Chapter Text
An Empirical Study on Modern Dating in LGBTQ Spaces, Part 1
By Gorya L, published January 11, 2026
There is a particular kind of cognitive dissonance that comes with living in Bangkok as a queer woman. On one hand, you exist in a city that has, by several measurable accounts, earned its reputation as one of the most gay-friendly metropolises in Asia. On the other hand, many eligible bachelorettes remain single, including myself.
I am a woman who dates women, though I sometimes wonder whether that is something I can continue to say without qualification, as I have yet to end up in a serious relationship with a woman, a fact that I recognize reduces my credibility on this topic. What I will say is that modern dating in LGBTQ spaces often feels like arriving at a show that is well into its sixth season: if you were not there for the pilot, you are already behind, and no one has the bandwidth to catch you up. I have heard this reflected by queer peers often enough to believe it is structural rather than personal.
As such, as an act of sacrifice and out of pure journalistic curiosity, I have decided to treat my romantic life the way I treat everything else that confuses me: with structure, documentation, and an uncomfortable amount of transparency. Over the next several weeks, I will be conducting what I am formally calling an empirical experiment in sapphic dating (using top dating app Blossom as my primary medium) and reporting my findings here, in this column, for your reading pleasure.
Let me be clear about why the app, as opposed to in-person or organic encounters.
According to a Forbes Health survey conducted in July 2025, more than 42% of people aged 18 to 26 meet their partners on dating apps. That is not a niche behavior, but rather a plurality approaching a majority. And yet the conversation around dating apps tends to oscillate between two poles: breathless enthusiasm from the newly out, and exhausted cynicism from everyone else.
The sapphic dating pool presents unique structural challenges that heterosexual dating research has historically failed to account for. The pool is smaller, and the social graph tighter–the lesbian relationship to six degrees of separation is more like two, on a good day.
So here is the experiment: I will use Blossom for a defined period, document my interactions with the rigor and precision of someone who surely should have gone into research rather than pop culture writing, and report back on what the anecdotal data actually tells us about modern queer dating in a city that is supposedly one of the best places in Asia to be doing it.
My hypothesis, should you want one: the gap between Bangkok's gay-friendly reputation and the lived experience of queer women trying to date here is wider than the rankings suggest. The infrastructure exists for visibility. Whether it exists for actual connection is a different question.
Let the record show: I did this voluntarily.
Gorya presses send.
The email leaves with a satisfying whoosh, and a moment later comes the answering ding from her editor's desktop, two rows over and currently unattended. He's out for lunch, but he’ll review it when he gets back, upon which he will flag two things she's already second-guessed herself on, and call it a good piece. This is their rhythm, a comfortable writer-editor dynamic only made possible after three years at GR Magazine.
She leans back in her chair and checks the time. 12:40. The crushed granola bar at the bottom of her work bag will have to do.
As she unwraps it, Gorya pulls out her phone and opens the App Store. On the Featured page, a large banner: the word Blossom set against flowing waves of salmon and white, a minimalist lily logo at its center. The button says “Open,” indicating the app has already been downloaded to her phone.
“You haven’t set it up yet?” comes a voice behind her.
Airy appears at her shoulder the way she always does–without warning, dragging a chair from the neighboring desk with one hand and a sandwich in the other, scattering crumbs in her wake.
“I was going to do it at home.”
“There’s no better time than the present.” Airy nods at the phone. “Open it.”
Rich words from someone who is a week overdue on her review of Heiress, the drama film currently sweeping Thailand. Gorya bites her tongue and opens the app, entering the registration details.
The first screen asks for photos. She scrolls through her camera roll with a glazed expression as she pans over pages upon pages of herself from slightly different angles. She really needs to clean out her gallery.
“That one,” Airy says, pointing at a photo from a work happy hour three months ago–Gorya in a denim jacket, hair catching the wind, expression hovering somewhere between pensive and irritated.
“I look annoyed.”
“I fear that’s just what you look like half the time.” Airy takes a bite of her sandwich. “Next.”
