Litterae ex Sepulchris
Julian’s phone buzzed at 11:47 PM.
He was lying in bed, not sleeping, scrolling through the grid of faces and torsos that had become, over the past five years, his primary interface with desire. The notification was from someone called “Mike_32”—a headless torso, smooth chest, the usual statistics: 6’1”, 175 lbs, “versatile,” “looking for now.”
He tapped the message. Hey.
He typed back: Hey.
The conversation would follow its predictable course. A few exchanges to establish mutual interest. Photos requested and sent. The negotiation of who would host. And then either the meeting would happen or it wouldn’t—someone would stop responding, or the logistics would fall through, or the photos wouldn’t match and one of them would make an excuse.
Julian had been through this sequence thousands of times. He was twenty-three years old and he had never, not once in his life, walked up to a stranger and expressed interest.
I want to say something about interfaces.
An interface is the surface where two things meet. The screen of your phone is an interface between you and the digital world. But it is also a barrier—a layer of glass and light that mediates every interaction, that transforms the other person into pixels, that makes presence impossible.
When we talk about “connecting” through apps, we are using the word loosely. What we mean is: exchanging information. What we do not mean is: being present with another person, in the same space, breathing the same air, subject to the same uncertainties.
Julian had connected with hundreds of men. He had been present with almost none of them. Even the hookups—the twelve encounters that had progressed from screen to flesh—had felt like extensions of the app, as if the men who appeared at his door were not quite real, were still somehow made of pixels, were profiles that had temporarily taken physical form.
This is what the interface does. It makes everything feel like information. Even bodies. Even desire.
Mike_32 sent a photo. Julian examined it with the detachment of someone sorting through inventory. Acceptable. He sent one back. The negotiation continued.
You host?
Can’t tonight. You?
Roommates.
Ah.
The conversation stalled. One of them would have to solve the logistics problem or the interaction would dissolve, as most interactions did, into the vast archive of incomplete connections that the app stored on its servers forever.
Julian put his phone down. He looked at the ceiling.
He was lonely. He had been lonely for as long as he could remember, but the loneliness had intensified over the past year, had become a physical sensation, a weight in his chest that he carried everywhere. He had matches, messages, the constant low hum of potential connection. And yet he was alone. Truly alone, in a way that the app could not touch.
He did not understand why. The app was supposed to solve loneliness. It was supposed to make connection easy, efficient, frictionless. You specified what you wanted, you found others who wanted the same thing, you met. Simple. And yet the more he used the app, the lonelier he became.
Something was wrong. He could feel it but he could not name it.
The next morning, Julian went for a walk.
This was unusual. He worked from home—tech support for a software company, the kind of job that required a laptop and a headset and nothing else—and most days he did not leave his apartment at all. He ordered food through apps, groceries through apps, everything through apps. The outside world had become optional.
But today the walls of his apartment felt too close, and the weight in his chest was heavier than usual, and he needed to move. So he put on clothes and went outside, into the city, for the first time in weeks.
It was October. The air was cool, the sky gray, the streets full of people going somewhere. Julian walked without destination, letting the flow of the city carry him. He passed coffee shops and bodegas and construction sites. He passed people—hundreds of people—and did not look at any of them.
This was habit. In the city, you did not look at strangers. You kept your eyes forward, your expression neutral, your body closed. To look was to invite interaction, and interaction with strangers was dangerous, unpredictable, unwanted.
Julian had learned this rule so thoroughly that he no longer thought about it. His eyes slid over the people he passed as if they were furniture, as if they were not there at all.
I want to say something about invisibility.
We think of invisibility as something that happens to us—as if we are naturally visible and then something makes us unseen. But invisibility is also something we do. We make ourselves invisible by not looking. We make others invisible by refusing to see them.
The city is full of invisible people. Not because they are hidden, but because no one is looking. They walk the same streets, breathe the same air, exist in the same space—and yet they are not there, not to anyone, because no one has acknowledged them with their eyes.
Julian was invisible in this way. So was everyone around him. They moved through the city like ghosts, occupying space without presence, existing without being seen.
This is what the apps have done to us. They have made presence optional. They have taught us that we do not need to see strangers, that we can sort and filter and select from the comfort of our screens, that the messy business of being in public with other humans is unnecessary.
And so we have become ghosts. We haunt the city but we do not inhabit it.
Julian sat down on a bench in a small park.
He was tired, though he had not walked far. The weight in his chest had not lifted. He took out his phone—reflexively, without thinking—and opened the app.
The grid loaded. Faces and torsos arranged by distance. The nearest was 47 feet away. Julian looked up, half-expecting to see someone staring at their phone, but the park was mostly empty. A woman with a stroller. A man reading a newspaper. An older man on a bench across the path, watching the pigeons.
Julian looked back at his phone. He scrolled. He was not looking for anything in particular. He was looking because looking was what he did, because the grid was a place to put his attention, because the alternative—looking at the actual world, the actual people—felt impossible.
“You won’t find anything there.”
Julian looked up. The older man on the bench across the path was looking at him. Not at his phone—at him. Making eye contact. Smiling slightly.
“Excuse me?”
“The app. You won’t find what you’re looking for.”
Julian felt a flash of irritation. “How do you know what I’m looking for?”
“I don’t. But I know what the app offers, and I know it isn’t what anyone is really looking for.” The man’s voice was calm, not aggressive. He was perhaps sixty, with gray hair and a lined face and eyes that seemed to be seeing something Julian could not see. “May I sit?”
He gestured at the empty space on Julian’s bench. Julian hesitated—this was strange, this was not how things worked—but something in the man’s manner was disarming. He nodded.
The man crossed the path and sat down, leaving a respectful distance between them. He did not look at Julian’s phone. He looked at Julian.
“My name is Victor,” he said.
“Julian.”
“You looked unhappy, Julian. Staring at that screen. I’ve seen that look before. I’ve worn it myself.”
“I’m fine.”
“Of course you are.” Victor smiled. “We’re all fine. That’s what we say.”
I want to say something about strangers.
We have been taught to fear them. Stranger danger, we were told as children. Don’t talk to people you don’t know. The stranger is a threat, an unknown quantity, someone who might hurt you.
And sometimes this is true. Sometimes strangers are dangerous. But mostly they are not. Mostly they are just people—people like us, with their own loneliness, their own desires, their own need to be seen.
The apps have weaponized our fear of strangers. They have told us that we can have connection without risk, that we can meet people without meeting them, that the stranger can be transformed into a profile and thus made safe.
But what they have actually done is make strangers impossible. They have eliminated the category altogether. On the app, there are no strangers—only profiles, sorted and filtered, known in advance. And in the world, there are no strangers either—because we do not look at anyone, do not speak to anyone, do not acknowledge that anyone exists.
Victor was a stranger. He had approached Julian without permission, without prior matching, without any of the protocols that the app had taught Julian to expect. And Julian did not know what to do with him.
“Can I ask you something?” Victor said.
“I guess.”
“When was the last time someone approached you? In person, I mean. Not on the app. Just walked up to you and started talking.”
Julian thought about it. He could not remember. Years, maybe. Maybe never.
“I don’t know.”
“And when was the last time you approached someone? In person. Without the app.”
“I don’t—I mean, that’s not—” Julian fumbled. “People don’t do that.”
“They used to. Not so long ago. They did it all the time.”
“That’s different. That was before.”
“Before what?”
Julian did not have an answer. Before the apps, he supposed. Before everything became mediated. But he could not articulate this. It was just the way things were—the way they had always been, as far as he knew.
Victor nodded, as if Julian’s silence was the answer he expected.
“I’m sixty-two years old,” he said. “I’ve been gay my whole life. I came out in 1978, when I was seventeen. For thirty years after that, I met men the old way. In bars, in parks, on the street. I walked up to them. I talked to them. Sometimes they were interested. Sometimes they weren’t. Either way, I was there. Present. In my body. Alive.”
He paused. Julian did not know what to say.
