Things are strange these days. Everyone, it seems, wants to tie me up. My stomach has been in knots. My wrists remain unbruised, and I am bound to no one. I have so few promises to keep, and nothing keeping me here.
I’ve been thinking about escaping. I should go somewhere warm, somewhere with an ocean. Somewhere I could get a sunburn.
I scheduled 847 dates this week, so far I have managed to go on three of them. Two were with Romanian guys. I don’t know what it is about me that attracts Romanian men, but I am surrounded by them. My friend F. says perhaps it’s my purpose in life, to uplift the Romanian people by, I don’t know, blowing all of their men?
I think there is a particular sense of Bostonian humor that differs from but complements the stormy, disdainful wit of Romanian men. I haven’t fucked anyone this week, but I made them laugh. Such is my calling in life, it seems.
This week I went on a date with a guy I wasn’t all that interested in just so I could see his dog. Like I never listened to a single word my mother taught me as a child, and willingly will now just get into a strange man’s white van on the promise of seeing a puppy, ha. I mean going out for a brunch date isn’t quite the same as getting into someone’s van, but still.
He came on strong, maybe too strong, but was good with boundaries. Asked to hold my hand on the walk home. Said he wanted to kiss me, but he had eaten bread at brunch- so celiac said no for me. So he asked if he could kiss my neck. I told him it’s a lengthy bureaucratic process to file these kinds of requests, so it would take a few months for him to get an answer from me.
This kind of bureaucratic nonsense would perhaps be a better technique to save for a date with an Austrian guy, but who knows. I certainly do not have any sense of how to successfully date an Austrian man. I think there’s a particular fragility to Austrian men that oxidizes violently in the company of a Bostonian sense of humor. The easiest way to watch an Austrian guy crumble is to call him “cute”. It’s like their masculinity is an elementary school project built of popsicle sticks, and held together with dried-up glue sticks. Or maybe I am a bitch. Both things can be true at the same time.
The third date this week was with an Austrian guy, who was so fucking handsome. When I met him I just thought,
“Fuck, this guy is so cute. I am going to absolutely destroy him.”
But, returning to my date with the Romanian bartender, I just held his hand, while he discussed his kinks and fetishes, and all the ways he would touch me if he could kiss me. Where his hands would linger and,
“I would just put my hands on your hips, and pull you towards me, to say, I would like my body to be one with yours right now.”
Despite all the hot-and-bothered-if-onlys he had to say to me, I stuck to holding hands and letting his arm brush against mine.
Perhaps the best thing I can do for the Romanian people is to leave their men alone.
Alessandra Ranelli 
Give me validation.