They go back and forth like this for a few minutes–Airy nominating, Gorya vetoing, occasionally conceding. A candid from a friend’s birthday narrowly makes the cut, along with one from a trip to Seoul.
For her bio, Gorya types Journalist at GR Magazine before quickly deleting it. She doesn’t plan to deceive anyone, but her experiment relies on a certain degree of restraint on the subject of her career. She changes it to Writer. A shred of transparency seems fair enough; if they really wanted to, they could probably find the rest of her information online.
“Age range?” Airy prompts.
Gorya moves the slider to twenty-four to thirty-four. At Airy’s pointed gaze, she shrugs unapologetically.
“I have a type.”
She sets the distance radius, toggles the preferences, and arrives at the final screen: a prompt asking what she's looking for. She stares at it blankly.
Something worth writing about, she types. Deletes it.
Honestly not sure. Deletes that too.
She settles on: Let's find out.
“Done?” Airy asks.
“Done.”
They do a final once-over of the profile together, Airy making a small sound of approval.
“You might actually meet someone,” Airy says, sounding almost surprised, which Gorya tries not to take personally.
As if on cue, a notification slides down from the top of the screen.
You have 2 new likes!
Gorya takes a bite of her granola bar and stares at it. She'll figure out what she's gotten herself into later.
Gorya is running four minutes late, which is entirely out of character for someone who prides themselves on their punctuality.
She fast-walks down the street with her bag sliding off one shoulder, replaying the last week in her head.
The match had come on a Thursday evening. She'd been on the couch, laptop open on a blank outline of the piece she'd been assigned earlier that day, a reality show humming on the TV for company. She’d grabbed her phone intending to take a short break when the notification appeared. Praew liked your profile. She’d almost swiped past it the way she’d swiped past the others (and there had been others, a slightly overwhelming number of them since she first set up the profile with Airy), but this time she didn’t. This still counts as work, she'd told herself, clicking through.
The first thing she noticed: all of Praew’s photos were shot on film. Slightly overexposed, warm at the edges, with a feminine delicacy to them. In one, Praew was laughing at something off-camera, eyes creased, seemingly unaware of being photographed. In another, the lower half of her face was concealed behind a coffee mug, but her eyes were still crinkled with a smile she hadn’t bothered to hide. The bio was brief: photographer. I have two sons named mochi and peanut. ask me about my film camera!!
The last photo was of two tabby cats asleep in a pile. Endeared, Gorya had swiped right.
Praew had messaged within the hour. hi!! you’re sooo pretty, followed by an unreasonable number of heart-eye emojis. Not quite sure how to follow up on that, Gorya had asked about the film camera, which did the job. They’d talked easily for a few days, conversation moving at an unhurried pace, until Praew asked if she wanted to get coffee sometime (with two exclamation points), and Gorya had said yes.
She spots the café now: a narrow shophouse with plants crowding the windowsill and a handwritten menu board propped at the entrance. She’s been here before, on one of her weekend matcha runs. Good taste, she notes absentmindedly.
Praew is already there, sitting at a table near the window, scrolling on her phone with a small canvas tote hanging off the back of her chair. She’s smaller than Gorya expected, and cuter, and when she looks up her face opens all at once, a wide smile spreading across her face.
“Gorya?” She half-rises from her seat.
“Hi,” Gorya slides into the chair across from her, slightly out of breath. “Sorry I’m late, I was–”
“Don’t even worry about it. You’re not even that late.” Praew waves it off. “I’m just always early. It’s kind of a problem.”
Gorya smiles politely, hands drifting to her hair to straighten it–a habit she returns to when she’s nervous, which is what she is, she realizes, sitting across from a stranger who is not a stranger on the first date she's been on in years. Her first ever from the apps.
As if sensing this, Praew slides a glass of green liquid across the table. “The matcha here is so good. Do you want to try some of mine?”
The first twenty minutes are slightly stilted in the way first dates often are–conversation that moves a beat too carefully, both of them reaching for topics and setting them down again. They talk about the café, the neighborhood, where they went to school, whether either of them had seen the new Heiress movie and what their thoughts on it were.
