escort diary® of Jolie: To my regulars, thank you x
I want to talk about the men who come back, and what they've become to me, and what that says about something I think most people get wrong about this work.
There is a man who sends me Lord of the Rings memes. Not occasionally. Regularly. With the commitment and consistency of someone who has decided that this is his contribution to the dynamic, and he will not be (and should never be) deterred. Some of them are terrible. Some of them are so specifically, absurdly perfect that I have to put my phone down and stare at the ceiling for a moment. Most of them make me cackle really loud. He does not send these because he wants anything. He sends them because at some point, in the middle of whatever his day is, he sees a picture of Gandalf with an inappropriate caption, and his first thought is: she'd like this. That is a small, ridiculous, completely genuine form of love, and I refuse to call it anything else.
There is a man who worries about me. Genuinely worries, not in the way people say let me know if you need anything, while hoping you won't, but in the way that produces action. He has asked about my work, has tried to get me a job, he checks in when I go quiet, not because he wants a booking but because my silence concerns him. He has, on more than one occasion, said things to me that made me realise I had not been asked how I was in a while, not professionally, not politely, but actually.
There is a man who is stuck in the Middle East right now and keeps messaging to check on me, and who has an enduring and very specific love for fashion and who sends me pieces I've been hoping to get for years. He asks what I'd like, and boy, do I always have something on my never-ending list of "this would look amazing". This is not transactional, which is that he likes knowing he's contributed to something concrete in my life, and I like wearing proof that someone was thinking of me on a Tuesday afternoon in a country I've never visited. He does not need to do this; he does it because he wants to, and the wanting is the whole point. I do not need to wear the clothes he sends me... well actually I do. They're perfect.
There is a man with whom I have had the most extraordinarily detailed conversations about Chinese astrology and workplace politics. These two subjects should not be related, and yet in our conversations, they are deeply, inevitably, hilariously intertwined. He always tries his hardest to come see me. Sometimes he can, sometimes he can't, but the trying is always visible and always genuine, and I have learned not to undervalue the man who tries over the man who promises. In the meantime, like every other person who's seen me more than once, we catch up regularly.
There is a Slav. He is one of the funniest people I have ever met, and I have met a lot of people. I am not going to describe his humour because it would not translate: it is the kind that requires his specific face, making a specific expression while delivering a specific line in a specific accent, and reproducing it in text would be like describing a sunset to someone who wants to feel warm. He comes suddenly, offering the warmth people misunderstand about eastern european man: dry on the outside, massive teddy bears on the inside, the humour of a part of the world that stopped taking themselves seriously after several wars and famines.
There is a man who is deeply, almost operatically invested in the dramatic stories of my life. I have sent him a body of my written work and (this ass) has not yet read it yet. I find this simultaneously outrageous and completely endearing, because it tells me something important: he doesn't need my writing to be interested in me. The writing is a bonus he hasn't gotten around to collecting, like a gift card that keeps not expiring. He'll read it eventually, or he won't, and either way, he'll show up and ask me and then what happened with the intensity of someone watching a series he cannot stop bingeing. I am his Netflix... and I have made peace with this.
And there is a man I have seen irregularly for five years. Five years. He sends me books, not randomly: specifically, deliberately, in response to things I've said or written or thought out loud in his presence. We have built, over half a decade of sporadic meetings and long epistolary exchanges about philosophy, love, and his intense investment in my current writing involving the most unusual muse...one of the most intense intellectual relationships of my life. It happens to exist within the framework of my work, it also happens to have transcended that framework so completely that I sometimes forget it started there. I will not say more about him because some things are private, not because they are secret, but because they are sacred, and the difference matters.
These are my regulars. Not all of them: there are others, and there are also the men I've seen once or twice who walked in as strangers and left something real in the room behind them.
The man who was so nervous his voice shook and who left standing taller.
The man who told me something he'd never told anyone and looked stunned by his own honesty.
The man who laughed so hard at something I said that he had to sit down, and then looked at me like he'd forgotten that laughing like that was something his body still knew how to do.
I carry all of them. Not as a weight, but as a collection, a private gallery of precious moments that nobody else saw, that will never be reproduced, that exists only in the space between two people who agreed, for a few hours, to stop performing and start being real.
This is the part of my work that no profile can capture, and no diary entry can fully convey. It is the accumulated evidence, built over years, that human beings are capable of extraordinary tenderness when they are given permission to stop pretending they don't need it, and when they find a space where it feels safe enough to do so.
These men gave me that evidence. Every meme, every book, every worried message, every terrible joke, every attempt to buy me a dress from a different time zone. They did not have to do any of it. They did it because something in our time together made them want to, and the wanting was not a transaction. It was just... human.
I am lucky that I get to experience a tesselation of human connection, while being able to sustain myself with financial independence from it.
To all of you who have and are helping me on this journey, I appreciate you, and you will always be remembered fondly (... your faces and who you are. Unfortunately, names escape me on the best of days).
J x
