the blueshift journal

      You’ve been IM’ing with the wrong guy for three dizzying hours – about everything, nothing.

      It’s innocent, you think as you type... as innocent as driving without your seatbelt fastened, going just a tad too fast on the parkway, a fine drizzle starting.

He’s sent a picture of a painting he’s working on, an abstract painting filled with curved, feminine shapes and almost faces.

      I like the composition but why are the colors so muted? I think you should use some bold colors.

      Hmmm... he types. Cobalt blue! Like Kandinsky! You’re right. You’re amazing! That’s what this needs. But I already put my brushes away.

      You know the wrong guy wants to just keep talking to you, because you connect in this visceral way which makes no sense to anyone outside the two of you. To the rest of the world you two make an ugly rock but inside, you are filled with bright crystals; no one is allowed to break the rock and find out. It is secret, just between the two of you.

      Your boyfriend is watching the baseball game as you type on your laptop, your feet on his lap. He pets you absentmindedly, like a puppy he wants around as long as it behaves, while talks to the players. You sometimes wonder if he thinks they can hear him. The boyfriend is never as passionate about anything with you as he is about the Mets.

      You think about the way the wrong guy’s lower teeth overlap each other and how the birthmarks on his left ear make some sort of elegant design and you wish you could take a thin tipped Sharpie marker and connect them to figure out what the design means, if it means anything. There is something about the wrong guy, some mystery, which you want to unlock, even though your boyfriend is a good guy who loves you. That’s what everyone says. What a good guy! As if that is all you should look for. Goodness. And you do love your boyfriend even if your mind is on the image of the wrong guy stretching in the office earlier today while you two talked, his maroon shirt lifting over his taut belly, dark hair trailing down under his belt. Your mind wanders there, under his belt, after the boyfriend is asleep and your hand is between your thighs in the darkness of your bedroom. You are not good.

      The wrong guy’s not interested anyway.

      Even if you didn’t have the boyfriend and the wrong guy didn’t have a live-in girlfriend who he’s sort of broken up with, but not entirely and a Girl he’s cheating on the girlfriend with, you are in friendzone, even when you dance together, even when he puts his hand in your hair and sings softly and slightly off key, songs the two of you have talked about, analyzed, sung together in the car or while drinking red wine after work in dim bars, even then. He points out beautiful women at restaurants and bars. Like the illicit Girl, they are skinny and very young with long straight hair and brown eyes. You are what is kindly called voluptuous and your hair is long and curly and you were young once but that time has passed and instead of brown, blue eyes, blue like the color missing from the wrong guy’s painting or grey like the sky in a storm and sometimes even green, green as envy and ivy in the fullness of summer.

      I could never talk to anyone like this, he types.

      Me either, you message back.

      We really click. We should get married. Hahahaha, and he adds a crazy looking smiley face with uneven eyes. The impossibly young Girl has taught him a plethora of emoticons which neither of you quite get because it is a language of hieroglyphs for a different generation and you are just explorers, decoding.

      You read and reread what the wrong guy has written and experience an aching pain; it is the ache of children you won’t have with his intensity and artistry and beautiful ears. It is the ache of futility. The boyfriend is watching baseball as your heart contracts painfully, like the birth pangs you won’t experience, the wrong guy holding your hand.

      In three hours of not watching baseball, you’ve messaged the wrong guy about the unusual number of rabbits in his backyard and his fear that the Girl is not in love with him although he’s convinced he’s entirely in love with her, despite their age difference and that she only reads romance novels – at least two a year – and the way that she plays with him. You point out that she is feline, sweet and wanting undivided attention until she ignores you entirely, walks away, sits in someone else’s lap. You say that he is in love with the Girl but loves the girlfriend, on whom he is entirely emotionally dependent (except for, you don’t say, his growing dependency on you), although he’s no longer attracted to her. He says you don’t understand but you think you understand more clearly than he’d like. You’ve debated if the term “in love” has any meaning. He says no, it is love or not love. You say “in love” is the time at the start of a relationship when you are actually insane, not really experiencing love. You imply that this is what is happening with the Girl, but skirt away from the issue because he is so sensitive, proving what you say, that this is insanity and not love.

      You’ve quoted from The Flame Throwers, the book that you’ve both been reading, sending lines back and forth. “That he simply found a girl he liked and incorporated her,” he types. Incorporated. I want to incorporate someone. You type back, “Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.” You’d highlighted this as you read it, like a textbook, knowing that it was some sort of private missive, meant for both of you. Do you think Rachel Kushner has been reading our messages? he types. She must be, you type back. You know he is thinking about the Girl and not about how you are thinking about him.

      You’ve made fun of baseball – it’s so slow, how can people get so excited? – and he’s laughed at the idea of watching sports – he doesn’t have a television, can’t be bothered with such mundane things – but told you about a time he went to a soccer game during the World Cup in France and how exciting it was, then, in person, like watching people have sex, not porn but real people having sex, almost as though they didn’t know they’d left their curtains open to the street.

      You’ve gossiped about a woman you both know at work that he’s attracted to, who is predictably skinny and much too young. You’ve heard that she’s dating someone from a different department. He says that whoever it is, he can get past that. You know his bravado is a joke, a way to feel better about the Girl. The young coworker is forgotten because he never meant it anyway; he really only wants the Girl whom he cannot really ever have – just as Kushner knows.

      Speaking of Kushner, you’ve told him how the boyfriend likes motorcycles, explaining why it’s so exciting to ride on the back of one – imagine a huge vibrator, between your thighs and going sixty miles an hour? – and he says he’s going to get one too, to win the love or at least the lust of the Girl.

      And then you write I love you, even though he’s the wrong guy, and the illicit Girl and the live-in girlfriend and the boyfriend – they are all just wrong, but you stare at it on the screen and you erase it before you hit send.

      I see what you did there, the wrong guy types.
      What? You flush, as though he could read what you didn’t send.
      You typed and then deleted.
      The flush deepens and expands while looking up at the boyfriend who doesn’t see at all.

      So?
      No big deal. Type, delete. We can’t always say everything.
      Why not? You are only musing. You know why not.
      Like that song – that guy who sings Your Body is a Wonderland?
      John Mayer?
      Yeah. Say what you need to say. You hear the wrong guy, not John Mayer, sing it in your head, noting how he’s emphasized the word need. What do you need?

      I don’t think I should.

      If you need to say it, say it. Why not?
      You sit and look at the screen on your laptop and over at the good boyfriend, lamenting the Mets losing in the gentle late summer rain. Type, delete. That’s why not.