a short story

 “Why did you dye your hair green?” my moms voice scratches through the phone into my left ear. I can hear her doing dishes. It sounds like she is throwing them. Maybe she is. 

The Subway noises scream in my right ear as it breaks, competing with my mother in casual decibel. I get off. Minding the gap. Minding my own business. 

“I'll be meeting a friend soon.” I answer while walking towards the light, the exit of this underground maze, trying to cut the conversation with my lovely green-hair-hating mother short because I need the phone as a substitute for my poor sense of direction.

“Is it the strange one with the yellow hair again?” 

"No, it is another one. You don't know them.”

The ugly yellow tiles cover walls, floor and ceiling like oddly geometrical mold. I am sure this is the wrong exit. 

“Okay, mama, I have to go, I`ll call u soon”

Where AM I? 

"Okay, hayati, take care.” Ending the call I notice I am already 5 minutes late. What a fantastic start. 

This is my first hinge date. New city, new luck, new freedom, I guess. Thank god I am way too busy finding the agreed on cafe to worry about being late to my date(?) with a GERMAN.

What even is a date? 

The person I am meeting up with is already waiting in front of the café. At least I think they are the person standing in front of a place called “lofti” switching between staring at their phone and looking up like they are searching for someone. Very suspicious behavior. Additionally they faintly look like the pictures on their hinge profile. 

They look up again and smile at me. Yes, it is them. Great. I feel absolutely nothing and flip a switch.

“Hiii, sorry I am late” almost singing I smile at them. Up to them. They are taller than me. So are most people. It is not really a flex. As with most people my brain automatically goes to calculating the heelhight necessary to change this annoying fact and the connected risk of breaking both my ankles in the process of pampering my fragile ego. 

"Hi!! Gar kein Problem. Schön dich zu sehen. Gut, siehst du aus. Willst du schon reingehen?" My mind goes from master-mind-mathematician straight to blanc. Apparently they think I speak German. 

“Ja sicher” I answer utilizing 50 % of my acquired vocabulary and an accent that makes sure everybody in a hearing distance to us knows that, I do in fact, not speak german. At least not fluently, at least not yet. Date the language they say, no?

They open the door for me. I notice we are wearing basically the same outfit. Funky. 

So how do I know if this is a date? 

“Oh I am sorry, I just assumed. There is a free table. Do you want to sit there? My girlfriend might join us later if that is okay with you? You look way taller in your pictures!” 

They have a girlfriend, which I knew about. 

I was informed about her existence the second I stumbled over Sam's online dating profile in the lake of faces and stories and Bios and little voice notes, which I thought was a good Idea to dive into. 

Just wanting to be spontaneous, adventurous, isn't that what people my age are doing, are enjoying? 

And they did look nice, a friendly smile, a nice style, something between librarian and lumberjack, nonbinary, polyamorous, spontaneous. At least that is what their profile told me about them. What got me a little bit. Something I need in my life, not need, crave more than sweets with my coffee in the morning, a little spark.

And an open relationship? That is new to me, adventurous, and it does sound like an ideal solution to the problem of not feeling particularly emotionally available to begin with. My little heart can´t get broken, their little heart can´t get broken. So my very naive theory. 

Therefore, I messaged them, calculating heelhights and heartbreak-risk, challenged their spontaneity and now we are here, only a day later, in a cafe that looks like a hobbit hole with slightly higher ceilings. The counter is covered in cakes and cookies in jars, the place packed with people in cozy winter sweaters distributed in various seating arrangements ranging from old wine boxes to window stills and armchairs, books glued to the ceiling.

Sam maneuvers us to the miraculously empty couch. It looks comfy despite its quite aggressive pattern. Everybody is dressed in the same fashion, with the same ragged style trying to camouflage the boiuasie that can afford six euro oat milk lattes. The intellectual conversations tied to keys on the carabiners carried visibly on every second pair of pants. 

I don’t feel quite cool enough to be here. 

“How do you like this place? It is my absolute favorite.” Sam drops on the couch and I follow, putting on a smirk. “It is so cozy, no? And everything is VEGAN” Their eyes sparkle while they fulfill every cliche with ease. 

“Yes, that is AMAZING” I say enthusiastically. “The cake looks great” I widened my little smirk into a smile. 

Give. Them. A. Chance. 

“It tastes great! You HAVE to try the lemon cheese cake. It is HEAVEN. What is your favorite cake?” 

“Hm I don’t know.. I like most cakes, the sweeter the better.” Is it normal that these things are that weird? 

I don’t know that person staring at me, expecting an answer, expecting to be entertained, expecting a date(?). My face is still smiling, my mind trying to remember how to put on a show.

The sofa eats me whole, I sink in further than one should sink into a sofa. Sam starts talking about bouldering in enthusiastic tones. What do People talk about on “dates”? Maybe I am boring. Or am I just bored? Is there a difference? 

A tall waiter with kind eyes and a bald head pulls me out of my existential crisis and Sam out of his boulder gym bro talk. We order oat milk cappuccinos and the famous lemon cheesecake. Everything is organic. Zero chemistry. Neither in the cake nor between us. I stopped listening to our conversation a few minutes ago. God I am rude. Someone please save me from myself and take Sam right with them. I bet they are a nice person. And cute too. From their arms I can clearly tell that they are sporty. I tell them that. Open, confrontational compliments are what I do best.

