[Originally drafted in 2016 as a part of a dating manifesto.]

“no-no-no-NO-NO-NO.”

The panicked thought in my head as we approached each other on the sidewalk in front of Osmium Coffee Bar in Lakeview.

I knew it was her and there was no turning back. My soon to be ex-friend had done it.

The realization locked in; he had set me up on a blind date with a dwarf.

I crouched down to shake her hand, and we entered the mushroom hut of sortilege and witchery. I started my mental clock for the forty-five minutes I allotted to dates at the time that I needed to escape from. Look it’s not because she was a dwarf. It was because she was really fucking short.

Like, what was this? She was just okay with dating someone three feet taller than her? Did my friend tell her I was a dwarf? Did he tell her I was into dwarfism?

As we stood at the register I ordered my typical large drip black coffee, and she planted herself there in mythical fashion, unmoving for at least three minutes – just staring at the menu, reading every letter of every syllable of every description of every coffee drink. Standing next to her, I remember being able to see the complete top of her head as if she were a child I dragged along for a caffeine fix.

“You, know… it’s Dark Matter. Anything you order is going to be pretty good”, I said with an attempt to speed things up.

Yes, it was taking a nice, sizeable chunk of my established forty-five-minute ethics window, true. I should have appreciated that in terms of chipping away at the inevitable painful awkwardness that was surely coming. But as the rusty dials of the clock creaked in slow motion, the lag was just becoming embarrassing as the line of customers began to build behind us.

I’m standing there with a being of fabled old wives tale with some sort of a romantic notion attached, and there were really no two ways about it. With every second that consecutively trudged by it was just becoming more and more painful. I didn’t plan on it, and I wasn’t ready to own it, okay? Yes, she was really small, but did she also have to be this inefficient and indecisive, too?

I wasn’t rude. I was trying to help the scenario by supplying a fact that nothing you order is going to suck. Even now – go to Dark Matter and just pick something. You’ll be happy. I can very well promise.

The truth is, even if she hated her drink I wouldn’t have cared. All that would mean is that she didn’t enjoy coffee. In my life at that moment, I just needed to get us away from that general area of the coffee bar pay counter.

She looked up and lashed out in a jarring trance, eyes locked in a laser form of demonology from the crypt.

“I’m taking my time.”

I was confused at the reaction, but quickly I learned that she was jaded. Probably miserable and exhausted from the dating world. Prosaic and uncanny.

Regardless, her response was tactless. If I had to do it again, I would have slunked back to the sidewalk and hob-scrabbled away though a trap door in an Elvin treehouse, whistling as though I just had some sort of normal existence.

We plunked down at a table in the back patio where witnesses would be minimized.

She told me I asked too many questions. Eyeing a back escape route, which would involve jumping a fence, I knew that asking questions was my only play. I didn’t know what else to do on a date, let alone the fact that asking questions was typically seen as a positive trait. Other than asking questions I had no other card to play, man.

I certainly didn’t know what else to do on a blind date, let alone a blind date where the other party showed up as a creature of Norse mythology.

I wasn’t interested. But I sat there and inquired about her life for the better part of one hour all the while projecting myself to a plane where I’m ending a friendship with a dickhead who thought it would be funny to waste two peoples’ time.

She told me she never went out and that she liked to stay home and drink vodka alone. My mind fashioned an image of this miniature Viking, somewhere in Svartalfheim. A lone hermitess, sipping an acorn cap of home-fermented potato juice over a cast iron caldron in an underground labyrinthine complex of mines and forges.

She was intensely and alarmingly emphatic about the idea that matching socks were boring. I cannot even begin to scratch the surface of my lack of articulation on just how much I didn’t care about her personal life or her views on socks, matching or otherwise.

She kept talking about some person or some pet named “Meesha”. Meesha this and Meesha that and Meesha horny. I did not care or know who Meesha was, and I gathered by this point that asking who Meesha was could end up being a really bad idea. But like the train wreck of the Nordic parable that was my blind date experience, I just couldn’t look away. Internally wincing, I braced myself and I asked her who Meesha was.

The look of grim hatred and disbelief streaming from her stabbing gaze was enough to paralyze. It was like a reaction I’d expect if I asked her if all elves are cobblers. (I know this was true, by the way, but I also know that not all cobblers are elves).

Brashness in dwarves or elves or even gnomes for that matter, on its face would not surprise me. Living life so low to the ground, you’re literally the last person to know when it’s raining. What I mean is that life is just harder to prepare for. I was taken aback by her razor edge, not because she was a dwarf, but because she was a dwarf on a blind date with a non-dwarf. Was I better than her? No. Just taller. A lot taller.

We didn’t meet on a short people dating app. No. We met through some cruel friend of mine. Once I got passed the notion that she was not in fact magical, I guess I still crazily enough, assumed that she would be kind.

If you’re going to show up being that short, you need something to offset the dwarfism. This is just the economics of dating. Trust me, if I show up to a blind date with only one arm and the other person wasn’t aware that I only had one arm, you know what I’m going to be? I’m going to be one charming motherfucker.

She had no desire to counter it, and it was certainly her right to act that way. I think I’m just still wondering, though, almost a decade later, why she wanted to meet up in the first place.

We exited Osmium and I took off in a bolt down the sidewalk like Frodo, running from the Tower of Cirith Ungol in Mordor. The terrifying cries of the Black Rider rented the sky above me.

I texted my friend in disbelief, expressing the conundrum he had intentionally set me up with.

He replied with one word:

“Perve.”

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