I live in a nice apartment in East Austin now, and I work a 9–5 as a software engineer. It’s a pretty good life, a welcome respite from years of underemployment in the art world. My room is big. It has a high ceiling and light floods in through three large windows no matter the time of day. I have four great roommates — one human and two beautiful cats. I’m learning to sing, there are great bike trails nearby, and I bought a motorcycle too. My team’s pretty flexible with PTO, so I can get out and go to conferences or fly to visit friends. Sometimes I still draw. Sometimes I write a bit.
But sometimes I wake up at odd hours. When I first moved in, I’d wake up anywhere between midnight and 4 AM. Sometimes I’d get up and work. Sometimes I’d exercise, or play videogames, or scroll Twitter. I’d often struggle to fall asleep, no matter how tired I was during the day. I usually put on a youtube video and let the noise fill the empty space.
Now that I’m vaccinated, I’ve been dipping my toes into online dating again. I met my friend Sasha on OK Cupid, and I’ve been on a couple of dates via Bumble recently — two in one week! I’m figuring out what I want, and who I want it from. Bethany was nice, but not really my type. I liked hanging out with Kendra, but have no idea if they want to see me again or not.
We had a really nice date at Loro. Perks of software engineer salaries, I guess — enough money to pay for lunch plus drinks without a second thought, and enough flexibility to blow off work for a couple hours. We talked a bit about gender, about their partner and nonmonogamy, wanting to leave the US, and a little bit about Austin in general. It was sunny out, and I thought about asking them to follow me to the bathroom and choke me in a stall. Obviously I didn’t. I’m not a psycho. In the end, Kendra hugged me goodbye and told me they’d send me their number, but it’s been a couple days since then.
In the mornings, I’ll usually be unwillingly dragged into consciousness — my body sandwiched between the weighted blanket and high-density foam mattress I’d bought when I first got a job with IBM. Usually I’ll pull my head from under the pillow, turn my phone over, and glance at the Outlook calendar so I can check what meetings I’ve got, and know if I need to be presentable by 9.
When I woke up today, though, I really wanted someone to hurt me. I wondered if I should just spill my guts to Kendra. Maybe I should’ve asked Sasha to give me a tattoo. Maybe that’d be too much. I know Peter likes me and I’m flying to LA partly to hang out with him, but I don’t think he’d be down. He’s too sweet — one of those tenderqueer types.
The first time I asked anyone to hit me, I was a broke 20-something art student still living with my family in LA. That’s when I met Wei. They didn’t have a car, and I didn’t have an apartment so I’d hang out at their place, and they’d ride around in my car. We’d go grocery shopping and then cook together. I’d pick them up to go to museum shows and then we’d grab a drink and complain about the sad state of the art world and its politics.
One time, we went to a gallery show, then a Japanese restaurant on Sawtelle. After dinner we ran into a dark alley and took turns punching each other until we bruised. They couldn’t hit so well, so I taught them how to twist their body into the punch. I remember how thrilled I felt as they learned to hit harder and harder. I remember grinning and accidentally biting my lip as their knuckles glanced off my humerus. We compared our bruises under the incandescent street light.
Sometimes I think about that night and how we giggled, out of breath, cheeks blushed red, arms blooming purple. Before covid, before IBM, before Austin, before Codesmith, before Shanghai, before the arrest, before the 5150, before the election, before the bomb threat, before the shooting, before the hike, before before before…
