Doritos

Being the designated fat friends comes with some baggage. It means settling for the broken cookies at the bottom of the bag. It means avoiding pictures with attractive friends and looking behind you when that cute guy smiles in your direction. When I got tired of being lonely, I followed the popular opinion and tried online dating. Navigating the sea of fuck boys and serial killers started off as a game. This one sags his pants. Swipe left. This one has no teeth. Swipe left. This one has a nice smile. Swipe right. This one is old enough to be my grandfather’s grandfather. Swipe left.

A message here. A like there. The insecurities slowly lift away to show the confident woman that was buried under the rubble. And then ‘he’ contacted me. I could have swiped left. I could have ignored it. But I admired his bravery for reaching out. He wasn’t attractive in the traditional sense. He was a heavy-set guy with very little care in physical appearance. All of his pictures looked the same and gave this strange grimace in all of his photos. We talked here and there. He called me beautiful and seemed to care about what I was into. Through all of this, I never really liked him. That’s why I kept a distance. I continued to move the starting line so no one could ever start. I refused to lower my standards of what I thought I deserved but at the same time, I wondered if I deserved much if anything at all.

After a week of texts and an endless stream of my bitching about needing to go to the gym, he offers to be my workout buddy. We set a date. My anxieties planted a wasp nest in the pit of my stomach. I come close to canceling our plans every hour on the hour. I don’t even like this man, and yet I’m going to meet up with him. I want to give him a chance. I want to extend a hand as he edges close to a starting line seconds before I move it again.

I get to the gym with my partner in crime is sitting close by waiting to pounce in case something strange occurs. Ten minutes pass. Fifteen minutes pass. Thirty minutes into my wait I’m more than annoyed. I get ready to head to my usual station and sweat away my worries. And then he walks in. I’ll give it to him. He was honest in his pictures.

He doesn’t make eye contact with me as he stands near the reception desk. Maybe I’m not what he expects. Maybe he’s just nervous. Maybe he never should have came in the first place. We exchange pleasant greetings and make our way through the gym.

He mumbles something about the bathroom and walks away. So here I am. Standing in the middle of the gym. Not moving forward or backwards. The feeling of anxiety is quickly encompassed by annoyance and frustration. My sense of self worth boils to surface and a wave of awareness sweeps over me. I’m no longer here for him. I hop on a treadmill and I start handling my business. Five minutes later, he walks back to me. He mumbles about the treadmill being his worse enemy. After all I’ve been through, I’m not too concerned about his worries.

We walk and try to make conversation. I don’t know if it’s as painful for him as it is for me so I just listen. I listen to his gripes about his ex girlfriend. I listen to him complain about the treadmill as he looks over at my machine in efforts to keep up with my pace. I’m sucked into ‘counselor mode’ without even realizing it. I listen to everything he says. I laugh when I’m supposed to. I chime in when he needs me to. This isn’t what a date is supposed to be like. I shouldn’t feel this detached. I should be excited and eager, but I’m just not. He sees someone he knows across the gym. A pretty female he calls ‘cuz. I initially expect him to get off the treadmill and walk over to them. Being ditched is nothing new but I’d more than welcome it right now. Instead he does the most horrendous thing a person can do while hanging with an introvert. He hollers across the gym to get his cousin’s attention. And the cherry on top is that they never turn around. They don’t even acknowledge him.

Now don’t get me wrong. I have my moments where eyes are directed to my person. There are times when I couldn’t care less what people thought of my behavior. But that day was not the day.

Towards the last five minutes of our workout, I’m convinced he may be on the brink of death. He coughing and wheezing and damn near about to pass out. I step along the sides of machine prepared to get help if he falls. Gym rat or not, I don’t know how to save a person when they flop. We decide to call it quits and try something else. He seems more into me. Granted, I just listened to him talk about his ex-girlfriend for half a hour. I’m ready to leave. I haven’t broken a sweat because I scaled my workout down so we could ‘talk’ and get to know one another. I don’t really know what rep I’m on and I’ve come to the ultimate discovery that he smells just like a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos.

We finally walk out of the gym. My feelings are cemented as I encourage him to leave while I go find my sidekick. If I liked him, I would have wanted to keep his presence close by a little longer. I would have wanted to keep talking and trying memorize every word and  every detail. But I didn’t.

I told him to text me when he got home simply out of habit. We spoke back and forth before I fell asleep that night. When I text to make sure he was feeling better, I realized that the gym life isn’t for everyone. He was in the hospital and I was starting to feel like I had put him there. I remembered the way he coughed and wheezed. I remembered how he tried to keep up with my pace knowing he wasn’t use to it. It seemed wrong to ghost in that situation, so we kept talking.

Unfortunately, the concept of ‘talking’ is poorly used. Our talk typically consisted of him saying the same two texts. ‘Good Morning beautiful.’ And ‘wyd?’ And that was it. There were times when he’d explicitly state that he was open to questions, but I didn’t feel like being the counselor or the interviewer. I wanted there to be conversation. A wanted there to be a pull that made me excited to talk with him the morning and reluctant to end our conversation at night. Ghosting on him over time was easy. I felt a little bad, but I took comfort in the fact that me walking away left room for someone else who would be better suited for what he needed.