Him

What a mysterious boy.

I didn’t think he would be my type. I usually like taller guys, and his pictures made him look like he was a lot shorter than me. We didn’t really talk much either before we met, so I had little to judge his personality from. I braced myself for the harsh reality of many Tinder escapades: differing expectations, repelling personalities, dull boredom, all the things you can’t see on your screen. But I figured it was worth a shot anyways. Maybe he could become a friend if we didn’t click. Besides, I was brand new to Heidelberg, instead of just almost brand new like when I left four weeks later, so what did I have to lose? He recommended we go for a run together for our first date, and I agreed.

But his Tinder profile failed to warn me that he was beautiful. When our eyes first met, mine had to angle upwards to meet his, suddenly confronted with the quietly confident, benevolent gaze of his radiant brown eyes. How could I respond with a mere “bien” to his first qué tal when he had just taken my breath away? I squirmed thinking of all the ways I could embarrass myself in front of my new crush, five minutes earlier merely the sum of my assumptions haphazardly formed from a couple of pictures and a couple of sentences. And for as much as I could have tried to understand him, it would have been in vain. He was his own person; he was a phenomenon. A gift, a curse, puppy love and romance old as time, the magnitudes of space that inevitably came to separate us. My miles, his kilometers, our fissure.

When we reached the start of the trail, he wasted no time setting himself in motion. “You don’t stretch?” I asked him, substituting the correct Spanish word for “stretch” with a failed bastardization of the English word. I don’t know whether it was because he thought stretching was for chumps or because he thought my linguistic faux pas was cute, but he smiled at me with an inquisitive gaze for the two minutes he let me disrupt his cardio. I smiled back. Then, we began to run. He told me in between breaths that, according to local legend, great thinkers had wandered this trail long ago to find inspiration in the forest. I asked him coquettishly if he had made any groundbreaking new discoveries. He told me nothing had come to him yet.

The views above the old city at the mouth of the trail turned into trees that multiplied steadily, and with each step we became deeper engulfed in thick forest. I noticed him looking at his fitness watch a lot, so I asked him with a flirtatiously competitive grin if the run was tiring him out. Unfortunately, my nerves had twisted my tongue, obscuring my Spanish into a mess of incomprehensibility. I asked him again, knowing that the romantic charge of my remark would be weakened by the need to repeat it. As I waited for his response, he looked down at the ground despondently before turning to me, and he admitted bashfully that he did feel a bit tired. I was trying to be more flirty than competitive, but something got lost on the way from my brain to his. It was cute regardless.

Our run a memory, he suggested we get something to eat. I agreed politely, not too fast but not too slow either, and shaped my lips into an I’m-interested-but-not-desperate smile. Not expecting to receive the invitation or maybe not expecting to want to accept the invitation, I had left my wallet at home. When I told him, he turned his eyes to mine, his milky brown eyes calm and assured, and said: “I’ll pay for you, don’t worry.” I hoped he wouldn’t notice my heart escaping from my chest in explosive bursts. As we waited for our food, shivering in our running clothes doused with wintry sweat, I found myself curious about Costa Rica, his home, the country he had distanced himself from with an ocean. I asked him about his family, the food he liked to eat, what kind of person he was in high school. I couldn’t help but feel a sort of New World camaraderie, an American continentality that drew us together in the Old World. Determined to pursue this strictly scholarly interest, I asked him if all Costa Ricans were as handsome as he was. He smiled in the unrestrained, unapologetically goofy way that I came to love, all the sweeter as a first confirmation of our mutual attraction, and informed me soberly that some Costa Ricans were handsome, some Costa Ricans were ugly, and others were simply okay. My non-inquiry answered, we finished our meal and parted ways.

When I said “nos vemos,” I meant it. On our second date, we made plans to get dinner. When we met, we discovered that neither of us had any particular restaurant in mind. I was relying on his knowledge of Heidelberg; he was relying on me insisting on a certain cuisine. We clumsily wandered the narrow streets, neither of us willing to fill the power vacuum. Finding a place to eat was an arduous journey through East Asia. The Chinese restaurant we looked up had closed for vacation, and the Japanese place had an hour wait, so we ended up getting Korean food. The restaurant was swarming with flies, the service was slow, and the party next to us was obnoxiously loud. We couldn’t find much to talk about besides our shared annoyance, exchanging empty threats to leave a negative review on Yelp against our nonconfrontational natures. The night dragged on as our interactions spaced themselves out further and further in time. Our eyes loomed in the distance, one pair occasionally confronting the other, pleading for something to discuss. We laughed nervously at the absurdity of the situation and our inability to communicate. I couldn’t decide what saddened me more: the silence, or the artificial pseudo-conversations we engaged in to fill the silence. But somehow, I wanted more of him.

We decided to go to his place afterwards to drink some wine and watch Modern Family. My friend who I told about our date made fun of me for the “secret code” inherent in this arrangement, as if it was only natural that physicality would automatically trump any other connection. I didn’t see it that way. I just wanted to exist at his side. The hesitant game of back-and-forth we played, inching together gradually as the red Netflix bar approached its terminus, was more like an inevitable consequence of the same magnetic pull that urged us to endure an awkward dinner. I had it bad.

He was so mysteriously calm and serene, and I was perplexed. I developed a habit of randomly asking him what he was thinking about, what kind of thoughts were crossing his mind. Of course, most of the time he just responded “nothing”. I believed him, too. I couldn’t imagine any other way he could be so laidback. As we sat together then on his bed, I asked him again, this time with a slightly different purpose. “Que estás guapo,” he said, our lips intertwined for the first time. Our desire could no longer be overpowered by our shyness.

