ciel badu
'ALMOST, NEARLY'
A story about firsts. Life, love, and self-discovery.
This is an email newsletter actual mail. | Shipping Winter '26 .
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Excerpt
The profile took four days, which I have never admitted to anyone.
Not four days of work. Four days of opening it, writing one line, and closing the laptop like I'd been caught. The picture was the easy part. The words were harder. Everything I typed made me sound like someone's cousin. 'I like music'. Everyone likes music. 'I'm in art school'. True and boring. In the end I wrote six lines, and the only one that sounded like a person was the last one, which I put in because it was three in the morning and I had stopped trying: 'I think chocolate is overrated'.
I read it back and thought about deleting it. I left it because deleting it meant thinking about it again.
Then the messages started, and I understood that I had been very naive about what this was.
There were eleven the first day. I remember counting them, and I remember the specific disappointment of counting them, because eleven sounds like a lot until you open them. 'hey', 'hey beautiful', 'ur gorgeous'. One of them was a paragraph, which I opened with some hope, and it turned out to be the same paragraph he'd sent to everyone, because he'd left another girl's name in the second line.
But it was still something. I want to be honest about that. For about two weeks it was fun in a way I couldn't have explained to my mother, or to God, or to anyone from home. I'd come back from studio with charcoal in my cuticles and lie on my bed with the laptop on my stomach and go through them like flyers.
I found him on a Tuesday.
The first photo was him in a kitchen. Not posed in a kitchen — in one, in the middle of something, white sleeves pushed to the elbow, one hand flat on a steel counter and the other holding a pan, looking off at whoever was talking to him. Somebody else had taken it without asking him to stand still. I looked at that picture for a long time before I understood what I was looking at. Forearms. I was looking at forearms . I had never once in my life thought about a man's forearms. There was a whole list of things I wasn't supposed to think about on a man, and forearms weren't on it, so nobody had warned me of their power.
His profile said he'd been to fourteen countries. It said he cooked for a living and that he'd teach anybody anything if they asked twice. Under what he was looking for it said, 'someone who'll eat what I put in front of her', and I laughed, alone, in my room, out loud. I'm a terribly picky eater.
Then I read it again, more slowly, and I thought... he is twenty-five. He has been to fourteen countries and I have only been to the States, once. I thought about the family rule regarding boys, which my father had delivered routinely at every drop-off, and I thought about how there was no version of this man that could be explained at my parents' dinner table.
I didn't message him. I want that on the record, because for years I told the story as though I'd been bold, and I wasn't. I clicked off his page. I opened it again eleven minutes later. I closed the laptop, went down the hall, brushed my teeth, came back, and opened it again, and told myself I was only checking whether the kitchen photo was as good as I remembered.
It was. I went to bed.
The message was there in the morning, before my critique, while I was standing up with one shoe on.
"So you really think chocolate is overrated?"
That was the whole message. No 'hey beautiful', no compliment about my face, which I had photographed carefully and which every other man on that website had felt the need to mention. He had read six lines and picked the only one that was mine.
