First off, I should note that the titular David is not dead. Sorry if that’s the whole reason you clicked the link to this post. If you feel duped, let me make it up to you by offering further reading on actually dead Davids: an early heartthrob from my childhood, David Cassidy, and a lyricist who helped pen the soundtrack of my youth, Hal David. As a bonus, I’ve dug up a Google Image of Michelangelo’s statue of David. Sure beats a traditional olive branch, don’t you think?
Okay, let me get to the living David who is actually the subject of this post. I met him in February 2020. He was the hookup who wasn’t. It’s not that I showed up at his place, he glanced at me up and down and then slammed the door, bolting the chain and sliding a heavy piece of furniture across the floor while saying through the soon-to-be blockaded door, “Go away! Consider yourself blocked.” Plausible, sure, but that’s not how our hookup came to NOT be. David had the sense to suggest we meet in public at a café somewhere between my place and his. Technically, it was closer to his place, but things were ambiguous enough that I had to spend an hour making the bed, dusting and shoving “keepsakes” I should have thrown away years ago in the hall closet.
The story of David and me made the pages of The New York Times. Again, not a murder story. He’s alive, I swear. One of my most satisfying writing feats was getting the newspaper to publish my Modern Love essay. You can read it here if you haven’t already reached your monthly limit of free articles (Is it one article or is it down to zero?), but I’ll condense things for you. We met, we chatted, we got kicked out when the place closed and then we said goodbye on the sidewalk. No hookup. Instead, he made reservations at a trendy Thai spot the next weekend.
The failed hookup turned into default dating. I’d already planned to leave Vancouver in two months and no guy was going to keep me in the place where my social life had long been stagnant. David would be a pleasant distraction between packing boxes and turfing so many of those keepsakes.
Most of my dating experiences that last more than a single meeting involve red flag spotting. There was the guy still shared a bed with his ex. And the one who was getting a divorce from his wife and had never dated men. There was also a guy who mentioned having nasal reconstruction surgery to repair damages from a past addiction to cocaine. All true scenarios. They say the cream rises to the top but, in my dating history, it’s been scum that comes to the surface.
David’s red flags weren’t as alarming. There were no flagrant fouls but there were obvious signs we weren’t a match. I saw them and shrugged. This wasn’t long-term. We were just hanging out.
Then the world shut down. My move was off. David and I continued on. He became my COVID bubble. The Modern Love article ended with hope, our bubble intact. I wrote it several months before it was published. By then, we’d broken up. Our differences hadn’t set off alarms, but they were such that I knew I would never fall in love. Five months was a good run.
We’d be friends.
That’s what people say. Occasionally, it comes to be.
The first couple of times we met, post breakup, we went for a walk or played tennis. It was friendly-ish. The chitchat was stilted, but it always was. One of David’s quirks was that the first ten minutes of conversation was a monologue of everything he’d been doing, every meal he’d eaten, every friend he’d seen. In the past, I’d tried interrupting with a question or by injecting an anecdote related to what he was saying, but he’d bat away my commentary and proceed undeterred with his spiel. It had to come out all at once. I often wondered if he’d even notice if I put on earbuds or stepped away for a minute…or seven. It wasn’t that he cared solely about himself. He'd always get around to asking about me and truly listening. I’d accepted the quirk, but then I’d grown tired of it. I wanted back-and-forth banter, not soliloquy exchanges.
In the friend zone, David would try to stretch our time, suggesting dinner. I sensed dinner would muddle his understanding of The New Us. Indeed, he kissed me on the lips the first time I dropped him off after tennis. Another time, while walking, he talked about getting back together. Maybe we couldn’t be friends. Maybe a stab at friendship caused deeper wounds than just walking away.
For his birthday, I bought him a coffee. Anything more might have been misread. For mine, I passed on a suggested pizza night. “I’m not big on my birthday,” I said. It was the absolute truth.
A chronic wrist injury flared up in David’s right hand so tennis was no longer an option. Our times whittled down to walks. COVID surges had a way of putting more time in between each outing as David was especially fretful about any possible exposure. I found I wasn’t putting any effort into making contact. Eventually, there was nothing more than an occasional Facebook message from him, so rare that I was afraid to click on them. I presumed someone had hijacked his account. When I did click, the message would be a random GIF. “Did you send this?” I asked the first time it happened. Indeed, he had. His explanation didn’t do much in terms of explaining anything. Why would he send it? What did it say about how little he knew of me?
I let the next GIF go. I spent a minute trying to think of a reply, but nothing came to mind. A thumbs up or a smiley face felt like too much, like a forced laugh upon hearing an old knock-knock joke, the one about bananas and a late-on-the-scene orange. Wouldn’t a meh emoji be insulting?
It’s been at least a year, maybe eighteen months. I’ve moved on. So has he. There’s no animosity, at least on my part. (Maybe he really wanted a smiley emoji.) In some ways, it boggles my mind. I dated David five months. We supported each other in the strangest of times. As with so many things from those COVID days, that relationship is behind us, nothing to revisit.
A friendship was not to be. We were too different to be partners. The friendship felt forced. Sometimes you just have to allow one another to move on. Circumstances change, connections fade. While we now live in a world that makes it easy to keep tabs on almost anyone, sometimes the need isn’t there.
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