Chapter 6: An elf to fall for.

A pair of elf ears, an unexpected crush and the strange feeling of getting very close to someone very quickly.

by Karl

Plan C

Plan C was a free salsa street festival. It was still pretty central in Barcelona, hidden in a small side street with a little stage, a live band and people filling pretty much every bit of space around it.

On paper, it sounded like a pretty good way to spend the evening. And it was. But if I'm being honest, going there was also a bit of a defence mechanism. Anything but going home just because the evening hadn't gone the way I'd hoped, even though going home was probably exactly what I needed.

I could have gone to bed early for once, called friends or family, written another chapter or edited some of the hundreds of photos I'd already taken and actually sent them to the people in them. There were plenty of things I could have done, and I actually like spending time by myself. Just not always when it feels like I didn't choose it.

There's a difference between deciding to have an evening alone and ending up with one. The first can be really nice. The second starts feeling like loneliness surprisingly quickly.

So I stayed out.

And once I reached the festival, that decision started to feel a little less like avoiding an empty flat and a little more like an actual Plan C.

The street was full without feeling like a proper event space. Families, friends, couples, people of pretty much every age were standing around the little stage, talking, drinking and moving whenever the music gave them a reason to. It didn't feel like everyone had come there to prove they knew how to dance. A lot of people simply seemed happy to be there, listening to the band and celebrating Cuban culture together.

I got myself a small Pinta from one of the tents and kept my bag with me. I still didn't know anyone, and putting it down somewhere while I disappeared onto the dance floor wasn't something I was comfortable with. So for the first few dances, it just stayed strapped to me.

I ended up dancing with quite a few older women, and there was something really lovely about how little seemed to be at stake for them. It wasn't about being the best person on the dance floor or wondering whether someone was flirting with you, and not every movement had to mean something.

They just wanted to dance.

The more playful and ridiculous I got with them, the more they laughed. Some dances were only a few steps, others lasted longer, but I kept getting these huge smiles, hugs and compliments afterwards.

I wasn't suddenly in some completely different state of mind because of it. But watching people enjoy themselves that freely made it a little easier to stay in the moment.

And for then, that was enough.

Elf ears in the crowd

While the band was playing and I was looking around for my next dance, a pair of elf ears caught my eye.

They belonged to a woman with blue hair, piercings and an outfit that felt just as expressive as the rest of her. Not necessarily colourful or extravagant for the sake of it. It just felt very clearly hers, like she was quite comfortable showing some of who she was on the outside.

Her name was Bridget, and I was immediately mesmerized.

So I walked over, leaned in a little to get closer to her level and so she could actually hear me over the music, and asked if she'd like to dance.

A few beats into the song, she started looking at me with this mixture of surprise and excitement.

Mi amor, you can dance! You're really good. How can you dance like that? Where are you from?

Different versions of that kept coming throughout the dance. Sometimes directed at me, sometimes thrown excitedly towards the people around us.

And honestly, I felt awesome.

She was very loose and relaxed when she danced, which gave me a lot of room to play with the music, move her around and, yes, probably show off a little. But what really got me was the way she kept looking at me.

I don't know how to describe that look without making it sound bigger than it was. She just seemed genuinely delighted by what was happening between us in that moment.

And suddenly I really wanted to impress her.

I wanted to show her what I could do. I wanted her to keep looking at me like that. I wanted to be something for her.

Which sounds a little strange when I write it down, but maybe that's what it was. I wanted to be something for her that perhaps only existed during that dance.

She kept pulling me into hugs, telling me how amazing I was and how much she loved dancing with me, and somewhere along the way she introduced me to her sister.

Her sister didn't speak English, but luckily dancing doesn't require much of it. So when Bridget suggested we dance, I took her hand and we started.

Later, she managed to tell me that she'd spent much of the evening leading herself and had really enjoyed being on the other side for a change.

By that point, I was just enjoying how warm and open the whole interaction with the two of them felt.

Afterwards, I stayed around the sisters. I watched them dance, we talked whenever they came back over, and I took some photos and little videos of them. Conveniently, it also meant I finally had people I trusted enough to leave my bag with instead of carrying it around the dance floor.

Somewhere in between all of that, I asked Bridget for her number and whether she'd like to meet up and dance again sometime.

Eventually the last few days caught up with me. Hard. Around eleven I made my way home, and by one in the morning I was finally asleep.

The next day

We were already texting again that night. I sent Bridget one of the photos I'd taken of her, and somewhere between that and me finally falling asleep, we loosely agreed to see each other again the next day.

My morning was mostly the usual by now: some work on the website, some photo editing, trying to catch up on all the little things I kept collecting faster than I could finish them.

And yes, I still owe Bridget that video: Future me, please deal with that.

I called her and asked if she wanted to join me at a second-hand market by the beach. She was still lying on a friend's couch after what sounded like a much longer night than mine and wasn't entirely sure whether she still had things to do at home. There was a bit of back and forth, but she decided to come.

I went ahead without her and finally used the chance to jump into the sea.

In my new sexy swimming shorts.

There is, tragically, no photographic evidence of this.

