Socially Distanced

We met on a late summer’s afternoon, in a pub at the bottom of Primrose hill. I was wearing a black dress with embroidered white little stars all over it. I like how that dress looks on me, I feel so comfortable in it. We started chatting on a dating app, I don’t remember being too excited about meeting up because of all the awkward disastrous dates I’d been through during the previous months. I remember wanting to enjoy an evening out and just feeling light. First thing he tells me as our eyes meet inside the pub is ‘you are not that short!’ Here we go, I thought to my self. Here comes yet another awful evening where the only way to get through it is getting wasted. Fine. Let’s do this. Maybe he is just nervous. But still! Fine.

Conversation was really hard as his northern accent and mumbling was like Chinese to me. I was trying to not show him I had zero clues about what he was talking about and was trying to say something that would match the general tone. Is it a good time to laugh? Maybe just nod. Smile. I was however very much into his arms, the veins running superficial under the skin that I could follow from the biceps all the way down through to the hands. I do remember going to the loo and seeing him from a distance as I was walking back to the table, his green eyes matching the tight polo shirt. I thought he was handsome and sent a text to my friends telling them while he was at the bar to get drinks. 

We had quite a few more and then walked up to Primrose hill and sat on the grass watching the city at sunset. He’d never been there and only later I found out that he loved it. He told me many times afterwards and bought a print of primrose hill that he hanged in his kitchen. He didn’t seem that impressed while we were there. Only much later I also started to understand his ways of showing feelings, so different from my Italian way of expressing every single feeling with my face, my hands, my voice, my entire self. He wouldn’t necessarily smile, like me, when he was happy. He would rarely laugh out loud. He would cover his face when he couldn’t help but stretching a smile. I found that really sweet. When I laugh the whole building shakes and in good times it happens a lot, I laugh with my mouth wide open and make a lot of noise. His reserved personality was somehow appealing to me, so very different from mine, the exact opposite I would say. His expression was the same when telling me about Iraq and Afghanistan or about how he was loving London and enjoying nights out in the city.

We came over at mine and had pizza, talking having fun and being drunk. Light. He kissed me after quite a while and was so confident in the movements and tender and slow in the rhythm of the moment, I remember loving it. He was sitting and I was standing, he took my hand and pulled me towards him, slowly and softly. I sat on his lap and we kissed for a long time. 
Sex had been amazing. Liberating, free, natural, never awkward, never weird, and always so intense for me. I like his confidence, his being cool but delicate, serious but careful and caring, cold and almost detached during the time spent together walking exploring London, and then feeling him so close and as one in bed. Feeling a connection, his eyes showing his armour is down, his heart on his sleeve, he holds me close so tight at night. 

Lockdown happened 6 months into our relationship, and we spent two months without seeing each other. He has two young daughters that he has over at his house half of the week with schools being closed, so we decided it’d be better to not risk passing anything to them and vice versa. I had been working from home at the beginning and then have been in furlough so I have literally not seen anyone, not hugged anyone, not touched, heard, smelled, felt anyone. It’s been really hard; I’ve been through despair, anxiety, fear, panic, loneliness, and all the saddest feelings that exist. I’ve even found myself mourning people that had passed away years ago, my dog that passed away last year, I felt all the sadness of the past again all over again. I felt in many occasions that he wasn’t there for me as I wished he’d be. I felt he wasn’t seeing my pain and I spent days being upset with him for this, not replying to his texts and just ignoring his calls and ways of getting through to me. All of a sudden I wanted him to be another version of himself, be the way I wanted him to be. Be more like me. He was worried about me, he would text me often to hear how I was doing and had his way of reassuring me. He was there, in his way. But I wasn't acknowledging it. 

I thought he wasn’t right for me, I thought I was better off alone than with someone who would never understand my way of living every feeling to its extreme. I don’t really know what I wanted him to do, what I was expecting.

I think I was upset with the world and he was part of it, I wanted to blame him for my unhappiness. It’s easier to blame a single person than an unsettling pandemic ruining all career plans, travels, savings, hope for the future and compromising every sort of happiness. 

I hope he likes me being me, with my steep spikes up and down, just as I love him being him. 

I can’t wait to see his inner smile again and tease him in bed, making fun of him resembling a sloth. I think that did make him laugh once.