Rolf/Rafa

In the dream, his name was Rolf but his face was Rafa’s (I suppose my brain is prone to culturally appropriating Germanic names, my own included). Anyway, the dream starts a few months into the COVID lockdown and he and I have not seen each other in a while. It didn’t help, apparently, that at the beginning of the lockdown he was in a car accident (Steven Strange-epic accident) and I was abroad travelling for work. When I finally call him, sheepish, a few months later, when I’m back at home (and home is Seattle, our houses those depressing, single-bedroom flats that sprout up all around the Amazon and Microsoft campuses), this is how our conversation goes:

Me: Hey Rolf, this is Ina…

Him: Mm-hmm

Me: I’m not sure if you still remember me?

Him: (sexily) Yes, of course, naked.

Then I try to go and see him and he tells me it’s not a good time, he’s supposed to have friends over, but that maybe next time. I get the distinct impression that this nascent relationship is now over because COVID and his weird, horrible accident and my lack of communication and his lack of impetus and all these other things combined. Who knows why new relationships flounder into nothingness. Might as well be due to the direction of the wind.

So I look through my phone for other flirtations I’ve had going on with other boys, desperate for a hookup I suppose, but also desperate for a connection, no matter how fleeting, no matter how secure. I remember being like that in real life: feeling like a bit of a loser if I went home empty-handed for the night. I went after those boys like I was coming out of lockdown, before we even knew what lockdown was.

There was another part of my dream in which I have an argument with my mother about something my little sister had done and which she made me feel responsible for, but that’s another psychosis for another day.

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In real life, Rafa was always just a friend. He was as purely Aryan as they came: Austrian, blonde and blue-eyed, square jawed, logical as fuck. I was always in other weird little relationships when Rafa and I hung out, so nothing ever happened even though he was exactly my type. But the rejection was familiar; all the flirtations that hung in the air until they didn’t, until the moment passed or the world moved on.

I wonder if that’s what it’s like for people now, with the lockdowns and the limited movement and the disruption of the basic mechanisms of romantic life (aside from, obviously, the disruptions to the more important parts of life). But desire doesn’t wait for some virus rate to plateau. I flirted like it was the end of the world; I almost always had a Plan A, a Plan B, as long as it took. It wasn’t desire as much as it was some form of hunger for all kinds of connection, to make my life as loud as I could. Now, in the quiet of my current, older self, I can see all the holes in my logic, but I still wouldn’t change a thing. That’s how I am surviving this pandemic.

Anyway. The world keeps turning. I haven’t talked to Rafa in years; the last I heard, he had moved back to Austria and his last relationship (with A, whom he met at one of my house parties; she was in the same circle of friends as The Lads) hadn’t worked out. Or maybe they had gotten engaged. Who knows; people end up living lives. Isn’t that the strangest bit of all – where people end up and how they got there? You think by default that the world revolves around you in the present because that’s the only tangible perspective you have. But then you see a picture or have a dream and it reminds you that there were parts of your life that actually happened, that involved other people and their feelings, even though they feel like snippets of a movie you watched years ago. The past returns to your present, and it feels like attaching an appendage you dropped somewhere along the way.