Swipe

Fiction: A dating app mirage lingers in a young man's mind.

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I joined Tinder again. So far I’ve only matched with robots and Kenyans, but I’m sure my soulmate is just a few swipes away. I haven’t used the app since I got catfished in 2022. I spent all my money on a flight to Kathmandu, then. I waited for five hours in the airport. I couldn’t believe it.

She wasn’t even real. She was some closet gay guy or a scammer or a bot, I never found out. I just wandered through the dust of “KTM” in June for six days, sweating myself to death between juice shops, dreaming of salt. She had those Mongol eyes, I love girls like that. I still want her to be real, in some sad part of me.

We had messaged for months, almost a year, I’d given her my whole story, she knew everything. When I had the meningitis and I was stuck in bed she was like a goddess-healer, her words drew me out of the Styx sickness. Maybe she was real and there was some mix-up… her bus crashed on the way to the city, her parents found her phone and deleted the app…

The Tinder people knew all about me after the chats I’d had with her, so I kept getting targeted ads about flights to Nepal, meditation retreats, stuff to do with volleyball. We talked about volleyball a lot. That was her sport. It’s the national sport of Nepal now, in fact, I learned that from her. I learned a lot about the country from her, even some of the language—when I was in Kathmandu for those six days I could speak to some Nepalis in their language, a little bit anyway.

I even tried talking to some women there, I was hoping one of them might look like her, but I couldn’t get the conversation beyond polite tourist chitchat even though one or two seemed kind of flirtatious. I can’t establish a connection. That’s the thing. I’d been messaging Anisha (that was her name) for months, almost a year. I felt like we had a connection. But I just can’t make a connection like that offline. I can’t be prepared, can’t present myself.

The few months after that, when I was back in the UK, I kept getting the targeted ads on my Facebook and on YouTube, etc., about Nepal and the Himalayas and Vipassana. Because I told Anisha I wanted to meditate and, like, calm my brain down, and I thought she could take me somewhere, way up in the Everest region where she’s from, and I could learn from the lamas and the landscape how to be wise and enlightened. So I kept getting those ads, but now they just made me furious because I wanted to forget the whole thing.

The ads stopped after a month or so, which felt like forever. The whole thing drove me so crazy that I didn’t want to be myself anymore, how could I have been so stupid? I wanted to rip my body off. I started going to Reddit forums for transgender people. I wasn’t even trans, it was a stupid thing, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Anisha.

I was obsessed with her memory. I wanted to become her. So I made fake aliases and started telling all these strangers that I wanted to be a girl. And then I started getting ads all over my socials for makeup and wigs. It’s racist to dress up as an Asian woman, I wasn’t going to do that. But it’s okay to dress up as a girl, actually, it might be a deep and unshakeable need inside you, that’s what all these strangers were telling me.

The strangers gave me tips, how to shape my eyebrows, how to contour, how to use an epilator, the price of at-home laser kits, the price of a private tracheotomy, the price of a round trip to Thailand for The Op. I started feeling kind of happy, dreaming of being a sexy goth. Maybe that was my calling in life.

I collected pictures of Wednesday Addams in her various incarnations for my Pinterest. Yearned for new life. I was on the HRT for two years. I was kind of happy. Well, until I got bored. Then I realised I’d probably overreacted to the whole thing with Anisha and now I had to go back and reverse all of it.

My dick had shrivelled up. I was distraught. So now I was on a mission to get my dick back. I kept testing myself with porn, but even a year after stopping the medication I couldn’t get hard. What the hell is wrong with me, I thought. It’s not supposed to take this long to come back. It was AI porn by that point, hyper-realistic, you could almost feel the girls bursting out of the screen.

Since the AI stuff came online, I haven’t looked at any old-school porn, I prefer the simulated videos. They’re more perfect than anything I’ll ever experience or even imagine, I’ve accepted that now. I’m kind of hooked on this stuff. I don’t think I’ll ever make a connection with a real woman, unless I get a match on Tinder.

That’s why I joined the app again. So far my matches are just chatbots and women from overseas looking for visas, but I’m going to keep swiping. The problem is I’m not a high-value man. I can’t find a job and I still live with my parents. The other day, the Green Party leader was saying we need a wealth tax to stop asset prices rising, which is driving up inflation and the cost of living, but this Oxford economist guy said if you tax the rich, they leave the country and in the end you get even less revenue. So I guess there’s nothing we can do.

I still talk to the women from Kenya and the chatbots sometimes, even though I know it’s all fake. I just want the fantasy. I toggle between the app and the AI porn. I’m watching it in incognito mode but somehow I’m still getting targeted ads all over my Facebook about stuff to do with Buffy costumes. I don’t even know if that’s legal, fake Buffy the Vampire Slayer porn, surely it’s copyright infringement.

How is it legal that they can track the porn I’m watching? How is it okay they know everything about me? Sometimes I wonder who I am after all this. I wish for a mistake like a bus crash or a nuclear bomb. If the mad king across the water doesn’t snuff it soon, then it could happen. What then would become of all my data?

I guess that’s the only way to really destroy your online trace, the thermonuclear way. If I get bored of AI adult entertainment, I can watch war all day long on TikTok, which I think they’re going to ban soon because it’s Chinese. But what do I care whether it’s the CCP or Silicon Valley who are spying on me? I am sold. I’ve never owned myself, not since I first dialled up the internet in the 1990s.

Sometimes I wish for a mistake. A lightning strike, a flood. I keep thinking of Lawrence of Arabia when a motorcyclist on the other side of the Suez Canal shouts at him, “Who are you? Who are you?”

Yeah. It’s like that. Sometimes I ask myself. Sometimes I wonder. I’m sold… I’m a commodity, information… It’s easy to forget I was a child once. Then, all I wanted was a simple kind of life. But I forget… I want to forget… To lose myself. To be unconscious. So, I swipe…

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