[u] was out of the question.
That much was obvious.
[u] was immature. It was juvenile. It was lazy and sloppy and thoughtless and in all honesty probably a little bit on the slow side, too, and that was not the kind of message that a guy like Steven could afford to send.
Not now, anyways. Not at this point.
No.
[u] wasn’t even an option. It couldn’t be.
Steven knew that much, at least.
After all, he wasn’t that bad at this.
It’s just that he wasn’t all that good at it, either.
His problem wasn’t a lack of words. On the contrary – there were too many of them. And they all had him surrounded. Words smothered Steven with their own special allures and subsequent pitfalls. Words seduced him. They teased him.
They tricked him
They led him on and on until he was completely enthralled and enamored and this close to finally making a decision when all of a sudden, just like that, like the snap of a finger, they would turn their respective backs on him and they would leave him, all alone.
Words left Steven abandoned and confused and betrayed.
[you] was one of the worst offenders.
[you] bothered Steven the most.
Because in a perfect world – or at the very least, in a perfectly grammatical world – [you] would be the correct choice. Because [you] made sense. [you] was proper. [you] was clean, [you] was polished. It was plain and it was simple and it worked.
[you] was right.
Yet the longer Steven stared at [you], the more [you] began to change. Right before his eyes, the letters began to become rigid. They tensed and they tightened and soon they transformed [you] from something that was right into something that was just a little bit too right.
[you] became deliberate. It became standoffish. It became too much like an exchange between strangers.
[you] became cold.
[Hey. It was nice meeting you last night.]
Steven reread the words he had typed on his phone, his thumb hovering over the “Send” icon.
He shivered.
The prospect of [ya] did little to warm him up.
Sure, at first, [ya] had seemed like a safe middle ground to Steven. Not quite a [you] and not quite a [u], [ya] was the sort of second person pronoun that was mature yet laidback. It was more playful than [you] and less capricious than [u]. It was proper and respectful and yet still with a drop of devilish intent interwoven within its lettering.
It even flowed nicely.
[Hey. It was nice meeting ya last night.]
But Steven couldn’t use [ya].
No. [ya] was a cop-out.
[ya] was a cop-out because there was no real practicality in [ya]. Because there was no point in it. Steven had thought it over thoroughly, he really had, about how [ya] had two letters and how [you] had three letters and how the elimination of one single solitary letter could possibly truly ever warrant [ya] to be a worthwhile, meaningful abbreviation.
No. Steven had thought it over and decided that it was clear. Too clear, in fact.
[ya] was trying too hard.
[ya] was trite.
And if there was one thing Steven did not want, it was for his pronoun selection to appear to be trite.
Steven sighed and rolled over in his bed, his limbs dragged along unwillingly. Everywhere he turned, he was met with false choices, with uncooperative destinies. They were just words, [u] and [you] and [ya], yet they refused to communicate properly. They refused to play along. They squirmed about in his hand and wriggled away through his fingers. They writhed against acting as what they were, as what they should be. They should have been easy enough to grasp at this point in his life.
They were only second-person pronouns, after all.
They shouldn’t be that complicated.
They weren’t her.
Steven sat up. Maybe, he began to realize, maybe his problem wasn’t some pronoun or an associated grammatical derivative. Maybe it was something deeper than that.
Maybe it was his whole message.
[Hey. It was nice meeting you last night.]
He dissected it, piece by piece.
[Hey.
it was
nice
meeting
you
last night.]
It was only eight words long and it was a train-wreck. A debacle. A tragedy in the making.
He didn’t even know where to begin.
It was weak, for starters. It was vague. Boring. Safe. White bread. It was a text message that was somehow shy, one that was wary and nervous and riddled with crippling self-doubts and too afraid to take any sort of meaningful risks or chances or gambles with love and honestly, Steven thought, honestly, who would want to end up with somebody who’s that much of an emotional coward, even via text message?
Even the word [nice] was wrong. [nice] was asexual. It was neutered. It practically suggested ambiguity in Steven’s sexual orientation. [nice]? Honestly. [nice] was perfectly adequate to describe a night in with your grandmother, certainly, but it was hardly the romantic, passionate, heart wrenching sort of terminology that would grab at somebody’s soul.
No. It was all wrong. Everything was wrong.
Steven deleted the message and decided to try again.
It was back to step one.
What was he that he wanted to say? He tried to remember. He tried to push past pronouns and adjectives, tried to ignore their shouting and demands and threats and to think about what it was he had wanted to say, to her and to himself and to anybody else that was willing to listen.
And so he typed.
[Hey, I think there’s a chance that I may like you – or u or ya, whichever you prefer, really, I won’t dwell on that any longer than need be, or more appropriately any longer than I already have.]
[Back to the point, though: there may be a chance that I may like you, although I don’t know if that’s because of your eyes (which are really nice), or how you looked at me (right at me) with them when you talked, or maybe because you laughed at my (intentionally, I swear) dumb jokes or (even better) how I laughed at your even (intentionally?) dumber jokes.
[Or maybe because it’s because I’m desperate. Because people tell me I’m too picky and that I should stop that.]
[Either way, there’s still a chance I may like you and that presents a very stressful position since I don’t get many date opportunities and am constantly reminded of this fact by others – who happen to be the same others who also constantly remind me that if I continue on this life trajectory I may die alone, or at least more alone than what is considered to be normal and this, apparently, is a very bad thing.
So then. Drinks?]
Steven read back what he wrote. It was honest. It was truthful. It was the most honest and most truthful thing he had ever written in his life and it was exactly what he felt.
He panicked, and deleted it immediately.
[Hey. It was nice meeting you last night.] he typed.
He pressed “Send” and was washed away, caught helplessly by a current of indecision, of doubt and hope. He couldn’t see where it was bringing him, the current, or where he was going. He didn’t know what to do. Whether he should follow it, to trust it, to let it bring him to wherever it willed, whether it be safe harbor or out to sea or crashing against who knows what. Or if he should swim against it. To struggle to find something that would keep him afloat, something that would keep his head above the water.
He thought of what he should do, and all the while the current carried him.
And before he figured out what to do, his phone rang.