What the Fuck Are We Waiting On?

The first time I mentioned meeting him, I did it as a threat.

“What if we meet and we hate each other in real life?”

It was the obvious question. In fact, it was the only sensible question left, and I had been doing my best not to ask it.

Until then he had existed in the safest possible place: inside my phone.

Inside my phone, he was clever and funny and Scottish. He wrote in full sentences. He understood feminism. He knew who Simone de Beauvoir was without needing to Google her halfway through the conversation. He did not open with “how u?” or tell me Reform was great. He asked questions and then actually listened to the answers, which placed him somewhere between a rare bird and a possible government experiment.

Inside my phone, I could take my time. I could read his words twice. I could think before I answered, although I rarely did. I could be completely myself while still maintaining the reassuring physical distance of approximately 150 miles and one national border.

In real life, there would be no read more button.

In real life, he might be less articulate. I might be too much. He might see me close up, without portrait mode or a Hollywood mirror, and mentally leave a two-star review.

Lovely location, but the architecture requires extensive renovation. Someone call English Heritage.

Or I might discover that the extraordinary connection between us was simply excellent correspondence. Some people are meant to be letters. Perhaps we were just Sartre and Beauvoir with emojis, destined to write enormous messages across the miles and never have to find out whether our knees bumped awkwardly beneath a table.

“There’s only one way to find out,” he replied.

He admitted that we might meet and hate each other. Then he said the thought of never meeting me was much worse.

That was the problem with Ewan. Every time I constructed a perfectly serviceable defensive wall, he arrived carrying a beautifully worded wrecking ball.

I told him I had moved from “no fucking way” to “maybe that’s a possibility”. This was, for me, an enormous concession. The crocodiles had already left the moat. Now I appeared to be lowering the drawbridge and offering the invading army a cup of tea.

For three more days, we continued not arranging anything.

Instead, we talked about sex and gender and masculinity. We talked about trauma, music, parents, age and the selves we had performed for other people. We discussed the things we would talk about when we were together, as if together were already a place we could visit.

Then, during a conversation about Morrissey, masculinity and whether his mother was younger than me, he finally said it.

“Mandy, what the fuck are we waiting on? Let’s plan something. To say I’m desperate to meet you would be an understatement.”

I read it more than once.

Not because I needed time to decide. I think the decision had already been made somewhere between the feminist theory and the fake Needoh investigation. I read it more than once because the words changed the shape of everything.

This was no longer a hypothetical man in my phone.

He wanted to meet me.

“First of all, your mum is younger than me,” I replied, because some facts cannot be allowed to pass without formal acknowledgement.

Then I said yes.

Edinburgh was the obvious place. It sat almost halfway between us and, more importantly, it was my favourite city. If this was going to become either the greatest Mandy lore of all time or a cautionary Netflix documentary, it deserved good architecture.

I proposed separate hotels for safety. He might still be a serial killer. I might still be a serial killer. At this stage, neither possibility had been independently verified.

He offered to drive me home to Newcastle so I would not need a hotel, while making it clear there was no pressure. I refused. I could get a friends and family rate at Hotel du Vin, I needed a mini-break, and travel was tax-deductible because I made travel content.

I remain tax-efficient in all romantic situations.

At first, I suggested July. July was sensible. July was distant. July gave me time to think, plan, panic and potentially flee the country.

He did not want to wait until July.

Neither did I.

He sent me his work rota. I checked hotels. The end-of-month TikTok sale finished on 6 June, after which the algorithm would probably switch me off for two weeks as part of its long-running psychological warfare campaign.

“So maybe 12th June then?” I wrote.

Then, in the interests of complete honesty, I added:

“Scared as fuck.”

He said 12 June sounded perfect.

Just like that, a date appeared in both our calendars.

Two weeks and one day.

We had a plan before we had ever had a phone call.

This was partly because I regarded phones as devices designed for typing. Calls were for medical emergencies, missing cats and people who had ignored the clear social contract of texting first. Voice notes were only just becoming tolerable, mainly because his arrived like a small Scottish podcast made especially for me.

He worried that he sounded more articulate in writing. I worried that every good angle I had ever found would abandon me simultaneously. He worried about his Ayrshire accent. I worried about my face, my body, my age and the fact that he would be seeing all of them in three dimensions.

We each kept presenting the other with our perceived defects, like nervous sellers completing a property information form.

Messy. Stubborn. Anxious. Occasionally flaky. Fibromyalgia. Wonky knee. Germ phobia. Too many feelings. Not enough spoons. Heavy accent. Terrible at conflict. Academically trained for conflict. Prone to lateness. Prone to waiting mode. Four cats. Several tarantulas.