Give. Them. A. Chance. :)

The waiter came back with our coffees and I could swear he grew a few inches in the minutes that passed since we ordered. Since Sam ordered in perfect German. I sat and nodded. Smiled up to the tall man in the white apron and the flannel shirt who looks like he belongs here. Not just belonging here but taking in the essence of the place with every breath, the people, the posh shabbiness, like a chameleon. A 6 feet tall camelion if I remember correctly. Now it’s seven. Which is at least two feet too much for my taste and one too much for any human being. Can he fit in a plane? In a normal car? 

“He is crazy tall.” I mumbled after he put the coffees down and left. 

“Some people are.” Sam winks at me and we continue our conversation that shifted into a more political direction. How did we even get there? 

Oh right, they told me they do sociology. From there it's just a small leap to politics. 

“Why did you go into journalism?” They ask, bringing the focus back on me.

Sometimes I feel like perspectives are missing. Especially in public media. I hope to have an influence on changing this sad fact eventually. Saying that my voice loses a little of the playfulness I have been putting on, because it is true. I told this person something real, handed them a chance on a silver platter. A piece of my personhood. 

“And what did you bring to the vast landscapes of sociology?” I throw in fast. Reaching out of the couch to cling to my cup of coffee. Not giving them a second more to form a response, to dig deeper into what I just exposed to them. I sprinkle sugar in my coffee and thinking about some lies I could sprinkle in to make this conversation more interesting. If they are not surprising me I might as well surprise myself.

I don’t fully listen to their answers. The latte art is insanely beautiful. Mesmerizing Patterns form a delicate, Van Gogh style landscape. If it wouldn’t be limited to the sepia hues of outlying milk foam it could even pass as realism. The clouds over the hilly grassland are moving slightly. They are moving. My composure is trying its best to keep my jaw from dropping. 

Sam starts talking about their recent fall out with Judith Butler. They make it sound like Judith is a person they study with not a subject, a person who’s work they dedicate their master thesis to. The cafe is filled with conversations, mumbling in a language I do not understand and even though we share a language, it does not feel like we do. Maybe it is the accent? 

The waiter comes back with a tiny piece of cake. It gets bigger while he walks towards our patterned couch. And so is he. He has to bow his head now else it would hit the cafe house ceiling. He definitely grew. Sam complains about Judith, about a few others. Big names. I know them briefly. They wrote a letter. They don’t agree. Not at all. I am starting to notice what this conversation is all about as the giant hand of the waiter sets the now giant piece of cake down in front of us. “Danke” the other half of my German vocabulary manifested itself onto my tongue. 

“He is really tall.” Like a broken record I turned to Sam after he left us. What the hell is going on? Is what I wanted to ask but the words are stuck behind in my throat. 

“He probably just looks tall from your perspective” Sam jokes, I laugh my forced laughter. Unrelated to the circumstances was the second comment on my height in the last 10 minutes. This is not well received by the jury. 

“His head was hitting the ceiling?!” 

“This Place has low ceilings, look!” They stand up and their head touches the ceiling. 

Hearing myself laugh I stand up, the ceiling being as far away as I remember it to be. I wouldn’t be able to touch it if I tried. Someone entered the café walking towards us. 

A slim girl with a buzz cut,  a light flowy coat, a wide smile directed toward sam. Blue eyes. They kiss. I got introduced. We hugged. I childsized next to them. They order coffee. They talk about themselves. 

I wanted to try new things. Everybody is poly these days right? Every queer person I meet seems to be poly. It is a good thing, right? 

Is that not what I moved away for? To be queer in peace, to date, to explore. I look at them talking to me, their words passing through my brain without leaving many marks. They are nice, and so much taller than me. Sam is right, it might just be my perspective. 

With the sip I take from my coffee I turn the realist sepia hue landscape into abstract art. The work of an octopus with incontinence. 

I don't understand what is going on and sink deeper into the couch with the moving pattern. At least I chose a pretty place to go insane. The foreign people singing strange songs fill the room with a subtle background noise. 

While the strangers across from me start to talk about politics again. I listen and smile while I silently disagree. What happened to talking about the weather?

The only clouds they are talking about are the ones left in the sky after the thunder of a bomb. They argue a little, have slightly different views, are becoming even bigger while their words become louder, take up more and more space up in the choir of comparses. 

“What is your opinion on this?” 

Sam's partner is looking at me in expectation. They want me to agree with them. 

“This is an odd topic to discuss on a first date.”

Silence. 

Stares. 

I drink my coffee. It has become cold. So did the blue eyes, so did the beringed hand of the Waiter on my shoulder.

“Anything else?” He asks in a deep, thunderstorm voice. A voice that reminds me of the clouds made of ash and dirt. 

While he is looming over me, his entire back bent down by the weight of the ceiling, he is carrying this place. I stopped being surprised about anything the moment a chair walked out of this establishment about 5 minutes ago. The person sitting on it did not even look up from their paperthin macbook. 

“no thank you” Sam answers for me. They are at eye level with the waiter who does not turn their eyes away from me. 

You can wish for anything in here you know, he whispered in tune with a synchronized rattling of all the keychain carabiners. 

Anything. Blue eyes staring at me. You can agree with me, they say, you can leave, they imply, you are small, they scream while I start to grow slowly. 

Anything. 

Anything? I ask. What even is the point in this? 

Am I going insane? Would it matter? 

As long as you are here. Anything. 

The cafe seems unbothered by our scene. Macbooks open. Eyes locked. Someone is writing a poem in the corner. Noone seems to care about the elephant sized waiter in the room or by me, slowly growing to the same height. They have important things going on, I figure. 

Anything, not more than a whisper. 

The eyes of the waiter are nearly black. A little brown, mostly black. Thick lashes. A little warmth in the darkness. 

“I want this to be over”