Piece Preview: "I Wrote This For the You I Made Up Long Ago"

Personal essays, as many artists know, take time to craft. In a conversation with writer Raven Reighard, we shared the works currently haunting our drafts --- and now here I am sharing it with you, too. Below, enjoy the first 700 words of my current living draft on asexuality, hook-up culture, and fanfiction: "I Wrote This for the You I Made Up Long Ago."

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Quarters, an arcade bar well-known to its Salt Lake City patrons, had a Zoltar machine tucked between the male and female bathrooms. It lived in the limbo between unused but grungy, its hands hovering lifelessly over its crystal ball. The animatronic was an archaic, racist archetype I’m sure, but my pre-game buzz had me digging through my pockets for loose change.

My fortune came out as a pink ticket. Pink! Have you ever seen a Zoltar ticket of such a rich, rosy hue?

My dear friend showed no interest in my question. She’s had five years of practice listening to me obsess over props for my stories, five years to reshape her nerdy interests into something more elegant. Long gone were her crooked colored glasses, her choppy hair highlights, her Steven Universe t-shirts. Like myself, her tomboy nature had been refined into casual queerness. We wore our hair to frame our face, our septums were pierced with titanium. She had her nails done a week before so they were green, acrylic. Mine were short not for a lack of trying but because it complemented the shape of my laptop’s keys.

She flipped the ticket over and read aloud its warning: A large load of happiness will soon envelop your personal space.

I took the ticket back and snapped a photo of my dear friend leaning promiscuously against the machine. I waited for her back to face me when I said the quiet part out loud. "Flirting with Fiona. Good or bad idea?"

There's no need for me to describe Fiona to you. She was the kind of fictional character found in books, a blonde femme whose resting face resembled a yearning melancholy. I met her an hour before when pre-gaming with my dear friend’s college group. Fiona's arrival then had not been a celebratory thing when she walked through the doors. It was a familial, welcome nod from my dear friend’s stoner partner and his pals before they resorted to tipsy rounds of Mario Kart. So introductions only had to be made between us two. The whispered party girl had an aura of relaxed femininity in her white leopard print dress pants and her chunky gold bling. Not my type at all.

But drinking, a practice I had only adopted in May during a trip abroad, reshaped my AFAB form into one of masculine comfortability. Legs were spread, my voice was dropped to reflect the men around us. My hand, wet from the sweat on my skinny can's perspiration, ran laps through my hair.

My interest in her at the apartment wasn't a spark or jolt. Like the other men, I felt like I knew her already. It would take me months to realize this was because she looked identical to my gay awakening character in middle school. She even shared a name with this character (though here, we will call her Fiona; we will call her the name of another character from that series that I once loved intimately).

The girl-boy (myself) who swapped small talk like trading cards with pre-game Fiona was a writer, was interested in teasing stories out of her than flirting. To admit what I had to my dear friend while leaning precariously between binary bathrooms was something new. In the fandom world, we call this an "out of character" moment — a mark of someone OOC. My tone and heavy eyes were a character I was portraying only. I called it investigative journalism. Nothing more.

My dear friend looked at her own ticket rather than at me when she responded. "Like I said, Fiona's a lesbian, and she just went through a break up two weeks ago. Right now she's trying men, so..."

It was word-for-word what she had told me earlier in secret, before the bar, before I met the people we’d be going out with. Except now she was omitting another prominent point: the fact that my own break-up happened just a month before. I could count the hours of my singlessness if I really wanted. I didn’t.

I itched for my phone instead, for a hit of nostalgia that my reading habit, my fanfiction, gave me. The pleasure of characters I loved loving each other was enough for me. Fanfiction on Archive of my Own had been my teenage sanctuary. Characters like Jayce and Viktor from Netflix's Arcane could fall in love again and again and again, and it could never get old. Sometimes blood between them was drawn. Sometimes they met in a coffee shop. Sometimes (almost always) sex was involved.

My reading activity was the closest I got to being sexually active. Some asexual people could tolerate sex, but I had been in a three-year relationship with a fellow transmasc ace and could leave sexuality up to fictionality.

But that partner was long gone now — first by distance, then by an hour-long call cross-country.