could choose.

That was what she wanted to leave him with after watching him behave as though choice itself had disappeared.

She was not expecting him to make another decision to make about her. Not a request to reconsider the ticket. She did not want to become one more thing pulling at him from outside himself.

She told him he did not have to do anything with what she had written. She simply thought he deserved to have it and then she sent it.

The next day, for the first time since the whole thing had happened, she cried and it surprised her because she wasn’t crying for herself.

There were plenty of things she could have cried for on her own behalf. For five days she had felt fucking alive. She had felt seen and wanted with an intensity that had startled her. Some interior light she had forgotten about had switched on, and for five days she walked around inside it. She could have cried because it was gone as suddenly as it appeared.

Instead she cried for him.

She thought about how vulnerable that earlier silly photo was. So unpolished and alive. She thought about the sweet eyes and the softness she had noticed before she knew what choices she would soon have to make with them. She thought about the grown man telling her about the child he had been and doing it  only because they had been talking about a movie. “Nobody worried about me and I worried about everything.”

She knew something about childhood wounds, although she did not know the details of his. She knew her own and how something can happen early enough that it stops feeling like something that happened and starts feeling like a fact about the universe. After that, a person can spend years gathering evidence. People leave. People lie. People do not mean what they say. Nobody is coming. Nobody worries about me. I am too much. I am not enough. If somebody sees me clearly, I will lose them.

There were a thousand versions of the same old story and she had one too.

He would never know that fully and in all its potential human ugliness.

He would probably never know what buying the ticket had meant on her side. To him, she had simply been the direct woman who said she was going to do something and then did it. He had liked that about her when he had called her determined. He had no idea that there was an entire invisible life behind her hand when she pressed the button.

She had far more to reckon with than airfare, embarrassment, or a bad weekend, and she wasn’t trying to construct giant meaning around this. It meant that when she bought the ticket, she had not been saying, “I choose you to be my forever and I’ll burn the world down for it.” She had been saying something much smaller and, in its own way, much more frightening, “ I am willing to find out if this thing can survive entry back into Earth”.

Whatever else existed in her life, she would sort through it. Whatever this man turned out to be, she wanted reality badly enough to tolerate not knowing the answer in advance. He had never known the cost of that.

There was a kind of mercy in this. She could return to the life waiting for her and decide that nothing had really happened. She had wandered into a strange corner of the internet, met a man who gave her five days of exactly the kind of attention she had apparently been starving for, felt beautiful and alive and wanted, and then walked away before the loaded gun ever fired. She had risked nothing permanent. What incredible luck.

Someday she might even believe that was the whole story but for now, when she thought of him, what came instead was unbearably simple.

What pain has brought you here? What has made the idea of reality so frightening?

Maybe all he had needed to do was have the drink. There were solutions to almost everything else they had made enormous. A weekend could end with or without sex. These two people could decide they were incompatible and futures did not have to follow fantasies simply because two people had imagined them together at two in the morning.

The thing without a clean solution was what happened after fear made the decision for them. They knew something about each other now that they could not unknow.

Before the ticket, she had believed his words without having to think about whether they were durable. Afterward, she couldn’t. Before the ticket, he had told her about the storms. Afterward, she had watched one arrive. There was no returning to the hour before that knowledge.

The strangest part was that the rupture had answered a question people often spend months or years trying to answer about somebody they might love: What are you like when I need you because the ugly parts of my humanity have come out to play?

He had his answer about her. She never got hers about him.

He never saw the loaded gun and he never saw the parts of her she had not yet trusted him with. He never had the opportunity to look at her when her own mess was finally sitting between them and decide what to do with it. But she saw some of his.

He contradicted himself. He frightened himself. He hurt her. He became something more complicated than the charming man who had spent days constructing impossible futures with her.

She had every opportunity to look at what happened and decide she had been wrong about him entirely. Instead, after the anger and embarrassment and confusion settled, her picture of him somehow became larger.

There was the charming man and the frightened man. The sexual man and the insecure one. The man imagining himself as a husband and father and the little boy who worried about everything while nobody worried about him. The man who wanted things and whatever part of him became terrified when wanting them was no longer theoretical. She did not know which one was the real him.

They all were.

She did not expect him to answer the letter. What could he say? If she was wrong, there was very little to say. If she was right, perhaps there was even less.

She imagined being on the other side of it and knew exactly which thought would destroy her. She had no ideations of “she was the one that got away”.

She did not want that. There was something almost embarrassingly grandiose about imagining herself becoming the great lost woman of a man’s life after five days on the internet. Maybe there had been nothing to lose. Maybe they would have hated each other by Saturday.

The thought that would destroy her was much quieter. Maybe he was earnest and would sit with, “I hurt her, and she went looking for the kindest explanation for why.” Then, after that, maybe, “she was listening the whole time”.

That was what finally made her cry. He had told her about the little boy almost in passing, and she had kept him.

When everything collapsed, she had not reached for that child as evidence against the man. She had simply wondered how much of the child still lived inside him, how much fear a person could accumulate when he learned early that he was supposed to carry it quietly, and what it might cost him if every beautiful uncertainty eventually became something to survive rather than something to experience.

She would never know.

She thought about how strange it was that for five days she had wanted something from him so badly. His attention, his desire, his body, his voice, the next message, the next confession, the next little piece of whatever world they were building faster than either of them could inspect it. At the end, she wanted nothing from him. She wanted him to have peace.

She hoped someday his mind became quiet enough that when something beautiful appeared in his life, he did not immediately demand to know what it would cost him twenty years later and that he could let a beginning remain a beginning. She hoped he could understand that uncertainty was not the same thing as danger, and that choice did not disappear simply because the possibilities became real.

She hoped that one day, when his life put something lovely and frightening in front of him, he would understand that nobody had chosen for him.

He could move closer or he could walk away. He could wait or he could change his mind. He could have the drink. He could choose.

Two people found each other strangely and briefly. They liked what they found.

One of them was willing to find out what it meant. Something stopped the other one. And so something that might have become nothing—or something enormous—will remain forever suspended at “might have.”

Five days in the ether.

Then Earth.