“Then the apps came. And everything changed. Not slowly—suddenly. One year, everyone was in the bars. The next year, everyone was on their phones. The bars started closing. The parks emptied out. The whole culture—everything I had known, everything I had built my life around—just... disappeared.”
“Progress,” Julian said. He did not know why he said it.
“Is it?” Victor looked at him. “You tell me. You’ve grown up with the apps. You’ve never known anything else. Are you happy?”
The question landed like a punch. Julian opened his mouth to say yes, of course, fine, the usual deflections. But something stopped him. The weight in his chest. The loneliness that would not lift. The hundreds of matches and the thousands of messages and the absolute emptiness at the center of it all.
“No,” he said. “I’m not.”
Victor nodded again. “No. I didn’t think so.”
They sat in silence for a moment. The pigeons pecked at the ground. The woman with the stroller passed by. The city continued around them, indifferent.
“I could teach you,” Victor said.
“Teach me what?”
“How to approach. How to be present. How to meet people—actually meet them, not just match with them. How to be free.”
Julian laughed—a short, uncomfortable sound. “That’s weird. That’s a weird thing to offer.”
“I know. But I’m old, and I don’t have much time left, and I’ve been watching young men like you stare at their phones for fifteen years, and I’m tired of it. I’m tired of watching something precious disappear because no one remembers it existed.”
“Something precious?”
“Freedom.” Victor said the word simply, without drama. “The freedom to walk up to a stranger and say hello. The freedom to be rejected and survive it. The freedom to exist in the world without being logged, tracked, sorted, quantified. The freedom to be human.”
Julian did not know what to say. The offer was strange—stranger than anything that had ever happened to him on the apps, stranger than any message he had ever received. And yet something in it called to him. Something in Victor’s eyes, in his calm certainty, in the way he had simply walked up and started talking.
“Why me?” Julian asked.
“Because you were here. Because you looked unhappy. Because you put your phone down when I spoke to you.” Victor shrugged. “Because you’re young and you don’t know what you’re missing, and I’m old and I do, and someone has to tell you.”
Julian looked at his phone, still open in his hand. The grid of faces and torsos. Mike_32, probably asleep by now or talking to someone else. The endless scroll of possibility that never quite became real.
He closed the app.
“Okay,” he said. “Teach me.”
They met the next day at the same bench.
Julian had almost not come. He had woken up thinking the whole encounter was absurd—a strange old man in a park offering to teach him how to meet people, like something from a fairy tale or a scam. He had opened the app, scrolled for half an hour, closed it again. The weight in his chest had not moved.
So he went.
Victor was already there when he arrived, watching the pigeons again. He looked up when Julian approached and smiled.
“You came.”
“I almost didn’t.”
“But you did. That’s the first lesson.”
“What is?”
“Showing up. Being present. Most people don’t, anymore. They say they’ll be somewhere and then they’re not. They make plans and break them. They exist in a constant state of maybe, never committing to anything, always keeping their options open.” Victor gestured at the bench. “Sit.”
Julian sat. Victor turned to face him.
“Before we do anything else, I need to ask you something. And I need you to answer honestly.”
“Okay.”
“What do you want?”
Julian blinked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, what are you looking for? On the app, in life, whatever. What do you actually want?”
The question was harder than it should have been. Julian had filled out dozens of profiles, had answered hundreds of “what are you looking for” prompts. But those were categories—hookups, dates, friends, relationships—not answers. What did he actually want?
“I don’t know,” he said. “Connection, I guess. Someone to... be with.”
“Be with how?”
“I don’t know. Talk to. Touch. Not be alone with.”
Victor nodded. “That’s honest. Most people can’t even get that far. They say they want hookups when they want love, or they say they want love when they want validation. You at least know you’re lonely.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“It’s a starting point.”
I want to say something about wanting.
We live in a culture that is very good at stimulating desire and very bad at satisfying it. Advertisements tell us what to want. Apps tell us how to get it. But somewhere in the process, the actual wanting—the genuine, embodied experience of desire—gets lost.
Julian wanted connection. This was not a sophisticated want. It was the most basic human need, the thing that infants die without, the thing that prisoners in solitary confinement go mad from lacking. And yet he could not get it—not from the app, not from the hookups, not from the endless scroll of faces and torsos.
Why not? The app promised connection. The app delivered bodies to his door. What was missing?
Presence. That was what was missing. The app could deliver bodies, but it could not deliver presence. It could arrange for two people to be in the same room, but it could not make them actually be there—actually see each other, actually acknowledge each other’s existence as something more than a profile that had temporarily taken physical form.
Julian was starving for presence. He did not know this, because he had never experienced it. But Victor knew. Victor had experienced it thousands of times, in parks and bars and bedrooms, in the long years before the apps arrived. And he knew that presence was not something the apps could give.
“Today we’re not going to approach anyone,” Victor said. “Today we’re just going to see.”
“See what?”
“People. The people around us. Actually see them—not look through them, not slide our eyes over them, but see them. Can you do that?”
Julian looked around the park. There were perhaps a dozen people visible—a jogger, a couple on a blanket, a man walking a dog, others scattered on benches and paths.
“I see them.”
“No, you don’t. You registered them. You processed them as information—jogger, couple, dog walker—and filed them away. That’s not seeing. That’s sorting.”
“What’s the difference?”
Victor pointed at the man with the dog. “Tell me about him.”
Julian looked. Middle-aged, maybe fifty. Gray jacket. Some kind of terrier on a leash.
“He’s... walking his dog.”
“You’ve told me what he’s doing. Tell me about him.”
Julian looked harder. The man was walking slowly, not going anywhere in particular. His shoulders were slightly hunched. He was looking at the ground, not at the dog, not at the park.
“He looks... tired, I guess. Sad, maybe.”
“Good. What else?”
“His jacket is worn. The cuffs are frayed. He’s been wearing it for a long time.” Julian was surprised by his own observation. He had never looked at a stranger this way. “He’s... he’s alone. Not just right now. He looks like he’s been alone for a while.”
“Yes.” Victor’s voice was soft. “He does. Now tell me—would you have noticed any of that if I hadn’t asked?”
Julian thought about it. “No.”
“No. Because you weren’t seeing. You were processing. The app has trained you to process people—to look at them just long enough to categorize them, to decide if they’re relevant to your needs, and then to move on. But seeing is different. Seeing takes time. Seeing requires you to be present, to actually attend to another person, to let them exist for you as more than a category.”
They sat for an hour.
Victor would point to someone—a woman reading a book, a teenager on a skateboard, an old man feeding pigeons—and ask Julian to see them. Not to categorize, not to evaluate, but to see. To notice the details. To imagine the interior life. To let them be real.
It was harder than Julian expected. His attention kept sliding off, kept wanting to check his phone, kept defaulting to the quick surface scan that was all the app required. But Victor was patient, and gradually Julian began to understand.
The woman reading a book was laughing silently at something on the page. Her coffee had gone cold beside her; she had forgotten it. She was completely absorbed, completely present to whatever world the book had opened. Julian felt a strange pang watching her—envy, maybe, for her capacity to be so fully somewhere.
The teenager on the skateboard kept failing the same trick, over and over. He would set up, attempt it, fall, curse quietly, set up again. His persistence was almost painful to watch. But there was something beautiful in it too—the refusal to give up, the willingness to fail publicly, to be seen failing and not care.
The old man feeding pigeons had a particular way of throwing the bread—a small, precise gesture, practiced over years. He knew each pigeon individually, Julian realized. He spoke to them in a low voice, names or nonsense words, a private conversation.
“Do you see?” Victor asked.
“Yes.” And Julian meant it. He was seeing—actually seeing—for the first time he could remember. The park was no longer a backdrop, an empty space to move through. It was full of people, each of them real, each of them carrying a whole life that Julian would never know but could, for a moment, acknowledge.
“This is the first skill,” Victor said. “Before you can approach someone, you have to see them. Not evaluate them—not decide if they’re attractive enough, young enough, your type. Just see them. Let them be real to you.”