Then Praew asks what Gorya is currently working on, and the tone shifts.
“A series of pieces," Gorya says; then, with more hesitation, "...on modern dating."
Praew's eyes go wide. “And you're–" She stops. “Is that why you’re on Blossom?"
Gorya tilts her head. "Sort of?”
There's a beat before Praew laughs, genuine and without malice. "That's such a writer thing to do."
"I've been told."
"So am I–" Praew gestures between them. "Is this…?"
"You're not some type of assignment," Gorya clarifies. It comes out more directly than she intends. "I'm on the app genuinely. The series is about the experience, not about any specific person."
Praew considers this. "Okay," she says, mulling it over. "Can I ask what you've found out so far?"
"Well, I've only been on it for a week."
“And?”
Gorya takes a sip of her drink. “Ask me later.”
Praew smiles at that, and the last of the awkwardness dissolves. They talk for another hour–about photography, about Praew's film camera and the discipline of shooting on a medium where every frame costs something. About how Bangkok looks in low light and what it takes to do it justice. About bad movies, which Praew has strong opinions on, catalogued and ranked, and Gorya finds herself listening with genuine interest rather than the performed attention she'd half-expected to be deploying by this point in the afternoon.
It is, she thinks, a little like talking to herself. Praew is warmer, more openly enthusiastic, but the mannerisms are uncanny, from the way they twirl their straw to the way they both lean slightly to the right when something strikes them as particularly funny.
Gorya is not sure yet if that’s a good thing.
When they finally step outside, the afternoon has gone golden, light falling long across the pavement. Praew shoulders her tote and carefully lifts her film camera from it.
“Can I?” she asks, raising it.
Gorya shoots her signature scowl, the one she uses when she's trying not to smile and losing.
“Perfect,” Praew giggles.
The shutter clicks.
They walk to the corner together, and it is Praew who says it first, with the cheerful directness that Gorya has come to recognize as her default mode.
“I feel like we should be friends.”
The words don’t sting with the feeling of rejection. If anything, Gorya feels something loosen in her chest, a wave of relief washing over her. “I was thinking the same thing.”
“Good,” Praew looks pleased with this, as if a minor logistical problem has been resolved. “I’ll send you the photos.”
They exchange numbers on the pavement and part ways, and Gorya walks back to the station with a sense of calm, wondering if the rest of the experiment will be so forgiving.
An Empirical Study on Modern Dating in LGBTQ Spaces, Part 2
By Gorya L, published January 25, 2026
First date: completed.
For those who missed the inaugural installment of this series, in which I outlined my methodology, established my hypothesis, and downloaded a dating app in the name of journalism, I recommend going back to read it first. For those who are current: welcome to my findings.
Subject one is a photographer. Twenty-four. Bangkok-based, loves film, two cats whose names I will not be disclosing to protect her identity.
…
We have since exchanged numbers and agreed to be friends. This is, by any reasonable measure, a good outcome.
I would like to, however, touch upon a phenomenon in lesbian spaces that heterosexual dating literature has historically underexamined. For sapphic women, the boundary between friendship and romance is less a fixed line than a gradient: permeable, context-dependent, and subject to revision without notice.
Queer women built their social world largely without the scripts that heterosexual courtship has long relied on: the legible signals, the social consensus that distinguishes a date from an outing, a close friend from something more. What developed in place of those scripts was a community organized around intimacy that doesn't announce itself, around relationships that deepen gradually and decline to declare what they are until they have to. The result is a social ecosystem that is, depending on your perspective, either beautifully fluid or genuinely difficult to navigate–and quite often both at once.
Blossom was supposed to introduce some clarity. Both parties opt in, the romantic intent is, theoretically, implied from the start. And yet what I found, sitting across from the photographer, was that the app had established the context without resolving the ambiguity. The date had quietly and incrementally reorganized itself into a friendship in real time, the gradient doing what it has always done and will apparently continue to do regardless of what technology we put in front of it.