When I came back out of the water, Bridget was there. We found two chairs, got ourselves something to drink and ended up sitting in the middle of the market while I slowly roasted in the sun.

Mostly, we just talked. Where we came from, what we liked doing, the kind of people we were. All those things you slowly discover when someone was a stranger less than 24 hours ago.

And almost every time I told her something about myself, she seemed genuinely delighted by it.

Which felt really nice.

It also didn't stop me from constantly wondering whether I was saying something wrong.

Our English worked, but neither of us spoke it perfectly, and every now and then I'd say something, see a reaction I couldn't quite read and immediately wonder whether I'd just stepped into another conversational puddle.

For about five minutes, I think I actually managed not to.

So naturally, I decided to make things considerably more complicated.

I looked at her.

I'm sorry, I think I just have to tell you this. I think I have a pretty big crush on you.

She laughed, turned red and looked away before eventually meeting my eyes again.

She had a crush on me too.

Which was particularly funny because she had assumed I was gay, while I'd been sitting there convinced I had absolutely no chance with someone like her.

Communication was clearly going extremely well.

From there, the conversation didn't really stop, but something about it changed. We were sitting closer now, touching each other while we talked and occasionally getting distracted just looking at each other. Our slightly crooked English was still producing misunderstandings, but suddenly they felt a lot less important.

My rapidly cooking skin was becoming a slightly bigger problem.

I kept shifting my chair around, trying to find increasingly ridiculous little patches of shade, until Bridget suggested we should probably leave.

We walked back towards my place holding hands. A genuinely lovely, romantic little moment that my body was doing its absolute best to ruin.

Because I needed to pee.

So badly.

There was this wonderful person walking next to me, holding my hand, and an increasingly large part of my brain had stopped processing anything except:

Please. Toilet.

Once I'd dealt with that emergency, we somehow ended up right back where we'd been: talking.

Her job came up, then polyamory, sex, Barcelona's kinky scene and this whole world she seemed to know incredibly well and I knew very little about. She worked in a sex shop and told me about some of the parties and places connected to that scene, promising she'd take me along sometime.

We didn't have all that much time together before she had to leave again.

Maybe that's why neither of us seemed particularly interested in actually saying goodbye.

We'd known each other for barely a day.

And still, before she walked out of the door, we'd already made plans to see each other again tomorrow.

So, tomorrow then?

Vestuari Compartit

Monday itself wasn't particularly exciting. Work, language school, the usual. I spent some time coworking with Lucy, although I'm not sure how much actual work survived once we started talking about her dating life and mine.

Very serious coworking.

On my way through the city, I also stopped at a clothing swap Julius had told me about. You bring things you don't wear anymore and can exchange them for something someone else left behind. I'll put the location here instead of trying to explain where it was.

But the person I was really on my way to see was Bridget.

She was working at the sex shop that evening, and through a combination of enthusiasm and apparently not knowing how long it takes me to get anywhere, I arrived about an hour early. So I just stayed, hung around while she worked, met her boss and got a little glimpse into this part of her life she'd been telling me about the day before.

I bought some massage oil, her boss added a few other things for us to take along, and once Bridget was done we wandered around the corner and found a ramen place where we could sit down, eat soup and let the evening slow down a little.

Somewhere between talking and eating, I said something about myself. I don't even remember the exact sentence anymore — something about the being autistic, or about not really seeing myself as particularly mal.

Bridget started laughing, turned towards me and told me that she'd manifested me.

She was a witch, apparently.

And somehow I was exactly what she'd ordered from the universe.

There was something about the way she said it and the way she'd been looking at me since we'd met that made the thought land much harder than it probably should have.
We'd known each other for two days. Somehow it already didn't feel particularly strange to be sitting there together.

For a moment, my brain turned one sweet comment into a whole philosophy about why I exist.

I know how strange this is going to sound.

But sitting next to her in that ramen place, listening to her tell me that she'd somehow manifested me, I suddenly had this incredibly intense feeling that, for that moment, I existed almost entirely for another person.

Not in a sad way. Not even in a way that made me feel like I was disappearing.

Almost the opposite.

For 27 years I'd just been becoming this person without really knowing what for. All the weird interests, the dancing, the way I dress, the parts of me that don't feel particularly masculine, the autistic parts, the traits that are loud and sometimes probably a bit much.

And suddenly there was someone sitting next to me looking at that whole collection as if she'd specifically asked for it.

For a moment my brain went: Well, maybe this is it then. Maybe all those 27 years were just preparation for making this particular person's dream real for a while.

Obviously that's a ridiculous amount of meaning to put onto someone I'd met two days earlier.

I knew that then too.

But strangely, it didn't scare me.

I wasn't planning a life around her. I wasn't deciding that my entire purpose was now making another person happy. It was much smaller and much more temporary than that.

I just remember thinking that if, for this little piece of my life, being exactly who I already was could make another person this happy...

there are worse things to have spent 27 years becoming.

We'd known each other for two days, and somehow sitting there together already didn't feel particularly strange.

When we eventually went home, there wasn't really a big moment attached to it. We just ended up there together.

And fell asleep wrapped around each other.