“Why does it matter?”
“Because if you can’t see people, you can’t connect with them. You can match with them, you can hook up with them, you can exchange bodily fluids with them—but you can’t connect. Connection requires presence, and presence requires seeing.”
I want to say something about objectification.
We are told that objectification is bad—that treating people as objects is wrong, that we should see them as subjects, as full human beings with their own interiority and dignity. This is correct, as far as it goes.
But the apps have done something more subtle than simple objectification. They have turned people into data. Not objects—objects at least have weight, texture, presence. Data is weightless. Data can be sorted, filtered, discarded without remainder. Data does not look back at you.
When Julian scrolled through the grid, he was not objectifying anyone. He was processing data. The faces and torsos were not objects—they were entries in a database, sortable by distance and age and body type. They had no presence because data has no presence. They had no interiority because data has no interiority.
This is worse than objectification. At least an object exists. Data is just information—patterns of ones and zeros, endlessly replicable, infinitely disposable. To turn a person into data is to erase them more completely than objectification ever could.
Victor was teaching Julian to see people again. To let them exist as more than data. This was the first step—the necessary foundation for everything that would come after.
At the end of the hour, Victor stood up.
“Homework,” he said.
“Homework?”
“For the next week, I want you to practice seeing. Every day, go somewhere public—a park, a coffee shop, anywhere there are people—and spend at least thirty minutes just watching. Not on your phone. Not processing. Watching. Seeing. Let people be real to you.”
“And then what?”
“And then you come back here, same time next week, and we’ll move to the next lesson.”
“Which is?”
Victor smiled. “Eye contact.”
Julian felt a small flutter of anxiety. Eye contact. That was already more than he had ever done—more than anyone did, in the city, where eye contact was an act of aggression or invitation or both.
“Is that... safe?”
Victor laughed. It was a kind laugh, not mocking. “Safe? No. Nothing real is safe. The app is safe—you can look at people without them knowing, you can reject them without facing them, you can live your whole life without ever risking anything. But safety is a trap. Safety is a prison. Real life is not safe.”
He put a hand on Julian’s shoulder. It was the first time they had touched. The contact was warm, brief, human.
“You want to be free? You have to give up safety. That’s the price. That’s always the price.”
Julian walked home slowly.
His phone was in his pocket. He did not take it out. He watched the people he passed—really watched them, the way Victor had taught him. A woman in a red coat, walking fast, late for something. A man with a guitar case, humming to himself. Two teenagers holding hands, laughing at a private joke.
They were real. They had been real all along, but he had never seen them. He had walked past thousands of people, tens of thousands, and had not seen a single one.
The weight in his chest was still there. But it felt different now—lighter, maybe. Or at least more bearable.
He had a week of homework. Thirty minutes a day of seeing. It seemed like nothing. It seemed like everything.
He went home. He did not open the app.
Julian did his homework.
Every day that week, he went to a different place—a coffee shop, the subway platform, a busy corner near his apartment—and sat for thirty minutes, watching. Seeing. It was harder than he expected. His hand kept reaching for his phone. His attention kept sliding away. But he persisted, and gradually something shifted.
He began to notice things he had never noticed before. The way people’s faces changed when they thought no one was watching. The small kindnesses—a door held open, a seat offered—that happened constantly, invisibly, all around him. The loneliness that so many people carried, visible in their posture, their eyes, the way they moved through space as if apologizing for existing.
He was not the only lonely person in the city. He was not even unusual. Loneliness was everywhere, a silent epidemic, and everyone was pretending it was not happening.
By the end of the week, he felt different. Not transformed—nothing so dramatic. But the weight in his chest had shifted. It was still there, but it was no longer the only thing. There was also curiosity, attention, the beginning of something like presence.
He went back to the park.
Victor was waiting, as before. He looked up when Julian approached and nodded.
“You did the homework.”
“How can you tell?”
“Your eyes are different. You’re actually looking at things. Most people walk around like sleepwalkers, their eyes open but not seeing. You’re awake now. Or starting to be.”
Julian sat down. “It was strange. I started noticing how lonely everyone is.”
“Yes. That’s what you see, when you really look. The loneliness. It’s everywhere. The apps promised to solve it, but they’ve made it worse. They’ve given us the illusion of connection while destroying the conditions that make real connection possible.”
“What conditions?”
“Presence. Risk. The willingness to be seen.” Victor turned to face him fully. “Which brings us to today’s lesson.”
I want to say something about the gaze.
In many cultures, eye contact is an act of aggression. To look directly at someone is to challenge them, to assert dominance, to threaten. In other cultures, avoiding eye contact is rude—a sign of dishonesty or disrespect. The rules vary, but the underlying truth is the same: the gaze is powerful. To look at someone is to do something to them.
In the city, we have developed a particular relationship with the gaze. We look at each other constantly—on the street, in the subway, in the coffee shop—but we do not see. Our eyes pass over faces without registering them. We have learned to look without looking, to see without seeing, to exist in public while remaining essentially private.
This is a defense mechanism. The city is overwhelming; there are too many people, too much stimulation. To actually see everyone would be exhausting. So we filter. We process. We reduce the humans around us to obstacles or backgrounds, objects to be navigated rather than subjects to be encountered.
But this defense mechanism has a cost. When we stop seeing others, we also stop being seen. We become invisible to each other—ghosts passing through the same space, occupying the same streets, but never truly present to one another.
Eye contact breaks this spell. To look someone in the eye is to acknowledge their existence, to say: I see you. You are real. You are here. It is a small thing, but it is also enormous. It is the beginning of presence, the first step toward connection.
“The rule is simple,” Victor said. “When you pass someone on the street, look at their face. Not past them. Not through them. At them. And if they look back, hold the gaze for a moment. Just a moment. Then let it go.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. It sounds easy. It is not easy.”
Julian thought about the thousands of people he had passed in his life, all the faces he had slid his eyes over without registering. The idea of actually looking at them—of meeting their gaze, even for a moment—made him anxious.
“What if they get angry?”
“Some will. Most won’t. Most people are so unused to being seen that they don’t know how to respond. They’ll look away, or they’ll look surprised, or they’ll smile. Occasionally someone will be hostile. That’s rare, but it happens.”
“And if they’re hostile?”
“Then you look away and keep walking. It’s not a confrontation. It’s not a challenge. It’s just acknowledgment. You’re saying: I see you. That’s all.”
They walked.
Victor led Julian through the park and out onto the streets, into the flow of the city. Julian had walked these streets hundreds of times, but never like this—never with the intention of looking at the people he passed, of actually seeing them.
“Start with glances,” Victor said. “Just look at faces. Don’t try to make eye contact yet. Just practice looking.”
Julian tried. He looked at the face of a woman walking toward him—middle-aged, tired, carrying grocery bags. She did not notice his glance; her eyes were fixed on some point in the middle distance, seeing nothing.
He looked at a young man in a suit, walking fast, probably late for something. The man’s face was tight with stress. He too did not notice Julian’s gaze.
He looked at an elderly woman with a small dog. She was looking at the dog, smiling at something it had done. Her face was soft, open, unguarded.
“Good,” Victor said. “Now try to catch someone’s eye. Not aggressively. Just be looking when they happen to look.”
Julian’s heart rate increased. This felt different—more exposing, more risky. To catch someone’s eye was to be caught yourself. It was mutual. It was contact.
He kept walking, kept looking at faces. And then—
A man about his age, walking toward him. Dark hair, leather jacket. Their eyes met.
Julian felt a jolt—electric, physical. The man’s eyes were brown, curious, alive. For a fraction of a second, they looked at each other. Two strangers, acknowledging each other’s existence.
Then the man looked away, and they passed each other, and it was over.
“How did that feel?” Victor asked.
Julian’s heart was still pounding. “Intense. Like—I don’t know. Like something happened.”
“Something did happen. You saw someone, and they saw you. That’s not nothing. That’s the beginning of everything.”
I want to say something about being seen.
