The woman was like steel wool, though if you spoke intellectually, even laughed at her wry humor, you’d be perplexed that lining the pockets of her charm was enough anger to destroy a popcorn machine in a multiplex theater in Times Square.

I’m not certain why she was imploding, but she was hostile—like if I wrote too many emails, she acted as if Nazis, and the sons and daughters of Nazis, and their grandchildren, Himmler Junior and Eva Braun II, had invaded her condo. 

It was exulting, this courting of her, when it happened, to open Yahoo and see her name in small letters. She said I was funny and delightful—created a certain buoyancy in my soul—an umphhh, an electrical shock comparable to what an obstetrician must have felt bringing Mussolini into the world.

The mindlessness of insidious days, the mud piles of snowdrifts on my street—all this dissipated when I saw her name in my inbox. My anima lit up, like the first Christmas bulb you see in Philadelphia on 13th Street, which features the biggest display in the city.

She’s a writer, I’m a writer—we engage the other in edited texts—like flying grammar moments where you slip on the ice. Calm and anesthetizing language with a few alluring moments. Now and then a typo, and certainly lust wasn’t halted by a mere typo, though at times it may have changed the meaning of what we were discussing.

My ex, on the other hand, is emotionally vapid, even crazy, like a semi-automatic gun that unexpectedly goes off in a movie theater. But she is a human. She springs forth like a chirping bird. She kisses well. She doesn’t mind my extra layer of cellulite, or that I have not succeeded, like her, on the Atkins diet, and lost 50 pounds.

This new girl, however, so trim and prim, from the prairies of Canada, is an out feminist with a degree in linguistics and communist studies, though she is a self-proclaimed non-atheist and does not tolerate silliness if fat cells are part of the fool pursuing her.

It would be one thing if I were her type without bull dyke appendages and my two chins protruding, in full frontal view, on the iPhone screen.

“In all of your previous photos, you are hiding behind a snake,” she said, seeing me for the first time.

It’s true, I hid behind Eddie, my python—thought the python’s cuteness distracted her from my jaunty chin that inhales Trader Joe’s Salty Caramel gelato.

I wait to see if she has written me, if she has changed her mind, and that my paunchiness, accentuated with a childish grin, which she viewed during our recent video conversation, has halted her interest level; if she has concluded I’m not the one she fell in love with.

“I worry about my job,” I type in the beginning of our correspondence, which is comprised of texts and emails.

“But you’ve been there ten years,” she replies. She says everything as if she is so sure, and must be the primary top, the reigning emperor, the perky girl with a mastermind of control, as she is with her linguistic patients who don’t speak English properly. She helps them pronounce.

“I treat them to a lollipop if they can distinguish the ‘w’ from the ‘v,’” she says. 

She coaches émigrés who have left their inhospitable homes in places like Russia and Venezuela, 

where dictators and communists inspire them toward Donald Trump or Canada.

She loathes my President.

“He is despicable,” I see her message.

“Yes,” I acknowledge. Some things do not require arguments.

“Our mayor—he’s a mini-Trump,” she notes—though he is not controlling the lives of so many people as Donald, I think.

“We feel fascism here—in Quebec,” she continues.
“Why?” I ask.

“My clients can’t get funding. I have to buy them groceries and writing supplies.”
“They don’t use the internet? Computer?”
She is reticent in her responses. She takes her time, sometimes a week, a month, five minutes, if she’s not busy resuscitating the minds of Honduran refugees who have left food in the refrigerator before escaping oppression. 

Our conversations, via the internet, precede the iPhone screen, where she will unfortunately view my various bellies, and this will dislodge any respect she once had for my intellect.

“Not all people know how to use the internet,” she discusses her clients, as if she is Margaret Mead uncovering the frailties of non-Western citizens, “they write to their families, usually by snail mail.” 

“I see…”

“So, what’s your family like?” she asks.
“They are frightening and enlightening.”
“What do you mean?”
It’s not like I can offer glib descriptors—she is a gluttonous creature who craves intense meanings; she likes specifics comparable to the customer consuming mozzarella on the white pizza.

“They don’t think I should pursue dating in Canada,” I wish to say, but this would certainly frighten and not enlighten her. “They denigrate me,” I type.

She wants a masculine partner. In her first relationship, when she was married to a cisgender man, they traveled across the prairies in a Volvo station wagon. Since then, she dates hes, but they are all claimants of vaginal anatomy and/or transitioning to the penal colony.

“Sorry to disappoint you femme ladies,” she writes on her profile, as if we will die if she doesn’t want us, “I prefer women on the masculine spectrum. Nothing personal.” In any case, I am so far, while we are texting, in the running.

When we finally meet via the video screen/phone, she is shocked that I don’t resemble a tallish KD Lang—though she is four feet and seven inches of human—she resembles a thin, saintly woman whose open-mindedness appears infinite; her real personality, however, is suffused with fascistic gerunds that betray kind and glistening eyes.