Preparing for one of the feline reversals of desire that sometimes suddenly overcame me, I told him that I wasn’t necessarily in the mood to have sex. I braced myself in an act of instinctual self-preservation for the pain of a cease of contact. “No te preocupes,” he told me as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the heat of our kiss lingering in the air. I gave myself the permission to disappear back into him. He told me I could sleep over, if I wanted. I fell asleep longingly in his arms. When we woke up, we continued what we started the night before. Our hands moved lower, our kisses became deeper, and the rawness of a morning itch gained supremacy. The feelings I had warned may not be there suddenly emerged so clearly that I couldn’t remember a time when they didn’t exist.

“¿Quieres que te folle?”

Yes, I do want you to fuck me.

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Nervous gay boys like me become skilled in the art of identifying post-sex signals. We’re proactive in searching for the subtle and not so subtle ways boys tell us they can no longer pretend to be emotionally available. Without this attention to detail, we run the risk of looking weak, and when our moment had ended, I was on edge. Although I felt like our connection was more than just physical, I had certainly been deceived before. But unlike the aftermath of empty nights of pure physicality that end before the sun can cast its knowing gaze, I stayed. He offered to make us breakfast. He told me he liked Rosalia, so I played her music in the background. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we enjoyed our silence, making the most of the closeness that we knew would disappear just as soon as we found it.

The third time I saw him, I thought it would be our last. I agreed to go on another run with him, suppressing my lazy inner monologue. This time I brought my wallet, more confident that our run would end with dinner. As we ran, we slipped into the bland joy of familiar rhythms, feeling no pressure to make conversation. Sometimes he passed behind me to let a bike pass, then I would slow down just a bit as he adjusted his pace to reach my side again. I enjoyed the simple fact of his presence, our proximity. As he led us further away from the center, I suspected he had a goal in mind. He asked me if I wanted to go up to the castle, a (the) central tourist attraction of the city that I had not yet seen. He warned me that it would be a steep journey up. My first thought is that I had made the wrong choice agreeing to go on a run. But then I smiled, thinking about the simple plan he made for us.

The brisk December cold meant that we were almost alone during our visit to the castle. The castle was nice, but the views of the city really took my breath away, not to mention the views of him as he took a picture for his Insta story. I told him that the castle reminded me of Shrek, to which he looked at me incredulously, grinning all the same. I felt like I could hear what he was thinking, the words he kept inside his head: Cute but crazy. I guess his standards for the words he allowed to escape the realm of thought and enter the air were higher than mine. He asked me to explain, but I just laughed. How was I supposed to explain the capricious inner workings of my mind? He told me how many times he watched Shrek as a kid, and I told him about my childhood obsession with Winnie the Pooh, curious about the inane details of each other’s lives in the way only lovers are. We went to dinner, and after dinner, he told me had to go home and do homework. I texted him after and lamented that I didn’t get to kiss him one last time. I should’ve known that the magnetic forces of our attraction would bring us together once more.

Some say that opposites attract. I say that attraction is much more random than could ever be explained in a two-word aphorism. He and I had both eerie similarities and marked differences, the novelty of mystery and the comfort of kindred souls. On our final date, just days before I jumped back over the pond, he told me that he was stressed by an exam, too stressed to fuck. Neither of us saw our relationship as purely carnal, but perhaps our biggest similarity was our inability to stick to our pledges of celibacy. When we were planning our last encounter, he told me we shouldn’t go to his place because it was infested with bugs that had bit him overnight. He was tired of getting bitten, and he told me he didn’t want them to bite me too. We met at a random Turkish place farther away from my apartment than necessary and decided to get a pizza for take-out, which ended up being completely cold by the time we got to my place. It wasn’t long after we ate when he asked me about our last kiss:

“¿Y el beso qué?”

It would be more accurate to say our last kisses. Our lips met, and our lips met again. Our lips met, our lips parted, our lips paused. I stroked his hair, he tickled me where he had discovered a ticklish spot with a brush of his finger. I nestled myself into the crook of his shoulder, ignoring the cognitive dissonance that told me my body wasn’t worthy of love, of touch, allowing him to discover my body. Over the course of hours, we removed pieces of clothing gradually, taking pleasure in the gradual dissolution of he and I as separate entities.

Hours passed before we started to pleasure each other physically, assuring that our physical intimacy was no mere anonymous expulsion of fluids, but rather an extension of the creation of our us, the we that belongs to you and me, the we made eternal by its brevity. We lay together, paralyzed by the climax that encapsulated the sum of our short-lived intimacy: the secrets we shared, the silence we cherished, the uncertainty we overcame in the name of mutual desire. He left my apartment, to my chagrin that I left unuttered, around midnight. I think he left less worried about his exam.

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I think about him a lot. I remember him, his scent, his smile. I recall the remnants of a short-lived passion. What else is a heart to do that stubbornly demands its own pleasure, irrespective of practicalities? Sometimes I ask myself what could have been and I fall into the melancholy of an imagined realm of possibilities unfettered by the constraints of reality. A change in circumstances, a loss of attraction, emotional staleness leading to a bitter conclusion. Who’s to say that what was beautiful stays beautiful? I think of him and hope he’s stretching before he runs, hope the bugs in his apartment leave him alone, hope he’s still learning Italian on Duolingo. I think of him and hope that one day he meets someone that makes him smile, until the threads that tied us together fade into the sepia tones of a romance that once was.

Our views from the castle.