We think we want to be seen. We curate our profiles, our photos, our carefully constructed online selves. We present ourselves to the world and wait to be noticed, validated, desired.
But being seen—actually seen, by another person, in the flesh—is terrifying. It strips away the curation. It exposes us. The person looking at us does not see our profile; they see us. Our face, our body, our presence. All the things we cannot control.
This is why we avoid eye contact. Not just to avoid seeing others, but to avoid being seen ourselves. The gaze goes both ways. To look is to be looked at. To see is to be seen.
Julian had spent years presenting himself through the app—choosing the right photos, crafting the right messages, constructing a version of himself that was optimized for attention. But that version was not him. It was a product, a brand, a set of data points designed to appeal to an algorithm and to the humans the algorithm served.
When the man in the leather jacket looked at him, he did not see Julian’s profile. He saw Julian. The actual Julian, unfiltered, unoptimized. And Julian saw him—the actual him, not a headless torso or a curated set of photos.
This is what the apps have taken from us. Not just the ability to see others, but the ability to be seen. They have taught us to present images instead of presence, data instead of selves. And we have forgotten that the real thing—the actual meeting of eyes, the mutual acknowledgment of existence—is possible.
They walked for an hour.
Julian practiced catching eyes—sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Most people did not look up, did not meet his gaze. But some did. A woman in a red coat who smiled slightly before looking away. A teenage boy who looked startled, then curious. An older man who nodded, a tiny gesture of acknowledgment.
Each contact was brief. None of them led anywhere. But each one was real—a moment of mutual presence, a small rupture in the fabric of urban anonymity.
“This is strange,” Julian said. “I’ve lived in this city for three years. I’ve walked these streets thousands of times. And I’ve never done this.”
“No one does anymore. It’s a lost skill. Like cursive writing or navigating by the stars—something humans used to do, before the machines took over.”
“Is that what this is about? Resisting the machines?”
Victor was quiet for a moment. They had stopped at a corner, waiting for the light to change.
“Partly,” he said. “But it’s more than that. The machines are a symptom, not the disease. The disease is disconnection—the idea that we can live our lives without being present to each other, without seeing and being seen, without the risk that comes with actual contact.”
“And eye contact fixes that?”
“It’s a start. It’s the first step. You can’t connect with someone you can’t see. And you can’t see someone without being seen yourself.” The light changed. They crossed. “The apps have broken this circuit. They let you look without being seen—you can scroll through profiles, evaluate people, judge them, reject them, and they never know. It feels safe. It feels powerful. But it’s actually a prison. You’re alone in there, locked in your own gaze, never meeting anyone else’s.”
At the end of the hour, they sat on a bench.
Julian felt strange—energized and exhausted at the same time. He had made eye contact with perhaps twenty people. Most of the contacts had lasted less than a second. And yet he felt as if he had done something significant, as if he had crossed a threshold he had not known existed.
“Homework,” Victor said.
“More eye contact?”
“More eye contact. Every day. Every time you leave your apartment, practice. Look at faces. Catch eyes. Hold the gaze for a moment, then let it go. Don’t try to start conversations. Don’t try to approach anyone. Just look. And be looked at.”
“And next week?”
“Next week we talk about the approach itself. How to turn eye contact into conversation. How to cross the distance between you and another person.” Victor paused. “But before we do that, I want to tell you something. About why I’m doing this. About what I’ve seen and what I’ve lost.”
“Okay.”
“Next week.” Victor stood up. “For now, practice. And Julian?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t open the app.”
Julian laughed—a short, surprised sound. He had not thought about the app in hours. It was still on his phone, still there, but it felt distant now. Less urgent. Less necessary.
“I’ll try.”
“Try hard. The app will pull you back. It’s designed to pull you back—to make you feel like you need it, like you can’t connect without it. But you can. You just have to remember how.”
That night, Julian lay in bed and did not open the app.
He thought about the faces he had seen that day. The woman in the red coat. The teenage boy. The man in the leather jacket whose eyes had met his for a fraction of a second. They were strangers—he would probably never see any of them again. And yet they were real. They had existed for him, and he had existed for them, in a way that no one on the app ever had.
The weight in his chest was still there. But it felt different. Softer. Less like a stone and more like an ache—the ache of something wanting to come alive.
He closed his eyes. He did not open the app.
They met at Victor’s apartment.
It was the first time Julian had been inside. The building was old, the hallway narrow, the stairs creaking under his feet. Victor’s door was on the fourth floor, painted green, with a small mezuzah on the frame that Julian did not recognize.
Inside, the apartment was small and full of books. Shelves on every wall, books stacked on tables and chairs and in corners on the floor. The furniture was old but clean. There were photographs on the walls—black-and-white images of young men, some alone, some in groups, all of them from another era.
“Sit,” Victor said. “Coffee?”
“Sure.”
Victor went to the kitchen. Julian looked at the photographs. The men in them were beautiful—not in the polished, filtered way of app profiles, but in a raw, unguarded way. They were smiling, laughing, holding each other. They looked alive.
“Friends,” Victor said, returning with two cups. “Most of them dead now.”
Julian did not know what to say.
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago. But I keep the pictures because I don’t want to forget. Because someone has to remember that they existed.”
He sat down across from Julian. The coffee was strong and bitter.
“You wanted to know why I’m doing this. Why I approached you in that park. Why I’m teaching you these things.”
“Yes.”
“Then I have to tell you a story. About the old days. About what cruising used to be. And about what we lost.”
I want to say something about history.
We think of history as the past—as something that happened before, that is finished, that we can study and learn from but not change. But history is also the present. The past lives in us, shapes us, determines what is possible. To understand the present, we must understand the past that produced it.
Julian had no history. He had been born in 2003, had come of age entirely within the world of the apps. He knew nothing of what came before—of the bars and the parks and the streets, of the codes and the signals and the dances that gay men had developed over decades to find each other.
This was not his fault. History had been stolen from him—not by conspiracy, but by the simple fact of technological change. The apps had arrived and everything that came before had been erased, as if it had never existed.
Victor was history. He was a living link to a world that had vanished. And he was trying, in his small way, to pass something on—to ensure that the knowledge did not die with him.
“I came out in 1978,” Victor said. “I was seventeen, a senior in high school. It was a different world. No internet, no apps, no gay-straight alliances. If you were gay, you were alone—or you had to find the others.”
“How did you find them?”
“I looked. I watched. I learned the signs.” Victor smiled. “There was a park near my school. I had heard rumors—things boys whispered to each other, half-disgusted and half-fascinated. I went there one afternoon, not knowing what I was looking for. And I saw two men sitting on a bench, close together, talking in low voices. Something about the way they held themselves, the way they looked at each other. I knew.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. I was terrified. I went back the next day, and the day after that. I watched. I learned. And eventually—weeks later—a man approached me. He was older, maybe thirty. He said hello. We talked. He told me about the bars, the clubs, the places where men like us could meet.”
“And you went?”
“I went. And my life changed.”
Victor talked for over an hour.
He talked about the bars—the Eagle, the Spike, the Mineshaft—places with names that meant nothing to Julian but everything to Victor. He talked about the codes: the handkerchief in the back pocket that signaled your desires, the single earring, the particular way of standing and walking and looking that marked you as one of the tribe.
He talked about cruising in the parks—the Ramble in Central Park, the piers on the West Side, the places where men gathered after dark to find each other. The danger, the excitement, the particular thrill of recognition when you caught someone’s eye and knew.
“It wasn’t just about sex,” Victor said. “Though there was plenty of that. It was about belonging. About having a world. About knowing there were others like you, and being able to find them.”
“And then AIDS.”
Victor’s face changed. The light in his eyes dimmed.
“And then AIDS.”
I want to say something about catastrophe.
We use words like “epidemic” and “crisis” to describe what happened in the 1980s. These words are accurate but insufficient. They do not capture what it felt like to watch your friends die, one after another, while the government did nothing, while the President refused to say the word, while hospitals turned patients away and families abandoned their sons.