I don’t think this is anyone’s fault. I think it is simply the texture of a community that has always known how to be close without always knowing what to call it.
On that note, I’ll keep this one brief. I have another date scheduled this evening, a first meeting with a different subject, and I have made a private commitment to myself regarding punctuality that I would like to keep this time.
The rooftop bar is nice enough that Gorya feels slightly underdressed in her work clothes, and busy enough that she has to scan three times before she spots Min at the bar, nursing a tall glass of red wine and eyes moving from the bartender to the patrons neighboring her.
She's pretty in the way her profile suggested, though that profile had offered very little to go on. One photo, black and white, her face slightly obscured by the camera flash. A bio that simply read: just looking around :). The name listed was a single letter: M. Gorya had stared at the profile for a long while when she first came across it, genuinely unsure what she was looking at. A person in the middle of setting up their profile and forgetting to finish, perhaps. Or someone new to all of this, testing the waters before committing so much as a full name.
She had swiped right anyway. Partly out of curiosity, partly because Min was hot, and partly because she had been making a note to herself about varying her approach (her only matches so far had messaged her first). At some point in the experiment, she would have to make the first move. M had seemed like a reasonable place to start.
When she reached out, M had replied within the hour, nervous but friendly in equal measure, and offered a name: Min.
She’s pretty in person too, Gorya thinks now, approaching the bar. Small features, good posture, hair pulled back neatly. Min smiles when she sees her.
“Hi. You must be Gorya.”
“And you must be Min.” Gorya settles onto the barstool beside her. “Nice to finally put a face to the letter.”
Min blinks, then laughs, a little surprised. “Right. Sorry about that. I’m not really sure why I did that.”
Gorya smiles and picks up the drinks menu. “No need to explain.”
Gorya has some experience under her belt now (thank you, Praew), but the first date jitters never really go away. She finds herself carrying most of the conversation this time, keeping it surface level and easy. She learns that Min works in logistics, has a younger sister she talks highly about, and as Gorya isn’t too surprised to learn, has never dated a woman before.
“Is it obvious?” Min asks.
“Not at all,” Gorya says. A part of it is true–Min carries a charisma that many other women would find attractive. She can see Min growing into herself, eventually.
“I’ve just always been curious,” Min says, turning her glass slowly on the bar. “About women. I don’t know… I’ve had the thought for a long time, especially during college when most of my friends were lesbians, but it always felt like something I’d figure out later.” She pauses. “I’m not sure when later became now.”
“What made you download the app?”
Min thinks about this. “My friend dared me to,” she admits. “Which I know sounds–” she winces, “...bad.”
“We all start somewhere,” Gorya says.
She thinks back to her own somewhere–age fourteen, alone in her bedroom, watching Legend of the Blue Sea on her phone under the covers because a classmate recommended it. She had lasted approximately forty minutes before accepting that she was significantly less interested in the mermaid's love story than she was in the mermaid herself.
She had never told anyone that. She is not going to tell Min now.
“I did want to,” Min adds, quickly. “The dare just gave me an excuse to actually do it.” She looks at Gorya with what appears to be regret. “Does that make sense?”
If Min is afraid Gorya would be offended by this confession, she’s far from it. Instead, her intrigue over Min only grows. She can understand what Min is describing, the wanting that requires an external push to become an action, the excuse that lets you do something you already intended to do while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability, mostly with yourself.
“How are you finding it so far?” Gorya asks before Min can spiral even further into her anxiety. “The app.”
“Overwhelming,” Min says immediately. “But also kind of… exciting? I think?” She says it like a question, like she is checking her own feelings as she names them.
Then, a couple at the end of the bar glances over, the way people do in crowded places, and Min shifts almost imperceptibly in her seat. Turns her body a few degrees, suddenly very interested in the skyline.
Gorya clocks it and says nothing.
It happens again twenty minutes later, when the bartender comes to ask if they want a refill of their drinks. Min responds shortly and looks away, and there is a brief, thin silence that neither of them acknowledges.
