Honey Lips
#1 Millennial Menoirs
One moment he’s asking you to lick honey from his lips in the kitchen, the next he’s speeding away in the dead of night hell bent on continuing his pursuit of finding the ‘one’ which, as it turns out, is not you. Why it isn’t you he cannot (or will not) explain, but describes it as a feeling in his gut of ‘being at home’. You ask what ‘home’ feels like, and he says that ‘home’ isn’t a thing he’s ever really known.
When you change tact and press for further insight about his Madonna he has none to offer, except to declare how impossible it all is. ‘That’s why I’m still fucking single at 35, Sally!’ he exclaims. He gives you no clues as to who she is, what she cares about, and why that’s important to him. As if he doesn’t actually know. But he’s possessed with the intention of finding her.
When you ask if he had had doubts before arriving that evening for what’s only your second date, he replies that he wouldn’t have driven for over two hours if he had had any question in his mind. And yet, suddenly, he does. He felt a flicker in his gut. And so he’s leaving. Except you’re now somehow entwined and he’s kissing you softly with his excitement beating on your thigh. You say ‘You really ought to leave’ and he says ‘Myrtle, we’re going’. Myrtle raises her beautiful, weary dog face and, you could swear, her eyebrows.
You watch from the window as he bundles a reluctant Myrtle into the car, pulls into the middle of the street, loiters there a while, and then screeches away. This man who opened with calling you his needle in a haystack, who has filled up your WhatsApp every morning, afternoon and evening with the warmest of affections, who giddily asked if he could kiss you two hours into your first date because he’s been dying to since he first laid eyes on you. This man for whose haste you made an exception because you felt the same way for once. This man who, just now, had his eyes rolling in his head with delight as he sipped the juices of the fresh tuna ceviche you’d made together from a tiny silver spoon, smiling at you through the candlelight.
This man has tossed you back into the haystack as if he’s been pricked and left without a backwards glance. You sit in silence with your mouth wide open surveying the abandoned dinner table before you. Crumpled napkins, a half finished bottle of Bordeaux, and that silver spoon still glistening from his wet lips, glinting with the echoes of his pleasure.
When he leaves you a note a couple of days after, his voice muffled by the roar of the car, he says one more time with conviction ‘I know it seems impossible, but I’ll find her’ and you wonder who he’s talking to because you didn’t ask. As his voice dissolves into the past you see a vision of him in your mind's eye: gorgeous, wild haired, honey on his lips, racing perpetually through the darkness, his journey never coming to an end.
Millennial Menoirs is a new series of short stories or prose about the strange world of online dating within my generation, still somewhat centred around food (quite a few of them feature honey, curiously).
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Thanks for reading!