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  • Buddy
  • Vincent Yu (bio)

She catches you staring on the H train, as it sloughs its way through tunnels beneath the city. The bleary morning, the drowsy surrender. She's reading something; you twist your neck for a look at the cover. Maybe you'll recognize it and start a conversation. But when you straighten up, she's staring. You try smiling but it's early, still, and your mouth is sealed in its crookedness by a layer of spittle and frozen toothpaste.

She smirks and goes back to her book. The train screeches and all the passengers shear and wobble like Jell-O coming to a stop. She lines up at the doors, and when they whoosh open she steps off without looking back.

Sheila used to hate the subway. "It's the one good thing about all this," she said on the evening she left. "Finally, I can escape this fucking subway." You hardly had the energy to respond. It strikes you, weeks later, that maybe it was some kind of a joke. Maybe you should have searched her face for a smirk, but your neck muscles weren't working back then. You were an All-Star shoegazer.

You're not tall by any standards save Asian. According to your mother, who's five-foot-four in heels, you're a big, strong boy. Your dad, five-foot-six, likes to slap you on the scapula and grin up at you. But your numbers on the big dating sites are rookie numbers, and not the kind you can just pump up. "Girls are like the big consultancies," says Bradley, who's been in a long-term, long-distance relationship since forever. "If you're not six feet, they'll just swipe left right away. They have enough candidates." You nod somberly. You try to mitigate your flaws by working out. You go on runs after work and you down those chalky protein shakes like water.

You've learned over the past few months that life proceeds like beads sliding down a string, and each moment holds a kind of whispering possibility that could expand and fundamentally alter the pattern of who you become—like a knot in the string—but you only have as long as it takes for the next bead to slide and click against the previous one. [End Page 100]

After Sheila left, you'd spent a week getting as fucked up as humanly possible. You called in sick four days in a row. Your boss, an old dude in complete denial of his age, called you a pussy but told you to rest up. "What do you even have?" he asked. You held your phone near the toilet and flushed.

"Okay, well, just come back when you're feeling better."

________

You realize, with a slow, telescoping kind of terror, that you're getting old. Nothing drastic, but you sense it in those subtle ways—like how your hangovers don't quite disappear so much as they compound, and a good stretch can somehow lead to five pulled muscles, and all the shitty food you're used to eating begins to linger in your system, emptying their calories straight into your gut.

You're accosted more and more frequently by those stranded moments when the loneliness morphs from abstract to physical, when you're surrounded on all sides by slippery black walls, and your best bet is to stay completely still, to not do anything, for fear that you'll sink deeper. You're getting old, and Sheila's gone.

You get vaguely racist messages on dating sites—stuff like, You're cute for an Asian guy and Normally I don't date Asians—but you bite down your pride for the chance to get nice and laid. And still the numbers are pathetic. For every hundred girls that get put in front of you, maybe ten match. Three of them respond to your conversational overtures—things that you and Bradley have spent more time brainstorming than you're willing to admit. What's a good pun? Does negging actually work? Should I compliment her or what? Two agree to meet you for a...

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