Dating : KARL

“The mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self. You don’t know whether you’re going to jump.” -Janet Fitch

I now know the exact moment I fell in love with him.

We were saying goodbye in front of my Lyft on a gauzy early December afternoon; I put my arms around his neck and we kissed, twice. No tongue, just full, purposeful, dead-on, lips intertwined. The kind of kisses you can hear. Quiet, but piercing. Dry, but wet. Thrills shot down my stomach, a pleasant burn — notably and obviously not love.

The love came when I pulled back to look at him and meet his eyes, which always had a story. It was an interesting weekend, more interesting than previous weekends, and there were now at least twenty question marks in my mind about twenty different things. Nothing was for sure, nothing was for certain; everything seemed more unclear than it had ever been. But in that moment, despite my protestations and insistence to my girlfriends and my therapist and myself that it was wholly impossible for me, of all people, to fall in love in conditions like these, I looked into his face and it was decided within me. It was done.

I studied his features in the nanosecond I had before it got weird, thinking “I am looking at the face of the man I love”. The thought was so ridiculous that I laughed at myself and smiled at him to cover it. He smiled back, the semi-pleasant smirk I’d gotten used to waiting to see.

I had not been in love in years. Six, to be exact. And I’d had my doubts for some time that I was even capable of it but here “it” was: Love — long shot and long-distance — hovering at my doorstep, unwilling to remove its muddy shoes and bearing no hostess gift.

He opened the Prius door and I dropped into the back, wondering where my romantic caution had failed me and imagining all manners of collateral damage that could be headed our way.

The driver, “Karl” per the app, had already put my suitcase into the trunk. Inside, he had the A/C blasting even though the weather was relatively cold. But he looked hot and a little sweaty and I told myself he’d been driving around in the sun and I had a warm coat on. I’d take the air as long as I could.

“Your boyfriend?” Karl asked as we creeped down the tree-lined street, away from my revelation. I successfully fought the urge to glance back and see how far he’d gotten towards his front door, how long he’d waited to turn away as I slowly disappeared.

Karl had a pronounced Eastern European accent — not Russian, but Russian-adjacent — that made him more difficult to understand than I felt like dealing with that day. At first, I pretended not to hear. “He’s tall. Girls like tall. This is a nice area. I live out here. You live in the city?”

I told him I was actually tall myself. And that I lived in L.A., 400 miles away.

“You moving here?” he asked, sounding convinced I’d say yes. His voice was heavy with cigarettes although his car smelled vaguely floral and new.

“No plans. And yes, it is a beautiful place. But expensive.”

“You get married, move here. It’s better here.”

I told him there were no plans to get married. “No plans for anything,” I reemphasized, beginning to feel inadequate from repetition, craving the opportunity to fall silent without being rude. He looked at me in the rearview for a long beat, the way men look at women to convey approval. I wasn’t flattered.

“You are tall. Beautiful. But young. Maybe wait to get married, but don’t wait too long.”

I didn’t bother to break the news that nature had been kind and that I was probably well beyond the age he was imagining was “too long”. He moved on to some innocuous discussion of the Peninsula (lovely if you don’t have to commute) and Northern California property values (skyrocketing if you could afford to get in) while I watched the freeway whizz by.

As we hit the edges of the city though, he was back to center. Wondering things. “He treats you nice?”

I knew who he meant but still blithely solicited clarification, mainly to buy time and maybe dissolve the question.

“Your boyfriend.”

Pause. “Yes, he’s very nice.”

“How many kids he has?”

“Um, none. No kids.” I felt the heat of ire in the back of my throat at this question. But appropriately schooling a post-Soviet immigrant on the sociopolitics of making assumptions of a Black man, even my Black man, didn’t seem like it would serve either my Sunday afternoon or to clamp this conversation, which was the overarching goal.

“You want babies.” It was a question, not a statement, and he flattened his voice in a way that almost made it feel like an accusation. He glanced in the mirror again and then back at the road, quickly. We were ascending into a canyon, where the streets were a little more narrow and the terrain required caution.

I was trying to be kind. But my mind was reeling from the street realization, still mildly hungover from partying the night before, and reconciling how I was going to manage being fully in love with someone who was, in fact, not yet my boyfriend and whose life, at any given moment on almost any other given day, was happening hours and light years away from mine.

I was in good spirits but my core felt quiet, and I really hadn’t bargained on this existential do-si-do in exchange for a 30-minute ride into the city. After realizing you’re in love with someone, the last thing you want is an Andy Cohen-style dress-down from a random third party, trotting you through your relationship’s nebulous highlight reel.

“One day,” I said, proud to have identified a response that should end the conversation.

But Karl would not be deterred.

“Tall babies?” He smiled at me in the rearview, overly pleased with his own clever callback. I crinkled my eyes cordially but kept my mouth still, a pleasant-enough acknowledgement that silently screamed how desperately I was trying to disengage.

By now he could tell that I was annoyed but didn’t care, evidenced by how easily he let my complete lack of response slide before opening his mouth again.

“You are in love.”

I looked up to meet his eyes in the rearview since I really couldn’t tell from his tone if he was serious or not. He was not looking at me. He was looking straight ahead, unsmiling. Four words and suddenly he held all the power.