Min turns the conversation to Gorya, and Gorya runs through the spiel. Twenty-four, two younger siblings, grew up here, works in media.
“What kind of media?” Min asks.
“Writing, mostly. I’m at a magazine.”
“Fascinating. What do you write about?”
Gorya considers the question in the half-second available to her.
“Everything,” she says. “Culture, mostly. People.” Then, to prevent her vagueness from being mistaken for disinterest, she adds, “I’m working on a series at the moment, actually.”
“About what?”
“Dating,” Gorya responds. “The app experience specifically. It’s part of why I’m on Blossom.”
She recalls Praew’s reaction to this information, how her curiosity and amusement over the subject opened up the conversation, and expects the same to happen here. She is not prepared for Min’s face to harden, for her brows to knit together in consternation.
“So when you matched with me…”
“I mean, my intentions are genuine,” Gorya says, which is true. “I’m on the app genuinely, the series is about the experience, not–”
“But you’re writing about this?” Min sets her glass down. “About tonight?”
“Everything is anonymized,” Gorya is quick to clarify. “No names, no identifying–”
“I’d rather you didn’t.” Min’s voice is polite but final. “I’m sorry, I just–I’m not really comfortable with that.”
A beat passes. Gorya looks at Min–at the careful posture that she now recognizes as stiff–and understands that the discomfort is not just about the article.
“Of course,” Gorya says. “I understand completely.”
The subject is changed, and they finish their drinks with the determined pleasantness of two people honoring an implicit agreement to let the remainder of the evening be painless. Min is nice about it, but all room for romance, if ever present, has vanished.
They part outside the elevator with a brief hug. Min suggests they do it again sometime, and Gorya agrees, knowing they won’t.
On the ride down, Gorya recounts the night, and when the mood shifted. It had not fully occurred to her that there would be people on the app with reasons they had not yet fully sorted out even for themselves.
She doesn’t take out her notebook for the rest of the night. Some evenings aren’t material.
An Empirical Study on Modern Dating in LGBTQ Spaces, Part 3
By Gorya L, published February 1, 2026
…
I want to be careful about how I write this, because it is easy to be glib about it and I don't think it deserves that. Bisexuality is not a phase, a stepping stone, or a personality trait to be picked up and set down depending on the social weather–I say this as a matter of fact, not as a disclaimer. But it is, for many people, a journey. And like most journeys, it has a beginning. I happened to meet someone who was still very much at hers.
She was warm, and honest, and clearly trying. I don't hold any of what followed against her. What I will say is that there is a particular experience, familiar to many queer women, of sitting across from someone who is curious about you in a way that has not yet fully been decided what kind of curious it is. It is not unkind nor malicious. It is simply the specific weight of being, for someone else, a question they are in the process of asking themselves.
The apps, I am learning, do not screen for readiness. They screen for interest, which is a different thing entirely. Whether you are ready to act on that interest, whether you have sat with it long enough, made enough peace with what it means about you, is between you and the download button, and entirely your own business until it becomes someone else’s evening.
I hope she finds what she’s looking for. I mean that without irony, which for me is saying something.
The third article goes up on a Tuesday. By Thursday morning, Gorya has a new match.
She knows this because she is already on her phone when the notification comes in. She has been on her phone since seven, watching her latest article gain traction. The comments are good, the shares even better. Airy has sent her four separate messages, each one a different variation of I told you people would like this, which Gorya reads and does not respond to because she’s still bitter that her denim jacket photo remains the most liked one on her profile.
By mid-morning, her manager sends her an email: the series is performing well, the readership numbers are climbing, and GR will be covering her dates going forward as a business expense. A stipend, effectively, for the pursuit of romance. Gorya sits with this information for a moment, retracing the career choices that led her here.
She has always loved this about her job, its fundamental strangeness, the way it occasionally requires her to do something that looks from the outside like simply living her life and then rewards her for writing about it honestly. Most people have to keep their work and their private life separate, but Gorya has been incapable of this since she started at GR three years ago as an editorial assistant.
She quickly responds to the email, then opens the Blossom notification.
Prim, 29.
