“I’ve always found you attractive, and I was lonely.”
And I, it seems, was available. An important distinction that, in its clinical precision, was less like a confession and more like an autopsy. He laid it out on the table, a perfectly dissected specimen of… Me, I guess. But what exactly? Desire? Expediency? The sheer, unadorned fact of being present in the same temporal space?
His statement has haunted me. Traumatised me. It has hung in the air since; a sterile, fluorescent hum. It, however, lacked the pathos of traditional loneliness; the romanticised ache. It was a statement stripped of sentiment entirely, a purely functional descriptor.
He spoke of attraction; a force he presented as a given; a constant – like the pull of gravity. But attraction, as he defined it, was devoid of any discernible depth. It was a surface tension, a fleeting flicker of recognition. It was the kind of thing one might notice in a passing window; a momentary aesthetic appreciation that required no further investment.
There was nothing spoken of connection, of shared vulnerabilities – the usual fragile architecture of intimacy. He offered, instead, a transaction. An exchange of physical proximity for… What? A temporary diversion? A fleeting sense of… something? The absence of something else? It seems he was a collector of moments, perhaps accumulating experiences like stamps on a well-worn passport..
I was lonely. A detachment that bordered on clinical. He was not a seeker, driven by some internal void, but a pragmatist, operating within the parameters of his own carefully defined needs. And I? A notch in a well-worn bedpost. Collateral damage. A simple means to an end.
There were no grand narratives or elaborate justifications. I was simply one of a series of choices made with the casualness of flipping through a catalogue. He was a consumer of experience, selecting from the available options.
And I, it seems, was one of those options. Not a destination, not a landscape to be explored, but a temporary waypoint. A brief pause in his journey. The transaction was complete, the exchange made, the ledger closed.
There is a certain clarity in this brutal honesty; it cut through the layers of romantic delusion and left me standing in the stark light of reality. And in that exposure, there’s a kind of freedom; a liberation from the narratives we construct to protect ourselves. I was nothing. And that’s a freedom, not born of comfort, but the cold hard realisation that some transactions are simply that: transactions, devoid of any deeper meaning.
I wish someone had told me sooner.