Victor lived through this. He lost his lover, Martin, in 1987. He lost his best friend, David, in 1988. He lost more friends than he could count—young men, healthy men, men who should have lived for decades, all of them gone in the space of a few years.
And he survived. He did not know why. The virus passed him over, for reasons no one could explain. He was left standing in a graveyard, surrounded by ghosts.
This is part of Julian’s history too—part of the history he does not know. The apps arose in the aftermath of catastrophe, in a community that had been decimated, traumatized, transformed. They offered safety, control, the ability to choose without risk. After everything the community had been through, who could blame them for wanting that?
But safety has costs. And the safety the apps offered came at the price of everything that had made the community what it was.
“After the plague years,” Victor said, “everything changed. The bathhouses were closed. The bars started emptying out. People were afraid—of the disease, of each other, of themselves. And then the internet came.”
“And you used it?”
“Of course. Everyone did. Chat rooms, bulletin boards, personal ads. It was new and exciting—a way to meet people without going to the bars, without the risk of being seen.” He paused. “I didn’t understand what it was doing. Not at first. I thought it was just a new tool, a new way of doing the same thing we had always done.”
“But it wasn’t?”
“No. It was different in kind, not just in degree. The old ways required presence—you had to be there, in your body, in the same space as the other person. The internet let you be absent. You could cruise from your apartment, invisible, anonymous, safe.”
“That sounds good.”
“It felt good. It was good, in some ways. But it was also training us—training us not to need presence, not to need bodies, not to need all the skills we had developed over decades. By the time the apps arrived, we had already forgotten how to do it the old way.”
Victor stood up and went to the bookshelf. He pulled out a photograph album—worn, the cover faded—and brought it back to his chair.
“This is Martin,” he said, opening to a page. “This is us in 1984, three years before he died.”
Julian looked at the photograph. Two young men on a beach, arms around each other, squinting into the sun. Victor was recognizable—younger, darker-haired, but the same face. The other man—Martin—had curly hair and a wide smile.
“How did you meet?”
“On the street. Christopher Street, in the Village. I was walking, he was walking, our eyes met. I stopped. He stopped. We talked for an hour, standing on the sidewalk, and by the end of it I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That I was going to love him. That he was going to change my life.” Victor closed the album. “We were together for three years. Then he got sick, and six months later he was gone.”
Julian did not know what to say. The grief in Victor’s voice was old—decades old—but still present, still real.
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I. Every day, still.” Victor put the album aside. “But that’s not why I’m telling you this. I’m telling you because I want you to understand what the old ways could give you. Not just hookups. Not just sex. But love. Real love, the kind that changes your life, the kind that you carry with you forever.”
“And you can’t find that on the apps?”
“Can you?” Victor’s eyes met his. “You’ve been on them for years. Have you found it?”
Julian thought about the 847 matches, the 12 hookups, the zero relationships. The loneliness that never lifted no matter how many messages he sent.
“No.”
“No. Because love requires presence. It requires risk. It requires the possibility of being seen—really seen, by another person, in the flesh. The apps eliminate all of that. They give you control, safety, efficiency. But they cannot give you love.”
I want to say something about love.
Love is not a feeling. It is not a choice. It is a consequence—the consequence of presence, of attention, of the willingness to be seen by another person over time.
You cannot fall in love with a profile. You can fall in lust, in intrigue, in fascination. But love requires the accumulation of moments—the shared meals, the quiet evenings, the small acts of care that only happen when two people are actually present to each other.
The apps have optimized for lust. They have made it easy to find someone attractive, to arrange a meeting, to have sex. But they have made love harder—not easier—because they have disrupted the conditions that make love possible.
Victor met Martin on the street. They talked for an hour, standing on the sidewalk, getting to know each other in real time, with no filters, no curation, no algorithms. By the end of that conversation, something had begun—something that could not have begun on an app, because it required presence, required risk, required the willingness to stand on a sidewalk and talk to a stranger without knowing how it would end.
This is what Julian had never experienced. Not because he was incapable of love, but because he had never been in the conditions that make love possible.
“The apps took something from us,” Victor said. “Not just cruising. Not just the bars and the parks and the streets. They took the possibility of meeting someone the way I met Martin—by accident, by presence, by the willingness to stop and see who was in front of you.”
“But the apps are how people meet now.”
“I know. And some of them find love. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But it’s harder. It’s rarer. And for many people—people like you—it never happens at all.”
Julian felt the weight in his chest shift. Something was opening—a door he had not known was closed.
“So what do I do?”
“You learn. You practice. You remember what humans knew before the apps—how to approach, how to be present, how to risk rejection and survive it. And then you go out into the world and you try.”
“And if I fail?”
“You will fail. Many times. That’s part of it. The apps have taught you that failure is unacceptable—that you should only approach someone when you’re guaranteed success, when you’ve already matched, when rejection has been eliminated. But that’s not how life works. Life is full of failure. Love is full of failure. The only way to succeed is to be willing to fail.”
Victor stood up. He looked older now, more tired. The conversation had cost him something.
“Next week, we start the approach itself. The hardest part. But before we do, I want you to think about something.”
“What?”
“Why you want this. Not the loneliness—that’s just pain, and pain is not a reason. Why do you want to be free? Why do you want to be present? Why do you want to learn the old ways?”
“I don’t know.”
“Find out. Because the approach requires a reason. It requires wanting something more than safety, more than control. It requires wanting to be alive.”
Julian walked home slowly.
The city looked different to him now. The streets, the buildings, the people—all of it was layered with history he had not known existed. Men had cruised these streets for decades. They had found each other, loved each other, died. The world Victor described was invisible, vanished, but it had been real. It had happened here, in this city, on these same blocks.
He thought about Martin, about the photograph, about two young men on a beach who had no idea what was coming. He thought about Victor, living alone in his apartment full of books and photographs, carrying the memory of a world that no longer existed.
And he thought about himself. Twenty-three years old, 847 matches, no love. Lonely in ways he was only beginning to understand.
Why did he want this? Victor had asked him to think about it. The question was harder than it seemed.
He walked and he thought and he did not open the app.
They met at a coffee shop.
It was Victor’s choice—a place he had been coming to for years, one of the few remaining establishments that did not have Wi-Fi, where people still looked at each other instead of at screens. The tables were small and close together. The music was low. It was, Victor said, a good place to practice.
“Today you’re going to approach someone,” he said.
Julian’s stomach tightened. He had known this was coming—had known since the first day in the park that this was where the lessons were leading. But knowing and doing were different things.
“How?”
“Simply. You see someone you’re interested in. You catch their eye. And then you walk over and say hello.”
“Just... hello?”
“Just hello. That’s all it takes to start. The rest comes after—if it comes at all. But the beginning is always the same. You cross the distance. You say hello.”
Julian looked around the coffee shop. There were perhaps fifteen people—reading, talking, working on laptops despite the lack of Wi-Fi. Most of them were older, not his type, not anyone he would have swiped right on.
And then he saw him.
In the corner, alone, reading a book. Mid-twenties, dark hair, glasses. Attractive—not in an overwhelming way, but in a quiet, intelligent way. The kind of person Julian might have matched with on the app, might have exchanged messages with, might have eventually met or might not have.
“Him,” Julian said, nodding slightly.
Victor followed his gaze. “Good choice. Now watch him for a moment. See him.”
Julian watched. The man was absorbed in his book, turning pages slowly, occasionally sipping from a cup that was mostly empty. His posture was relaxed. He was alone but not lonely—or at least not visibly so. He looked like someone who was comfortable with himself.
“What do you see?” Victor asked.
“He’s... calm. Focused. He likes what he’s reading—you can tell by the way he’s holding the book, like it’s something precious.”
“Good. What else?”
“He hasn’t looked up in a while. He might not notice if I approach.”
“He’ll notice. Everyone notices when someone approaches. The question is how he’ll respond.”
I want to say something about courage.