The profile is a bit all over the place. Her first photo positions her on what looks like a film set, a headset around her neck and a clipboard tucked under her arm. Another of her behind a camera on what appears to be a rooftop at dusk, her back to the lens, the city spread out below her. One slightly blurry shot of a drum kit crammed into a small room crowded with equipment, scattered notebooks, and what appears to be at least two unfinished cups of coffee perched precariously on a chair. Prim’s head pokes up from the corner of the picture, a sleep mask positioned askew over her eyes. The bio reads: When I’m not on set, I’m probably traveling.
Gorya opens their chat before she has the opportunity to second guess herself.
What follows is a week that Gorya will later struggle to summarize when she decides it’s time to introduce Prim to her readers.
It starts simply enough. She asks about the traveling, and Prim responds with a voice note, which Gorya was not expecting. It’s slightly chaotic, recorded apparently from the back of a moving vehicle, describing, in no particular order, a film festival in Seoul she attended last spring, a disastrous shoot in Sa Pa where it rained for four consecutive days, and a hotel in Osaka with snacks in the lobby that she still thinks about to this day. Gorya listens to it twice, then responds with a text, because she is not a voice note person and never will be, which she says outright.
that’s fair, Prim writes back. some people aren’t. you seem more like someone who chooses their words carefully anyway
Is that a compliment?
definitely. I work with a lot of people who don’t. it’s a pain
In a later conversation, Gorya learns that Prim has been to fourteen countries, and her favorite outside of Thailand is Japan, though Switzerland is a close second.
Over a voice note on a random Friday, Prim complains that the model for the shoot she’s doing is running late again, and as result, she’s bored with nothing left to do. She drags the word “bored” out, whiny and exasperated, and ends the voice note with a coy keep me company?
Gorya finds it so charming that she leaves her desk to accept the phone call that comes shortly after, which earns her a very suspicious look from Airy.
By the following week, Gorya notices that she has started checking her phone with a frequency that she would describe, if pressed, as moderate, and which Airy (who notices everything) would almost certainly describe differently. She checks it between meetings, while waiting for her coffee to cool, at her desk under the pretense of reaching for her water bottle.
Prim texts the way she apparently does everything else: with momentum and ease. She sends Gorya a photo of a location she’s scouting, a narrow alley in the old part of the city, early morning light cutting across the pavement at a low angle.
doesn’t this look like the opening shot of something?
Gorya studies the photo longer than is strictly necessary and writes back: it looks like the kind of street your main character would grow up on.
Prim’s response is a single exactly, which for some reason gives Gorya a disproportionate sense of accomplishment.
A few days later, Prim sends a short clip of herself sitting by a pool, the surface of the water shimmering, followed by the message I’m procrastinating.
What are you procrastinating on?
a script I just can’t be bothered to look at rn. what are you procrastinating on?
Gorya looks at the half finished article open on her laptop, cursor blinking with quiet judgment.
Nothing, she writes.
liar, Prim writes back.
You can’t prove that.
I don’t need to. I can just tell
That’s a very confident claim from someone I’ve never met. Which reminds Gorya–they haven’t met yet. It’s the longest she’s gone on the app without scheduling a meetup, but Prim seems to be in no rush, and Gorya reasons that she’s already exhausted her boldness by messaging first.
am I wrong?
Gorya looks at the article again. She has written one sentence in the last hour.
No, she admits.
thought so. what’re you supposed to be writing about?
Gorya considers it carefully before replying.
Dating apps, specifically the part where they make you optimistic against your better judgment
A pause, longer than usual. Then:
speaking from personal experience or?
Based on general observations. Plus academic research
sure it is. does your academic research happen to have a favorite person on the app right now? Prim punctuates her question with an emoji sticking its tongue out.
Gorya closes her laptop, article long forgotten. She’ll suffer the consequences tomorrow.
Telling you would compromise the integrity of my research
Prim responds quickly: very professional. totally didn’t answer the question though
Three dots.
don’t think I didn’t notice
Followed by the smirking emoji.
