escort diary® of Jolie: The normalcy of my bookings
You will search my name at least three times.
You will read my profile twice, possibly four times, and you will still not absorb a single word because your brain is too busy having a small existential crisis about the fact that you're actually doing this.
You will open your emails, then leave the message in draft.
You will open it again, type something, delete it, type something worse, delete that, and eventually send something so aggressively normal it sounds like you're booking a dentist appointment.
And I understand.
You will then check your phone every four minutes until I respond.
Once we've confirmed a time, a new phase of thinking begins.
You will shower twice.
You will change your shirt at least once, possibly three times.
You will briefly consider cancelling, not because you don't want to come, but because the version of this that exists in your head is still safer than the version that requires you to actually get in the car.
You will get in the car anyway.
You will not be able to find parking. This is not a metaphor, Sydney parking is a genuine test of character and I live in a busy area, and I have lost count of the number of men who have arrived slightly flustered because they circled the block so many times they started to question their commitment to the entire endeavour. If you arrive and the first thing you say is something about parking, I will know exactly what kind of evening we're about to have: a good one. Because a man who leads with a small complaint about something mundane is a man who has stopped performing.
And then comes the lift that shakes because the hydraulics are old, the dreaded "where on earth is her unit" because the numbers are confusing, the hope you won't meet anyone in the corridors. The questions about why my lobby has a gigantic train whistle post.
And then finally, I open the door, and you have to look down because I'm smaller than you expected (5 feet is not a lot of feet). I will immediately be comfortable, I will guide you through, offer tea, coffee, water, for the rare few some pastries.
There will be a sofa and there will be a moment — I'd say it happens around the seven-minute mark — where you realise that this is just a conversation. That I am just a person. That the enormous mythological event you built up in your head for the past seventy-two hours is actually just two people sitting in a room figuring out whether they like each other. Most of the time, they do. I am very easy to talk to, or so eighteen men have now written on the internet unprompted, so the odds are in your favour.
You will tell me what you do for work and I will ask you if you love it. This question will catch you off guard because almost nobody asks it. You will answer honestly, possibly for the first time in a while, and something in the room will shift.
At some point, and you will not be able to identify exactly when, the nervousness will leave. Not dramatically, it will just... thin out, like fog, until you look up and realise you've been laughing about something for the last five minutes and you forgot you were supposed to be anxious. This is my favourite part, not because I did something clever but because you did something brave: you stopped managing the experience and started having it.
And then you will drive home afterwards. Light, relaxed, with my many stories and the aftermath of physical intimacy running through your brain, wondering how we ended up spending four hours just being two people with no expectations or demands. You might see me again, you might not, and I will catch up here and there to see how you are doing.
Just two people who for a little while decided to be themselves in a little bubble filled with light and birds visiting me.
