SmokeLong Quarterly

You begin your story with a breathless sentence. The technique works beautifully to pull us into this world of online hookups. What do you like about the breathless sentence and why’d you choose to start the story this way?

I wanted this story to move at the speed of thought. Ultimately, it’s about someone knowingly making a bad decision—in order for us to go along with him on that ride, we need to be completely inside his head. I wanted the causality to feel airtight: we barely have time to process the reason something is happening before the next thing is already happening. The first sentence is particularly endless, but the long sentences persist throughout the story—about half the sentences in the entire piece are from Henry’s messages, even though they take up way less of the word count! My hope is that the story as a whole and the first sentence/paragraph in particular feel like you’re going through a portal with this character. In this case, the long sentence compresses time while building anticipation, so the reader experiences the narrator’s entire afternoon in a short period and resonates with the twisting disappointment of realizing it’s going the wrong direction.

You convey a lot of information, personality details, distances, text exchanges, thought bubbles without any quotation marks, but some underlining. How did you decide on the formatting for this piece? What advice do you have for writers seeking to push the boundaries of form?

Talking to someone on a hookup app always feels like its own weird reality to me. Underlining the texts gives that sense of trying to seem cool or edgy. In experimenting with form, it helps me to think about what I’m trying to convey—in this case, the posturing that hookup apps can bring—and how I can do that on the page. The underlines give me the image of someone speaking while striking a sexy pose; they replace the black background of the app, or the knowledge that if you scroll up a bit you’ll see a picture of a penis.

The story seems to be about one experience leading to another. What is it about a broken hookup that hooked you? Did you always know the story would start with one interaction and end with another type of relationship?

This story is largely autofiction, minus the part where the narrator falls for the scam. That’s the point where I called my partner to discuss how we felt about me sugaring, and in relaying everything to him it became clear I had let wishful thinking carry me too far into my conversation with the supposed Daddy. Luckily, I have a lovely partner who did not judge me in any way and was supportive of me exploring those big buckets of wishful thinking I found in myself by writing this story, and writing a version of me who would make a different choice. The reason I wanted to include the previous hookup falling through is that there are layers of precarity impacting the narrator’s life: We get some of the larger precarity issues as the story goes on, like that he is struggling financially, doing work that does not align with his values, and grieving a partner; but right up front, we get that particular day’s precarity, when he was looking forward to some relief that is now not coming, for reasons he doesn’t understand. It puts him in a position to project active physical desires onto whoever sends the next message, and that happens to be Henry. I think if Henry’s first message had come through while the narrator was in the middle of a productive writing session, or chatting with a friend, he would have made different choices.

In a way, this story feels like it’s about what people are willing to sacrifice for a chance at our ideal relationship. Is that a fair characterization? 

That’s really interesting. I would characterize the story as being about how we let delusion get the better of us—when we want something so much that we become willing to convince ourselves the thing in front of us is the thing that we want, even if that’s clearly not the case. The narrator gets all these needs kicked up by the offer of the arrangement, and he wants to believe they could be filled—enough that he overlooks the obvious red flags. Part of delusion might also be telling ourselves that we’re just making sacrifices or taking risks! This, to me, is also about precarity: the less we believe we can fulfill our desires elsewhere, the more likely we are to delude ourselves about what’s on offer.

Your story alludes to the fact that the narrator is a trans man. How does the trans identity inform the narrator’s actions and how did you weave that into the story?

There’s very few words given to the narrator’s trans status, but I do think it would be a different story without it. I had deeply internalized the idea that it would be harder to find partners after I transitioned. This has been extremely untrue for me—as a transmasc submissive interested in older men and living in Los Angeles, there is no shortage of interested parties. But despite that reality, I had so entrenched the idea that my transness would make me an outsider, or that it would be something a future partner might be evolved enough to look past if I was lucky, I still sometimes have to remind myself that it isn’t actually true. This concept may add to the narrator’s overall sense of precarity, or willingness to overlook red flags. In my longer works, I am often exploring the relationships between trans men and older cis men, and the experience of transmasculine submission—while I don’t get to unpack them as much here in such a short space, the phenomenon of desire for a masculine mentor impacts this narrator as well.