“What makes you think that?” I asked, genuinely curious and more than a little self-conscious. What made him so sure to say something like that to me? Perhaps it was obvious. Or maybe he was clairvoyant, or worldly, or wiser than I’d estimated. Maybe he was just a blowhard. I needed to know which it was.

He shrugged hesitantly, and I tried, from my skewed peripheral gaze, to gauge his age. 55, maybe 60. Maybe 48 with a hard life. The shrug felt immature. And his lack of a real response was glaring, seeing how he hadn’t succeeded in being silent for more than 15 seconds since I got in the car.

“You are,” he said, finally. “Right?”

He was sure but wanted my confirmation — my capitulation, as I saw it. But I wasn’t pouring out the contents of my heart to a stranger in a rideshare, no matter how much Sex and the City this guy had watched.

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t say that.”

Karl seemed deflated in that moment, as though I had taken something away from him. I saw his shoulders slump and his arms lower. It was an imperceptible shift, unidentifiable to anyone but a hardcore empath. He tapped on the steering wheel for a moment with two fingers before abruptly turning off the air.

“Lucky man,” he said simply. Then, he fell remarkably silent.

We were winding around coiling back hills, breezing through neighborhoods for which I had no name other than “San Francisco”. But I knew enough to know they each had their own moniker and culture and zip code. I was glad, in my condition, to be in a place where I felt like a foreigner. New territory. The best part of unchartered land is the abject newness that blankets everything, the blank slate it offers. There are no old memories or associations, no ineradicable visual around every corner. Everything is fresh and fascinating. You can write all new stories and hear yourself think.

And yet, I admitted, lately when I landed in my own city it felt almost just as foreign, except not new and not blank. It felt like someplace I used to know but had just been dropped back in the center of by a force over which I had no control. I didn’t really feel like I belonged there anymore, but I didn’t know where I did belong. All I knew was that I felt a bit like I was shedding a skin, slowly detaching from its sides. Just when I would actually glide out of it, I had no idea.

I began to miss Karl’s voice. As long as he was talking I did not have to sit there and think about what in the hell I was going to do about the man I’d left in the South Bay, the man I was still picturing in the street even though I knew better. It was almost dusk. I saw him in front of his computer, working. Maybe walking his dog in the cold night air. Was he thinking about me?

Karl was lost. My destination was a private street, tucked away and easy to miss, and he was becoming flustered searching for it. I called the sister-friend who waiting and she gave brusque directions on speaker to help Karl turn around. Being an efficient multitasker, she suggested I just stay in the car and we continue on to our next destination to save time.

I told her that wasn’t possible as he was headed directly to his next destination, and she easily said she’d ping for another car. By now I was feeling silly. I’d made it awkward with Karl for no reason. I felt like he didn’t deserve my truth, but who was I? The truth is the truth. I was mildly ashamed to have responded so dramatically to what could have been shut down with ease, playfully dismissed. It was love. It wasn’t an indictment. It wasn’t a slight. It was nothing to hide.

Karl pulled up the steep driveway where my friend hobbled out in her boot, fresh from knee surgery. He made some casual joke about her injury as he pulled my suitcase out of the trunk, and she laughed good-naturedly. Naturally, he took this as an invitation to ask her about the neighborhood, a question she answered in her signature work tone that indicates she’s ending the exchange. Down below, another car arrived to carry us on.

Karl gingerly sat my tote bag on top of my suitcase inside her garage and nodded towards me with a tiny smile. “Maybe she moves here,” he said to her, clearly unable to resist one last unsolicited comment.

She responded gleefully to the suggestion, much the way any best friend responds to the suggestion that 363 miles between them be erased. Karl seemed to find something redemptive in her effervescence. She lacked all my baggage and embraced all the joy.

After the fanfare that comes with getting a temporarily disabled individual down a San Francisco street and into a vehicle, she and I were off. The new driver was a young Japanese guy who drove wordlessly and very fast, with old-school hip hop blasting from his speakers. He turned the volume down when we began to talk, but I wouldn’t have minded leaving it up. After my pensive, introspective trek with Karl, it was freeing to be sporting down the hills, able only to hear Dr. Dre, thinking only how the next pavement dip would feel in my gut.

As we sped onto the Bay Bridge towards the East Bay I know so much more intimately, she asked how the day had been, her typical inquiry following every day I spent with him. She always checked the temperature. I, in turn, acted as though I didn’t realize the objective, but in actuality we both knew better. She was splayed across the backseat, the way she had to be to elevate her knee, and I was in the passenger seat next to The Fast and the Furious, taking in the choppy waters beneath the bridge and the rapidly darkening sky. There was a magic in the moment, a feeling that I was in the middle of a story I would later need to tell. I wanted desperately to rewind two days and do everything over, and yet, I didn’t want to disturb the mollifying pleasure each part of the weekend delivered. I felt fully alive.

My saga with Karl had compelled me toward honesty. I turned to her with wide eyes and the tacit smile only a best friend of 19 years could understand. She and I had last seen each other the night before, but there was new news to share. “I love him,” I announced, making her burst into hysterical giggles.

She came up for air after a moment, half-smiling as she studied my face. “Girl. I know.”