We go through this process where we write long emails frequently, and I’m sending twenty responses for each of hers.

“You know, Zelda,” she says, “I dig your candor and spirit—but you must slow down.” I feel like I’m one of her linguistics patients not using verbs correctly.

I eventually calm down. I write only one email after she writes an email or one text after she writes a text.

The woman, “the Canadian” I call her, whose name is Eva, is happier with me now. I dance at the right speed to the music rather than breaking the glass window to get my cookies.

For a moment, when I couldn’t stop sending her memes of Justin Trudeau in underwear, I thought she’d discard me like a can of tuna, perhaps a generic brand, that would fall to the bottom of the dumpster, never to be heard or seen—a disposed fragment in the universe.

Dating is similar to an interview process. First interviews are conducted via emails and texts and serve to broaden our understanding of the potential fuck mate.

I had visions of moving to Canada.

I began sending out my resume.

Over latkes, I discussed the possibility.

“Can’t you meet someone in Trenton, New Jersey?” my brother Edgar and sister-in-law Ruth ask me in the diner. I live in Philadelphia, and anything remotely closer is preferable, they say.

“I got a super deal to Montréal,” I tell them.

“What?”

“A bus ride. For $14.95 roundtrip.”
“Well, I hope your shrink gives you sleeping pills.”
My last girlfriend (pre-Montréal dame) lived 5 hours away in upstate New York, in the mountains where a circus showcases bears in the summertime. In the winter, however, there are slippery roads and I almost ended up in a creek with my Subaru and German Shepherd. My brother babysat the snake.

“What’s up with you and exceedingly long-distance relationships?” Edgar asks. This was certainly better than the woman in Perth, Australia, I pursued a decade earlier. She worked for an oil company, had red lips, was President of a Charlotte Bronte Fan Club, and unstoppable in her responses.

With your “new love interest,” you always envision the person is like, oh my God, the most seamless person.

This Montréaler, Eva, seemed exuberant, honest, charitable, open-minded, and appreciative of creativity—things you’d stick on your curriculum vitae when applying for the position of MFA professor.

I had to admit, however, I was not looking forward to our upcoming telephone/video conversation.

The lack of perfection I felt while sitting in my tight pants…plus a new and unexpected yeast infection. 

She wanted to set a time—soon—to talk—to check each other out.

I thought—maybe Thursday—by then I’ll lose five pounds. I won’t eat bread this week.

Eva was insistent about scheduling our video call. Tuesday, not Thursday. I could not possibly delete my carbs by then.

Eva could not speak Saturdays through Mondays. “I work 24 hours a day so it’s hard to talk, you know,” she wrote.

As I am a 9 to 5 girl, with a car that gets me to work, and I am quite desperate to leave the immediate memories of my ex-girlfriend hitchhiking in the Adirondacks (with punk intellectuals more athletically inclined than me), I am eager to find a lover, though by Thursday, as stated earlier, the lack of carbs would have given me a better image. We decided when, and it came suddenly, perhaps unexpectedly, like a thousand homeless people eating dinner at Sardis.

“Hi,” I said at 9:06 pm.

“Hi,” her hello was not lacking in confidence.

She was sitting in her office. There was a green plant above her.

“How are you?”

“Great.” 

“Good to finally meet you,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Great,” and then added, “are you nervous?”
“Nervous? Why should I be nervous?”
“I always get nervous when I meet new people,” I said.

“We’ve been chatting for weeks—why would you be anxious?” she wondered out loud.
I was now a patient in her office.

“This is my brick exposed wall,” I said, pointing over my head.

“Yes, I love exposed brick.” I think she liked the brick more than me.

I kept staring at her plant.

“Are you in your office?”
“Yes,” she said, exploding with rage.

“Cat got your tongue?” I wanted to say, but in truth, as linguist, she probably thought she mastered the English language at age three.

“Nice plant,” I said.

“Thanks.”

“You done for the day?”
“You know I am,” she was irresolute, “I told you I’d call after work and here I am…”

Eva didn’t like small talk, but her profundity was enclosed in clichés nonetheless.

“Well,” she hesitated, “I’m afraid this isn’t going to work.”
“What?”

“Sexually, I’m not …”

“I see…” The conversation was shorter than expected.

“You take care then,” I said, wanting to exude a bit of self-esteem, despite there being not a drop left.

“You, too.” She hung up.
I sat there silently, not far from Eddie the python, which inhaled a mouse.

I couldn’t move.

My soul fell to the floor.

I couldn’t stand and said nothing.

It went on like that for an hour, until I kissed Eddie good night and got into bed with Henry, my German Shepherd, where we listened to Brahms and fell asleep—organ music descending on us like a rain storm in March.

By Elenor Levine