Neither of us ran.

Instead, we planned the date.

Hotel du Vin had no friends and family rooms. Neither did Malmaison. While looking at alternatives, I found a hotel beside Edinburgh Zoo and suggested we go there.

The capybaras had recently had a baby called David Attenbara.

If a tiny capybara with a pun for a name could not guarantee romantic success, nothing could.

He said he had been thinking about the zoo all day. Afterward, depending on the Scottish weather, we could find a rooftop cocktail bar with a view across the city or a cosy pub with live music.

I imagined us in a corner booth, talking the way we did in messages. He imagined the same thing. Every subject became something we would discuss properly in Edinburgh. Masculinity. Existentialism. Music. Fear. The strange paths that had brought us to one another.

There was already too much to say.

I booked my train on 30 May.

The act itself took seconds. The meaning of it did not.

There it was on my screen: Newcastle to Edinburgh. A real train, on a real date, carrying me towards a real man.

I booked a hotel using Avios because apparently romance, like air travel, should be funded with points wherever possible. He booked his own room, separate from mine, because he wanted me to feel safe.

We continued our nightly films. We made playlists. He made lists in his phone called “movies to watch together” and “Things Mandy likes”, which was either extremely cheesy or a criminally effective seduction technique.

Our messages became longer and more intimate. “Read more” appeared so often it might as well have been a third participant. We wrote about what we wanted from love, although neither of us was quite calling it that yet. We wrote about separate lives that could meet in the middle, about freedom rather than possession, about Sartre and Beauvoir writing to one another across the miles.

He called me his Beauvoir.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of him as a man I might meet and started thinking of Edinburgh as the place where something already happening would finally become visible.

This did not make me calmer.

My sleep declined. My brain, which had spent years believing its main purpose was finding new ways to describe squishy toys, had switched itself back on and refused to power down. Synapses were reconnecting. Thoughts were arriving faster than I could write them. Every notification brought a tiny burst of anticipation.

He had lit up my brain.

For an autistic woman, there may be no greater declaration of attraction.

The closer we got to Edinburgh, the less useful our safeguards became.

Separate hotels remained booked, but now we discussed late checkout and films in bed. The flirting, which had once arrived disguised as jokes, stopped bothering with a disguise. I bought pyjamas and placed a coded message for him in the description of a video. He saw it, of course. He saw everything.

We had still never spoken live.

I had heard his voice in notes. He had watched mine every day on TikTok. He knew the rhythm of my livestreams, the things I said when I was excited, the way “better butter” sounded in a Geordie accent. But there had never been a real-time conversation. No FaceTime. No telephone call. No opportunity to discover whether the ease between us depended on the pause before pressing send.

It should have felt reckless.

It did feel reckless.

It also felt strangely inevitable.

By 9 June, neither of us was sleeping properly. We counted down the days. We talked about teleportation. We tried to work while our minds were already in Edinburgh.

The night before I travelled, he discovered that extending his hotel booking by one night would cost another £200. He wanted to come early, but he did not want to put pressure on me by asking to stay in my room.

Two weeks earlier I had required separate hotels in case he murdered me.

Now I told him he could stay with me.

We were adults, I said. I could put pillows down the middle of the bed if he was frightened I might get him in the night. It did not mean we had to have an orgy.

He accepted, while suggesting that an orgy consisting of him and several versions of me might be permissible.

The crocodiles were now several counties away and showing no sign of returning.

The following morning, the universe gave me one final burst of chaos for the road. A video I had posted at eleven the night before had reached a quarter of a million views while I slept. Overnight sales were higher than anything I had seen in four years of TikTok Shop. The Needoh would be sold out within the hour.

There are moments when life changes with a cinematic swell of music.

There are also moments when life changes while you refresh your affiliate dashboard and wonder whether you have packed enough skincare.

I had packed for summer. It was raining.

Of course it was.

I checked the cats. I checked my bag. I checked the train time, then checked it again because this was not a day on which my brain could be trusted with administrative responsibility.

For nearly a month, Ewan had lived inside my phone. He had become the first person I wanted to tell things to. He had made me think about philosophy again. He had made me look forward to nine o’clock, to movie nights, to messages so long they became chapters. He had made a life I already liked feel newly illuminated.

Now I was going to find out whether he existed outside the little room we had built together.

I left the house.

I went to the station.

And I got on the train to Edinburgh.

Landed Here First?  Start Here