A winter holiday fling of sorts had little ambition of becoming anything more until my flight back to China was cancelled and I found myself stranded here in the U.S. Each caught up in the sudden changes taking place around the globe and in our personal worlds, “quarantine boyfriend” (among the many labels associated as COVID-19 parlance) and I began texting each other regularly, sharing what we were experiencing and feeling while sheltering in, the things we liked and disliked about teaching via zoom and the subsequent zoom fatigue, the jitters of entering a crowded grocery store, along with the usual things new couples share with each other, namely our families, childhoods, interests, favorite books.
By April, QB was texting me daily. He often sent me virtual flowers, photos of the sun hugged between tree branches, and after a discovery of our love of mycophilia, beautifully textured mushrooms growing out of rotting wood. Occasionally I was treated with a topless photo, perhaps fresh from a jog outside, his forehead still beaded with sweat. He made playlists for me on Spotify as if we were high schoolers making mixed tapes, and then stayed up late talking about the meaning of the songs (Kraftwerk’s Computer Love - get it? Computer Love!). How I loved being a cheap date! And I felt somewhat intoxicated by the attention despite my reservations about him (Was he much too into obscure intellectual pursuits that perhaps intimidated me but also, quite frankly, bored me? Did he seem too self-important at times? Why did he seem to gloss over or not seem to express the slightest interest in my grandparents who lived for over fifty years in the East Village or my long history of community organizing? Why did it seem like he asked questions about me but never the ones that really mattered? And more importantly, I had only really liked half of the songs on the playist!)
Some nights we stayed up late, and he said heavy things to me. How much he missed me and couldn’t wait to see me again. All the things we would do together once New York reopened and I moved back into the city. The image that often came to mind was of us sitting by the fountain at Washington Square Park, not quite young lovers holding hands and discussing, with unabashed pretension, about what we had read that day. He expressed his concerns about meeting my kids - that he had little experience with children - but nonetheless seemed open to meet them and brought it up as a future next step.
One evening I was feeling a bit more emotional than usual. He implored me to tell him what was wrong. I expressed to him that sometimes when we’re talking, I feel that the things he says to me seem like they’re meant for someone else. He replied, “Even though we don’t know yet how things will work out, I still meant everything I said before; every sweet word I say for you is meant for you.” I swooned and my eyes got teary and I swooned some more. I went to sleep that night night-dreaming about Washington Square Park. Many times in the following few days, when I thought about those words, my eyes would immediately well up in romantic, dizzy tears. In fact it surprised me at how easily my eyes would just glaze over with nascent tears during those weeks. Ah, those sweet words! And I could instantly feel my eyes watery with happiness.
But the next steps we talked about were always in this hazy realm of future, nothing that could be finitely grasped in the present. In June, as NYC’s COVID rates decreased and the atmosphere relaxed, he drove back from Michigan where he had been sheltering in with friends to a NYC on the verge of COVID-summer. And just as NYC reopened, so did his heart, finally released from the burdens of quarantine. Within a matter of weeks he expressed wanting to slow things down. And from within a week of that conversation, he had moved on and slept with someone else. He claimed it just happened unplanned and unexpectedly. How do you just happen upon sex with someone during a global pandemic?!, I argued. The situation stung me. And it reconfirmed the notion that men, ultimately, are driven by practicality and ego, putting themselves first. I fumed and fumed and fumed some more.
But after emotions settled, I realized that our “love” was only possible in the context of the quarantine. Outside of that, we were back to being awkward, mismatched lovers just looking to address the immediate needs of loneliness and ego. In person, our conversations were punctuated with the same pauses and start and stop polite conversations as back in January when we had first met. The possibility of the future we had talked about so fervently suddenly seemed so absurd that I found myself laughing about it at times. Of course he couldn’t have loved me. I realized, too, that I couldn’t have possibly loved him either. After all, when things ended, I was only angry, but I never even cried. Not a single tear.
