ciel badu
'ALMOST, NEARLY'
A story about firsts. Freedom, love, and self-discovery.
This is an email newsletter actual mail. | Shipping Winter '26 .
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Excerpt
The profile took four whole days—which I have never admitted to anyone before.
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 nerdy 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 just about given up trying: 'I think chocolate is overrated'.
I read it back and thought about deleting it for all of eight seconds. I ended up leaving it in because deleting it meant thinking about it again and I was very over that idea.
Then the messages started, and I understood that I had been incredibly naive about what this was.
There were eleven the first day. I remember counting them, and I remember the exact disappointment of counting them. 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, but it turned out to be the same paragraph he'd sent to everyone. I only know this 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 grocery store flyers.
I found him on a Tuesday.
The first photo was him in a kitchen. Not posed in a kitchen — legitimately in one, in the middle of something. His 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. 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, so this should go swimmingly, right?
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 recited 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, then I opened it again eleven minutes later. I closed the laptop, went down the hall, brushed my teeth, came back, and opened it again. I 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 Doc Marten on, while the other was MIA.
"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.
I typed back, 'Why? Are you going to try and change my mind?'