Sometimes you find someone who seems absolutely perfect. He was a total gastronome and travel enthusiast. He had favorite modernist painters and strong feelings about local museums’ art collections. On weekends, he was trying to visit every country in South America.
He started talking about flying me to Paris and Thailand and visiting me in London or San Francisco for grad school.
I’m a firm believer that the gift of travel is one of the most beautiful, intimate things you can give. You’re giving someone new perspective, new tastes, new conversations. You are filling their eyes with new sights and their minds with new ideas. It’s more than a plane ticket; it’s a little piece of the world. I’ve always identified with Sandra Bullock’s character Lucy in While You Were Sleeping. She has this dream of traveling to Florence, the point that she carries her passport everywhere. I love to travel, but most of my experiences have been through working on cruise ships. This guy seemed like a dream come true: someone who loved to travel and whose priorities matched my own while doing so, namely seeing fantastic art and eating beautiful things.
But I had a funny feeling about him. Something just didn’t seem right, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. But even from the very beginning, I remember remarking to my best friend that something about this guy seemed off.
I got sick and had to cancel on him once, which seemed to really piss him off. I’m no fun when I sound like a baby seal and my ears hurt. So I’m really not too sorry for this. It sucked to cancel, and I definitely understand being disappointed, but at least he wasn’t the one whose cough shook the walls.
We had decided to go to the Brooks and then to Bari for dinner. That had been the plan. We were working on rescheduling, even as he bitterly threw guilt trip attempting zingers at me about how I hadn’t really wanted to meet him and would he ever get to see me in person.
Then suddenly the text conversation changed to demanding erotic images.
Here’s the deal. You can ask all you want, but you don’t get to demand anything. Ever. My body is my body, and only the people I want to see it get to see it. I love my body. And sometimes, I let people see it, but it’s only if I want them to do so. It’s an intimate experience of sharing, something that stems out of trust and a mutual desire. I have to want to show you just as much as you want to see, and even then, it’s totally up to me if you get to see anything, and on top of that I get to determine what someone gets to see. And you can be damn thankful for whatever you get, even if it’s just a shot of my face. You want more, there’s a whole internet full of porn for that. I used to run an underground porn club. Trust me. There are plenty of boobs out there to be seen that aren’t mine.
So I told him off, and thankfully he hasn’t texted me back. I’m thankful to whatever germs kept me from meeting up with him in the first place, and I’m glad I’m learning to listen to my instincts.
If someone gives you a weird feeling, don’t walk, RUN. Life is too precious for us to waste time on people who make us feel bad about ourselves and who want to deny us our personal autonomy, and we should never put ourselves in situations with people who make us feel remotely unsafe. We deserve to feel safe and respected at all times, bare minimum. Trust yourself before you trust anyone else, especially a stranger.
In other news, anyone for a friend date to Bari and the Brooks?
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