We think of courage as the absence of fear—as if courageous people feel no anxiety, no doubt, no hesitation. But this is not what courage is. Courage is action in the presence of fear. It is doing the thing that frightens you, not because you’re not frightened, but because you’ve decided to do it anyway.
Julian was afraid. His heart was racing. His palms were sweating. Every instinct he had developed over five years of app use was screaming at him to stay seated, to take out his phone, to find this man’s profile and send a message instead of crossing the room.
But he had decided. He had decided when he closed the app in the park. He had decided when he came back to meet Victor. He had decided when he asked to be taught.
Courage is not feeling. It is decision.
“One more thing,” Victor said. “Before you go.”
“What?”
“He might say no. He might not be interested. He might be straight, or taken, or just not in the mood. If he says no—if he shows any sign that he doesn’t want to talk—you say ‘no problem,’ you smile, and you walk away. Cleanly. Without argument. Without lingering.”
“Okay.”
“This is important. The approach is not a demand. It is an offer. You are offering your presence, your attention, the possibility of connection. He is free to accept or decline. If he declines, you have lost nothing except a few seconds. You have not been diminished. You have not been rejected as a person. You have simply been told ‘not now, not me.’ That’s all.”
Julian nodded. He understood, intellectually. But he also knew that rejection would feel like more than that. It would feel like confirmation of his worst fears—that he was unwanted, unlovable, not enough.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Victor said. “That rejection will prove something about you. It won’t. It will prove something about that moment, that person, that circumstance. Nothing more.”
“How do you know what I’m thinking?”
“Because I thought the same thing, when I was learning. Everyone does. It’s the lie the apps have taught us—that rejection means something, that it reflects our worth, that it can be avoided by swiping and matching and pre-screening. But it can’t be avoided. It can only be survived. And surviving it is how you learn that it’s survivable.”
Julian stood up.
His legs felt weak. The distance between his table and the corner where the man sat—maybe twenty feet—seemed enormous. He had walked farther than this thousands of times without thinking. But this was different. This was intentional. This was crossing a threshold.
He walked.
Each step felt deliberate, conscious. He was aware of his body in a way he rarely was—the movement of his legs, the swing of his arms, the expression on his face. He tried to look calm. He did not know if he succeeded.
The man looked up when Julian was five feet away. His eyes were brown, curious, slightly wary. He did not smile, but he did not frown either. He waited.
Julian stopped beside the table. His heart was pounding so hard he thought the man must be able to hear it.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt. I just—I noticed you from across the room, and I wanted to say hello.”
The man’s expression shifted. Something flickered in his eyes—surprise, maybe, or discomfort. He glanced down at his book, then back at Julian.
“That’s... nice of you,” he said. His voice was polite but distant. “I’m actually waiting for someone, though.”
“Oh. Of course. Sorry to bother you.”
“No bother. Have a good day.”
Julian nodded. He smiled—or tried to. He turned and walked back to his table, his face burning, his heart still pounding, every nerve in his body screaming that he had failed, that he had made a fool of himself, that he should never have tried.
He sat down across from Victor.
“Well done,” Victor said.
I want to say something about failure.
We live in a culture that despises failure. We optimize, we iterate, we A/B test—all in the service of eliminating failure, of ensuring that every action produces the desired result. The apps are the apotheosis of this culture. They promise that if you do everything right—if you choose the right photos, write the right profile, send the right messages—you will succeed. Failure is treated as a bug, a mistake, something that should not have happened.
But failure is not a bug. It is a feature. It is how we learn, how we grow, how we discover what is possible and what is not. The person who never fails is the person who never tries—who stays within the safe boundaries of the known, who never risks anything, who never ventures into the territory where failure is possible.
Julian had failed. He had approached a stranger and been turned down. This was not a catastrophe. It was not proof of his unworthiness. It was simply the thing that happens when you try—the natural, inevitable, necessary consequence of putting yourself out there.
The question was not whether he would fail. He would. Everyone does. The question was whether he could fail and keep going.
“I failed,” Julian said.
“Did you?”
“He said no. He’s waiting for someone.”
“Yes. And? Are you injured? Are you diminished? Has something been taken from you?”
Julian thought about it. His heart rate was returning to normal. His face was still warm, but the burning had faded. He was still here, still sitting in this coffee shop, still alive.
“No,” he said. “I guess not.”
“You guess correctly. You approached someone. You were polite, direct, honest. He declined. You accepted the decline and walked away. That’s a complete interaction. That’s success.”
“It doesn’t feel like success.”
“No, it doesn’t. Not yet. Success feels like getting what you want—the number, the date, the connection. But that’s a narrow definition. Success is also trying. Success is also surviving the try. Success is proving to yourself that you can do the thing that frightens you.”
Victor leaned forward. “You have spent years on the apps. How many times have you approached someone in person?”
“Never.”
“And how many times have you been rejected?”
Julian thought about it. The unanswered messages. The matches that went nowhere. The hookups that never repeated. “Hundreds. Maybe thousands.”
“But those rejections were invisible. They happened in silence, in the dark, without acknowledgment. You were rejected, but you never had to face it. You could pretend it wasn’t happening, that the match just got busy, that the message got lost.”
“I guess.”
“This rejection was different. It was visible. It was public. You asked and he answered, and you had to stand there and receive the answer. And you survived. You’re still here. You’re still yourself.”
Julian sat with this. It was true. The rejection in person had been painful—more painful than the silent rejections of the app. But it had also been clean. It was over. There was no ambiguity, no waiting, no wondering. He had asked; he had been answered; he had moved on.
“Okay,” he said. “I see what you mean.”
“Good. Now do it again.”
Julian approached three more people that afternoon.
The second was a woman—a mistake, as it turned out. She was friendly but clearly not interested in men. “I’m flattered,” she said, laughing, “but you’re barking up the wrong tree.” They talked for a few minutes anyway, and she gave him her number—”for friendship,” she said. “You seem sweet.”
The third was another man, older, maybe forty. He was reading the newspaper, and he looked annoyed when Julian approached. “I’m not interested,” he said, before Julian could even finish his greeting. “I’m here to read.”
The fourth was different.
He was sitting near the window, looking out at the street. Late twenties, blond, a face that looked like it smiled easily even though it wasn’t smiling now. When Julian approached, he looked up with curiosity rather than wariness.
“Hi,” Julian said.
“Hi.”
“I’m Julian. I wanted to come say hello.”
The man smiled—a real smile, warm and open. “I’m Tom. That’s brave of you.”
“Brave?”
“Nobody does that anymore. Approaches people. Everyone’s on their phones.”
“I’m... trying to learn.”
Tom laughed. “Trying to learn to approach people? That’s kind of adorable.” He gestured at the empty chair across from him. “Want to sit?”
Julian sat. His heart was still pounding, but differently now—not with fear, but with something closer to excitement.
They talked for twenty minutes. Tom was a graphic designer, originally from Ohio, living in the city for three years. He was easy to talk to—curious, funny, not taking himself too seriously. When Julian finally stood up to leave, Tom said: “Give me your number. We should get a drink sometime.”
Julian gave him his number. His actual number, not a dating app handle, not a social media account. A phone number, the old-fashioned way.
He walked back to Victor’s table feeling like he was floating.
“You see?” Victor said. “That’s how it happens. Not every time. Not even most times. But sometimes. You approach, you’re present, you’re honest—and sometimes, someone says yes.”
“I got his number.”
“I know. I was watching.” Victor smiled. “How do you feel?”
Julian thought about it. The weight in his chest was still there, but it was lighter. Something had shifted—not because Tom had said yes, but because Julian had tried. He had crossed the distance. He had risked rejection. He had survived one failure and been rewarded for another attempt.
“I feel... alive,” he said. “I feel like I did something real.”
“You did. That’s what the approach gives you. Not guaranteed success—nobody can give you that. But the experience of doing something real. Of being present. Of risking. That’s what the apps take away, and that’s what you’re getting back.”
I want to say something about aliveness.
We use the word casually—”I felt so alive”—as if it’s just another emotion, just another experience among many. But aliveness is not an emotion. It is the condition that makes emotions possible. It is presence, attention, the experience of being here, now, in this moment, rather than somewhere else.