Don’t make that face
you can’t see my face
I can extrapolate…
If Gorya were Prim right now, she would use this opportunity to ask Gorya to meet in person. But, as Gorya is beginning to learn, Prim is far from predictable.
okay gorya. I’ll let you get back to your very important article that you’re definitely writing
Followed by the winking emoji.
The weekend passes in the background of their conversation.
On Saturday morning, Gorya is at her usual coffee shop, the one near her apartment with the corner table that she has claimed through years of consistent patronage, when Prim sends a photo. It’s a half-eaten bowl of noodles, a dog-eared book beside it, and a drumstick being used as a bookmark for extra measure.
breakfast of champions, Prim captions it.
Gorya turns her phone toward the window beside her and takes a photo of her own reflection caught in the glass, the shop blurred behind it.
The caption: Morning :)
Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.
cutiee
Heart eyes emoji.
Exploding head emoji.
Rocket ship emoji.
Gorya is starting to think Prim just likes spamming emojis.
By Saturday afternoon, she has learned the following: Prim grew up in Khon Kaen, the second of three siblings, and is the only one who left–a fact she states without drama but which Gorya files away carefully. She studied film in Bangkok, stayed because the city suited her, and has been freelancing long enough that she has built a wide enough network to never have to pay for housing in other cities.
She also, apparently, cannot cook.
Like at all?
like I once set off a smoke alarm making microwave rice
That’s almost impressive
thank you. I’ve chosen to see it that way
So what do you usually eat?
I have three places near my apartment that know my order. And im very good at reading menus
Is that so? I didn’t realize reading menus was a life skill now
it absolutely is. you can tell everything about a restaurant from its menu. font choice, item descriptions, it’s a whole language
Gorya stares at this for a moment.
Oh so she’s a linguistic genius now
Winking emoji.
Sunglasses emoji.
On Monday she learns that Prim once spent three weeks on a remote island and came back having taught herself basic Portuguese from a phrase book she found in the rental house. She does not speak Portuguese. She can, however, order coffee and apologize for minor inconveniences, which she argues is the essential vocabulary for any language.
what do you do when you’re somewhere new?
I write about it, Gorya responds. Everything goes in a notebook first
physical notebook?
Always
ok that’s actually very attractive
Gorya reads this twice. She is at her desk, in the middle of annotating a draft, and she puts her pen down.
?
the notebook. the fact that you still use one. the whole thing
You’re easily impressed
I really don’t think I am actually. you’re just a special person, goryaa
She leaves that one unanswered and picks her pen back up. The annotation she was working on now strikes her as significantly less interesting than it did ten minutes ago.
By Tuesday, Gorya has stopped pretending the article is why she keeps picking up her phone. She’s not sure exactly when this happened, but Prim has become part of her daily routine.
She is reading through her notes when Prim sends, unprompted: genuine question. If you could only write about one thing for the rest of your career what would it be
That’s not a light Tuesday evening question
I know. I’ve been thinking about it for myself. Film is different but within film I keep coming back to loneliness. not in a sad way, in a this is the most interesting human condition way
What about loneliness specifically?
the way people move around it. toward each other and then away. the near misses. I think that’s what most stories are actually about if you look closely enough
Gorya reads this and thinks, without meaning to, about a photographer whose mannerisms mirrored her own. About a girl at a rooftop bar, hands fidgeting in her lap, as she watches everyone around her. About the way an app full of people can still feel like a very populated form of loneliness.
People, she writes back, even though she knows she’s stretching the bounds of the question. I’d write about people, specifically the parts they don’t mean to show
like what?
Like the way someone laughs when they’re caught off guard. Or what they reach for when they’re nervous. The details that happen before people remember they’re being observed
Gorya.
Prim, Gorya echoes lightheartedly.
I think you might be the most interesting person I’ve matched with on this app
That’s a low bar. You’ve seen the app
I’ve also seen you. relatively speaking
A few seconds pass, Prim typing.
and I’d like to actually see you. If that’s okay
Gorya doesn't need to think of a response this time.
That’s okay