The Formalities of Nothing

I had installed some stupid dating apps. An absolute, mind-numbing waste of time, swiping through endless, glossy catalogs of human consumption, looking for some spark of life in a digital graveyard. Last week, I matched with a profile. No face picture. Just a void. I didn’t even know if she was a real breathing person or some algorithmic phantom designed to mock my isolation.

I talked to her. I have zero experience chatting, no practiced lines, just the awkward, jagged edges of my own neurotic mind trying to form coherent sentences. I suggested going to a movie. Joker. It felt appropriately grim.

I got her number. We went to the movie. I paid, I booked the tickets, performing the rote mechanics of what I assumed was a “date.” Afterward, she handed me cash for her ticket. A cold, transactional squaring of accounts. It felt less like a romantic gesture and more like she was paying off a debt so she wouldn’t owe me anything. We went to eat. Shoveled some chicken biryani into our mouths in a crowded, noisy room. It rained a little—or maybe it didn’t. Maybe I just felt the damp, heavy oppression of the air settling over us, dragging everything down. I don’t know why. My memory is a bruised, unreliable thing.

Then, I took her for a walk in the Shri Kotla Vijaybhaskar Reddy Botanical Garden in Kondapur. The name itself is an exhausted mouthful. It was evening, around 5:30. The light was dying, bleeding out across the manicured, artificial nature.

I invited her home. It was meant as a formality, a polite script to read before saying goodbye and retreating back into my meticulously constructed solitude. But she said yes. She actually agreed to come home with me.

She walked into my space. I was suffocating under the pressure of it. I was consciously, desperately trying to be very friendly , to mimic the easy, thoughtless breathing of “normal” guys. I was playing a character, shedding the awkward, feverish skin of myself just to keep her comfortable in the room. ==I felt completely fraudulent.==

It got late. Maybe 7:30 PM. The silence in the apartment was deafening. I suggested she could stay the night, the words tumbling out before I could catch them. And she stayed.

I won’t say anything more. There’s no grand climax to this miserable little story. We did not have coitus. She slept in my room, breathing softly in the dark while my mind spun in frantic, exhausting circles. That’s all. No virginity lost. No profound transformation. I woke up the next day just as intact, just as isolated, and just as utterly alone as I was before. All good.