The apps dull aliveness. They take us out of the present moment and into an endless scroll, an eternal comparison, a perpetual search for something better. They train us to be absent—to be always looking at our phones instead of at the world, always swiping instead of seeing, always somewhere else.
Julian had felt alive for the first time in months—maybe years. Not because Tom had said yes, but because Julian had been present. He had done something that required his full attention, his full self. He had risked and survived and been rewarded—not with success, but with aliveness.
This is what Victor was teaching him. Not technique. Not strategy. Not the “right way” to approach someone. But how to be present. How to risk. How to be alive.
They left the coffee shop as the sun was setting.
“You did well today,” Victor said. “Better than I expected.”
“I was terrified.”
“Of course you were. That’s the point. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s action in spite of fear.”
They stood on the sidewalk, people flowing past them, the city loud and alive around them.
“Next week,” Victor said, “we go deeper. We talk about what the apps really are—not just how they work, but what they’re doing to us. Why they make us lonely. Why they capture us. And how to resist.”
“The political stuff.”
“The political stuff.” Victor smiled. “You’re not just learning a skill, Julian. You’re learning a form of resistance. Every unmediated encounter is an act of defiance. Every approach that leaves no trace in a database is a small rebellion against a system that wants to log and quantify and own every aspect of our lives—including our desire.”
Julian had not thought of it this way. But as Victor said it, he recognized the truth of it. The app was not neutral. It was not just a tool. It was a system—a system that had shaped his behavior, his expectations, his sense of what was possible. And he was beginning to escape it.
“I’ll see you next week,” he said.
“See you next week. And Julian?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t forget to call Tom.”
Julian laughed. He watched Victor walk away down the street, an old man in a city that had forgotten people like him existed. And he took out his phone—not to open the app, but to save Tom’s number.
He would call. He would see where it led. And whatever happened, he would have done something real.
Julian called Tom.
They met for drinks that Thursday at a bar Tom liked, a place with exposed brick and dim lighting and no particular theme. They talked for three hours. Tom was easy to be with—interested, interesting, the kind of person who asked questions and actually listened to the answers.
At the end of the night, they kissed on the sidewalk outside the bar. It was brief and tentative and left Julian wanting more.
“I had a good time,” Tom said.
“Me too.”
“Let’s do this again.”
They did. The next week, and the week after that. Julian found himself thinking about Tom at odd moments—while working, while walking, while lying in bed not sleeping. It was not love, not yet. But it was something. It was the beginning of something.
And in between, he kept meeting Victor.
They met at Victor’s apartment again.
It was raining outside, the windows streaked with water, the room dim despite the lamps. Victor had made tea this time—something herbal, unfamiliar, warming.
“Today we talk about the machine,” Victor said.
“The apps?”
“The apps are part of it. But they’re not the whole thing. They’re a symptom, or maybe an instrument. The machine is bigger than any single app.”
Julian waited. Victor gathered his thoughts.
“Let me ask you something. When you use the app—when you swipe, when you message, when you arrange to meet someone—where does that information go?”
“To... the company, I guess. The servers.”
“Yes. Every swipe you make, every message you send, every photo you upload—all of it is stored. Your location when you open the app. The time of day. How long you look at each profile. Which profiles you look at twice. All of it, recorded and stored, forever.”
“I know. It’s in the terms of service.”
“And what do they do with it?”
Julian shrugged. “Target ads, I guess. The usual stuff.”
“The usual stuff.” Victor’s voice was flat. “Let me tell you what the usual stuff means.”
I want to say something about capture.
We use the word “capture” casually—to capture a moment, to capture someone’s attention. But there is a darker meaning. To capture is to take possession. To capture is to remove freedom. To capture is to make something or someone subject to your control.
The apps capture us. Not metaphorically—literally. Every interaction we have through them is recorded, analyzed, owned. Our desires become data. Our connections become products. Our most intimate impulses are transformed into information that can be sold, shared, used against us.
This is not paranoia. This is the business model. The apps do not make money by helping us find love. They make money by capturing our attention, our data, our desire, and selling access to it. We are not the customers. We are the product.
Julian knew this, in an abstract way. Everyone knows it. But knowing and understanding are different things. Victor was about to make him understand.
“In 2018,” Victor said, “Grindr was caught sharing users’ HIV status with third-party companies. Not anonymized. Not aggregated. Individual users’ HIV status, linked to their identities.”
Julian felt something cold in his stomach. “I didn’t know that.”
“Most people don’t. It was news for a day, maybe two. There was outrage, statements, promises to do better. And then everyone went back to using the app.”
“What else?”
“In 2021, a Catholic priest in the United States was outed because his location data—captured by Grindr—was purchased by a newsletter and used to track his movements. They could see which bars he went to, which bathhouses, which homes. His whole life, laid out in data points.”
“Jesus.”
“In Egypt, police use Grindr to find and arrest gay men. They create fake profiles, arrange to meet someone, and then arrest them. The men are tortured, imprisoned, sometimes killed. The app provides the location data that makes it possible.”
“But that’s—that’s different. That’s a repressive country.”
“Is it so different?” Victor leaned forward. “The data exists. It’s captured, it’s stored, it’s owned by the company. What they do with it depends on who asks and how much they’re willing to pay. Today it’s targeted ads. Tomorrow it’s insurance companies deciding your rates based on your sexual behavior. The day after, it’s a government that’s decided gay people are enemies of the state.”
“That wouldn’t happen here.”
“History is full of things that would never happen here.”
I want to say something about surveillance.
We think of surveillance as something done by governments, by police, by authoritarian regimes. We imagine cameras on street corners, agents listening to our calls, the apparatus of the state watching our every move.
But the most comprehensive surveillance system ever created was not built by any government. It was built by corporations, with our willing participation. We carry the devices that track us. We download the apps that capture us. We consent, with every click, to terms of service that grant total access to our lives.
The apps know more about us than any government surveillance program could ever learn. They know our desires, our fantasies, our secret selves. They know who we want and what we’re willing to do to get it. They know us at our most vulnerable, our most human, our most free.
And they own it all.
“Let me paint you a picture,” Victor said. “You open the app. You’re at home, it’s late, you’re lonely. You start scrolling.”
“Okay.”
“The app knows it’s late. The app knows you’re at home—it has your location. The app knows you’ve been scrolling for twenty minutes without messaging anyone. It knows you’re lonely, even if you don’t admit it to yourself.”
“That’s just... algorithms.”
“Yes. Algorithms that learn you, that model you, that predict what you’ll do before you do it. The app knows which profiles will keep you scrolling. It knows which messages will keep you checking. It’s not trying to help you find love. It’s trying to keep you engaged—to maximize the time you spend staring at the screen, generating data, looking at ads.”
Julian thought about his own behavior. The hours spent scrolling. The compulsive checking. The way the app seemed to know exactly how to keep him coming back.
“But if I find someone—”
“If you find someone, you might leave the app. You might be happy. You might stop generating data.” Victor’s eyes were hard. “The app is not designed to help you find someone. It’s designed to keep you looking.”
The rain continued outside. Julian felt something shifting in his chest—not the weight he had carried for years, but something new. Something that might have been anger.
“I didn’t know any of this.”
“Most people don’t. Or they know and they don’t think about it. Because thinking about it is uncomfortable, and the app is convenient, and everyone else is using it, and what choice do you have?”
“What choice do I have?”
Victor smiled. “That’s the question, isn’t it? The question everyone asks. What choice do I have?—as if choice is something given to us, something we wait to receive. But choice is not given. Choice is taken. Choice is made, in the face of pressure to not choose, to go along, to accept the terms that have been set for us.”
“But I can’t just... not use apps. That’s how everyone meets now.”
“Is it? Or is that what the apps have taught us to believe? There were millions of years of human connection before the apps existed. People met, they fell in love, they built lives together. They did it without profiles, without algorithms, without giving their intimate data to corporations.”
