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Khashayar J. Khabushani
It’s 2019 and I’m desperate to escape the complicated man I’m dating, the two jobs I’m juggling, my shoebox apartment in New York City. I convince myself I need to be in the arms of a woman, and I know exactly who to reach for.
I first met Lana in Vienna, where we spent one fulfilling and devastating weekend together in 2015, ended by borders and visas. Still, I’m stubborn, and want more of her. “Dearest Lana,” I write, summoning the courage to ask to see her again. She is now married, and I know I should be happy for her, but Lana insists I come to her anyway, that her marriage won’t prevent us from continuing what we started—that our summer will be the Before Sunset to our Before Sunrise.
Our romance takes place in the Serbian summer light; a string of charged and tender days in Belgrade, her girlhood city, where she rents a quiet Airbnb for us with a balcony from which it seems summertime hues never stop shimmering. To me, Belgrade—its smoggy air and sidewalks packed with street vendors—feels as close as I’ll ever get to experiencing my ancestral land, Iran; the place where I belong but can never belong to. I fall in love with the city, our version of it, and I fall for Lana too. We drink sweetened iced lattes under the bright Balkan sun and eat mediocre fried food at a strange American-themed diner and spend nights together in bed, our chests sweaty and sticky. On one warm, moonlit evening we sit at a riverfront restaurant, where mosquitoes feast on our arms and legs, until her brother arrives, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes, and drives us home so recklessly that maybe Lana doesn’t notice how my eyes radiate with want: that I’d like to do to his tall and muscled body all the things she loves to do to mine.
On our last night together, as Lana whispers her final need into my mouth, I search for a word to call what is ours—how it’s blossomed in full but, tomorrow, will be left ripe.
Naoise Dolan
I can’t say exactly when or how the voice notes started. Probably she sent the first one, on the impulsive basis that it was easier or more pleasurable than texting.
The idea of “just” sending a voice note is not generally a sentiment I relate to. I express myself maybe three percent as well orally as I do via keyboard. I’m almost too fluent a texter: because I can instantly compose several paragraphs for anyone about anything, I risk seeming more romantically invested than I am. In short-term entanglements I have found myself consciously suppressing the brio with which I reflexively approach any written form. I nearly type a semicolon, then opt instead for a spliced comma to intimate what a chill gal I am.
But the summer of voice notes was different. There was no need to hold back, to make sure I wasn’t being too much for her, because the whole thing was genuinely platonic. We had been sort-of friends for many years, in a normal Irish diaspora sort of way, meeting up whenever we happened to be in the same city and not communicating much in between. But we began exchanging hours of daily voice notes. Hers, sent from Berlin, tended to come from the couch or the bath, and I replied, from London, while walking down busy roads. Sometimes the content happened to be on topics of shared interest—autism and ADHD diagnoses, theology—but whatever we talked about, we enjoyed hearing one another think. It’s the freest I’ve ever felt with a fellow person, approaching even the freedom I feel when writing.
The summer of voice notes passed. But the emotional legacy continues, both in this friendship and in all the other connections I’ll forge throughout my life. I know this friend was not horrified by the relentless deluge of winding sentences that constitutes my inner life. And I know, therefore, that if anyone else does get freaked out by the unabridged workings of my mind... then they’re not a person I should be texting.
Rachel Connolly
There is a kind of holiday fling I have often found myself having. Or “a fling with a certain kind of man” is probably a better way to put it. A kind of man I like a lot but can’t imagine having a functional relationship with: hot, stupid and with a pretty chaotic lifestyle. As I get older they tend to be a little younger too. If you’re thinking this sounds more like a man’s taste than a woman’s, that’s what my therapist says too. I’m working through that.
A little while ago I was in Berlin and I hooked up with one of them. We had great sex and a good laugh. Actually a great laugh. So many men are incredibly condescending and these ones never are. I remember he told me I had beautiful eyes, which, I replied, is an incredibly corny thing to say. He agreed. “It’s just one of those things you say, though. Isn’t it?” he said, laughing. It’s one of those small, random snippets of conversation I shouldn’t remember but I do because it felt like a real, honest conversation. It’s so hard to find that with men, people who speak to you on your level.
I have a version of this story in quite a few cities in the world but this one sticks out because of the end. Normally, we exchange texts for a while after, keeping the memory of the holiday fling alive. These men are always terrible texters—in a hot way. But this one happened to be coming to London, where he is from, a few months later. We made protracted plans to meet up; we texted about it continuously. But then on the day he arrived I found I couldn’t bring myself to mix the holiday romance with my “real” life, so I ignored a string of messages. I told myself it would sully the memory somehow. Now I wonder if it’s more the case that you can be a different person on holiday. Or a truer version of yourself, depending on how you look at it.
Megan Nolan
I turned 30 in the strange summer of 2020. I had never dreaded aging, had frankly never expected to live long enough to get the chance, but I started to wonder if I was already past it. Typically of my bullish idiocy, I decided this meant I should, for the first time in my life, date younger men. My classic romantic dynamic was one in which I hero-worshipped someone in a position of vague authority over me. Perhaps it was my turn to be the successful older man.
I began seeing two guys who were both 27. What’s three years? I’d have thought nothing of it if our positions were reversed but it was somehow transformatively liberating to enact it this way round. I met K in Burgess Park and drank corner shop beers out of black plastic bags and bit my lip over the ambiguous distance between us, watching with proprietorial lust as he walked away to find some bush to piss in. He was a tall, goofy, handsome athlete and almost intolerably sweet to me. I met M in a pub in Camberwell and then brought him back to my place to drink hard seltzer and listen to Led Zeppelin, leaning over to inhale his damp dirty blond hair, so boyish and redolent of the crushes of my youth. We spent long mornings in my sunlit bed, admiring each other’s sexual abilities with respectful awe.
I was obsessed but in a pleasant, clean way. The age gap, which was materially meaningless, nevertheless meant I felt assured and at ease, as I never usually did in casual relationships. I fell in love with them both for a moment, but in all honesty was only falling in love with myself. The best parts of that summer were the evenings I would leave them and walk home in the dead of night, listening to Billy Joel and feeling the glow of being a person in the world.
