Classifieds

Content note: This piece talks a bit about my sex life, so if you are someone for whom that wouldn’t be appropriate to our relationship, please skip this one!

I wrote this list in September of 2022. I smoked more weed back then, and I still watched TV. I lived in a crushingly lonely shared apartment. I thought of it as “classified ads” for a way I longed to be met.

I live alone now, but with neighbors, all single women. We text each other for a cup of sugar or to warn about the Jehova’s witnesses at the back door. I have so much of what I craved.

But I still dream of sweet intimacies amongst friends, queer-platonic (or not platonic) sweetnesses, pleasures we could cling onto as the world around us becomes ever more cruel, cold, isolating. In an interview in For the Wild, writer and philosopher Alexis Shotwell speaks about friendship as one of three formations that counter individualism (friends, comrades, and enemies—I’m working on some more writing about the latter). She says1:

I feel this with so many of you. And developing this profound, counter-cultural form of friendship requires creativity outside of the conventional bounds of “friendship activities” (which is to say…happy hours alone won’t cut it). So these are fantasies, or classified ads for ways I’d dream of building bonds. Offers are still open. Hit me up.

1. You come over and we paint each other’s nails. We both independently start to watch videos about manicure techniques late at night stoned. We start buying each other special lotions, and thinking of each other as we walk through Bartell’s (RIP). I bet they would like this pearlescent pink one... It feels almost illicit—like we’re having some sort of manicure affair—though we’re not fucking. But the manicuring is just as intimate.

2. On the first Sunday of the month, I go to your house at 5 pm. On the third Sunday, you come to mine. From 5-6 pm, we put on music and clean one of our apartments. We don’t live together but we come to know the intricacies of each other’s homes—the porcelain salt bowl, the dried flowers that collect dust, The dent in the French press. We play music. I like wiping down your cooktop like I’m wiping sweat from your brow. As we do it more and more, I become ever more comfortable with your gentle but persistent care for my home, less ashamed of the lingering dried tomato sauce on the burner, the grungy dishtowels, or the slightly sticky floor.

3. You have excellent taste in porn: You actually bookmark the stuff you like, instead of (like me) flailing aimlessly at the internet, forever regretting the loss of that one couple (oh how they whispered!). Your eye is trained toward the strong, the artful, the sincere. You send me linktrees full of videos, images, smut. I consume them and live-text you my responses, pointing out frames that would have killed as Tumblr porn gifs (R.I.P.). After we cum, separately, all the way across town and across time, we text jokes and kindnesses before falling asleep.

4. You have long hair and I braid it for you.

5. Email me one of you and your partners’ inside jokes. Offer no context, just “Babe if this relationship’s gonna work….” or “BEAR” or “woofers.” I’ll put them in a time capsule and bury them deep underground, because should the relationship end, those bits can be lost quickly or slowly without a thought. I will archive them, that the language created by two souls who love each other might be remembered even if a day comes when they do not.

6. We go to the beach in our swimsuits and then jump in the water and swim fast because the last one to the swim platform is a rotten egg.

7. We go visit one of the oldest trees in Seattle. We sit up against her with our backs against her bark. I read aloud to you from books as wise as her.

8. I start buying magazines every time I go to the grocery store. I devour them late at night, in bed, while eating nice chocolate and tangerines. Or in the bathtub with coffee (in the morning) or spaghetti (at night). At this rate, I get 4-6 magazines each month. Real Simple, Better Homes and Gardens, Vogue, Food and Wine. Maybe if I’m being fancy, Whetstone or Kinfolk. When I’m done, they lay splayed across a coffee table like at the dentist's or tucked in a holder next to the toilet.You are a collage artist. Once a month, I tuck the magazines into a brown paper grocery bag and walk them over to your house. You might live in an attic with beige shag carpets. You sit on the ground wearing overalls with a joint in your mouth, cutting out shapes while holding the glossy paper up to the light. Stray bits of paper fall amidst the carpet fibers. You thumb through my new delivery before grabbing a canvas leaned against the wall. You’ve made me something. I will treasure it.