“That was different. The world was different.”
“The world was different. But human beings are the same. We still have bodies. We still have eyes. We still have the capacity to see each other, to approach each other, to speak to each other. The apps have made us forget, but they haven’t taken it away. Not yet.”
I want to say something about freedom.
Freedom is not the absence of constraints. Freedom is the capacity to act—to choose, to decide, to make something happen that would not have happened without you. Freedom is always freedom to do something, not just freedom from something.
The apps constrain us. They limit our choices, shape our behavior, capture our data. But they also offer us something: convenience, efficiency, the illusion of control. We accept the constraints because the offer seems good. We trade our freedom for a service.
But the trade is not what it seems. The convenience is engineered to be addictive. The efficiency serves the app, not us. The control is illusory—we feel like we’re choosing, but our choices have been pre-structured, our options have been filtered, our desires have been shaped by algorithms we cannot see.
True freedom—the freedom Victor was pointing toward—requires refusing this trade. It requires accepting inconvenience, inefficiency, the loss of the illusory control. It requires doing things the hard way, the human way, the way that leaves no trace in any database.
This is not easy. This is not comfortable. But it is free.
“Let me tell you about the alternative,” Victor said.
“The old ways?”
“The old ways. But not just nostalgia—the principles behind them. The reasons they worked.”
He stood up and went to the window, watching the rain.
“When you approach someone on the street, when you catch their eye and walk over and say hello—nothing is recorded. No server knows. No algorithm learns. The encounter belongs to you and to them, and when it ends, it vanishes. It exists only in memory.”
“That sounds... lonely. Like it doesn’t matter.”
“Does it? Or does it sound like freedom?” Victor turned back to face him. “The app promises that everything matters—that every swipe is recorded, every match is logged, every interaction is saved forever. But what does that actually give you? Does it make the connections more meaningful? Or does it make them less—because they’re not yours, because they’re owned by someone else, because they exist in a database rather than in your heart?”
Julian did not have an answer. He was thinking about Tom—about the kiss on the sidewalk, about the conversations they’d had, about the something that was beginning between them. None of that would have happened through the app. All of it had happened in the world, in person, in the spaces that no algorithm could see.
“I’m not telling you to never use the apps again,” Victor said. “I’m not naive. They’re part of the world we live in. But I am telling you that there’s an alternative. That you don’t have to be captured. That you can choose—actively choose—to do things differently.”
I want to say something about resistance.
We think of resistance as grand gestures—protests, revolutions, the overthrow of systems. But resistance is also small. It is daily. It is the accumulation of tiny choices to not comply, to not participate, to not be captured.
Every time Julian approached someone in person rather than through the app, he was resisting. Every time he made eye contact with a stranger, he was resisting. Every time he had a conversation that left no digital trace, he was resisting.
This resistance would not overthrow the system. It would not put Grindr out of business. It would not change the fundamental dynamics of surveillance capitalism. But it would keep a space open—a space where human connection was still possible, where desire was still free, where the machine could not see.
This is what Victor was teaching. Not how to win, but how to stay human while losing. Not how to defeat the machine, but how to remain free inside it.
“There’s one more thing,” Victor said.
“What?”
“The people who designed these systems—the apps, the algorithms, the capture mechanisms—they know what they’re doing. They know they’re manipulating you. They know they’re exploiting your loneliness, your desire, your need for connection. And they do it anyway, because it makes money.”
“That’s just... capitalism.”
“Yes. Just capitalism. As if that explains anything. As if that makes it acceptable.” Victor’s voice was harder now, angrier. “The system is not neutral. It is not inevitable. It was built by people who made choices, and it can be unmade by people who make different choices.”
“But I’m just one person.”
“Every movement starts with one person. Every change begins with someone deciding to do things differently. You are not going to overthrow surveillance capitalism by approaching strangers in coffee shops. But you are going to stay human. You are going to keep the old ways alive. And maybe—just maybe—you’ll teach someone else what you’ve learned.”
Julian thought about this. He thought about the weeks since he’d met Victor—the eye contact, the approaches, the failures and successes. He thought about Tom. He thought about the weight in his chest, which was still there but lighter, transformed.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m in.”
“Good.” Victor smiled. “Because next week, we go to a bar.”
The bar was called The Phoenix.
It had been there since 1982, Victor said—one of the last survivors from the old days. Most of the bars from that era were gone now, closed or converted into condos or upscale restaurants. The Phoenix endured, though it had changed. The clientele was older, the crowd thinner. On weeknights, you could count the patrons on two hands.
“This used to be packed,” Victor said, as they walked in. “Every night, wall to wall. You couldn’t move without touching someone.”
Julian looked around. The space was larger than he expected—a long bar along one wall, tables scattered through the room, a small dance floor in the back that looked like it hadn’t been used in years. The lighting was low, the music something vaguely disco that seemed to come from another century.
There were perhaps fifteen people inside. Most of them were Victor’s age or older. A few were younger, but they were clustered in a corner, looking at their phones.
“Now look at them,” Victor said, nodding toward the young men in the corner. “They came to a bar—an actual physical space—and they’re still on the apps.”
“Maybe they’re finding people to meet here.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they’ve forgotten how to be anywhere without the app. Maybe being physically present isn’t enough anymore.”
I want to say something about places.
Human beings are spatial creatures. We exist in physical space, and our relationships are shaped by the spaces we inhabit. For millennia, people met in particular places—the village square, the marketplace, the church, the bar. These places were not just backdrops for human interaction; they were conditions for it. They brought people together, put them in proximity, created the circumstances where connection was possible.
The apps have changed this. They have made place irrelevant—or seem to. You can meet someone from anywhere, without going anywhere. The stranger in your bed might live across the city or across the country; the app has collapsed the distance.
But something is lost when place becomes irrelevant. The chance encounter disappears. The unexpected connection—the person you would never have swiped right on, but who catches your eye across a crowded room—becomes impossible. The bars and the parks and the streets, the places where gay men found each other for decades, become unnecessary.
Victor had brought Julian to The Phoenix because place still mattered. Because being here, in this room, with these people, was different from being anywhere, alone, with a phone. Because presence required a place—a there to be present in.
They sat at the bar. Victor ordered whiskey; Julian, a beer. The bartender was a man in his sixties with a weathered face and kind eyes.
“Victor,” he said, nodding. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Been busy. Marcus, this is Julian. He’s learning.”
“Learning what?”
“The old ways.”
Marcus looked at Julian with new interest. “That so? Not many of your generation interested in that.”
“I’m trying,” Julian said.
“Good.” Marcus poured the drinks and slid them across the bar. “This place could use some new blood. Some nights I think I’m running a hospice, not a bar.”
Julian looked around again. The men at the tables, most of them alone, nursing drinks, watching the door as if expecting someone who would never arrive. They looked like Victor had described himself—survivors, ghosts, the last remnants of a world that had vanished.
“It’s sad,” he said.
“It’s what happens,” Victor said. “The community ages. The young people don’t come. The bars close one by one. Eventually this one will close too.”
“And then what?”
“Then nothing. Then the old ways are gone, really gone, with no place left to remember them.”
A man approached them.
He was perhaps fifty, broad-shouldered, with silver hair and a face that had been handsome once and still carried the bones of it. He stopped beside Victor and nodded.
“Victor.”
“Paul.”
“Didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Julian wanted to see what a gay bar looked like. The real thing, not the branded chain establishments that pretend to be bars.”
Paul looked at Julian. His gaze was direct, appraising—the kind of look Julian had learned to recognize as cruising. “He’s young.”
“He’s learning.”
“Learning what?”
“What you and I used to know. What everyone used to know.”
Paul smiled—a small, sardonic smile. “Is there a point? The apps won.”
“The apps won the war. But there are still battles. Small ones. Worth fighting.”
Paul considered this. Then he looked at Julian again. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Twenty-three. Jesus.” He shook his head. “When I was twenty-three, this place was packed every night. Men three deep at the bar. You couldn’t walk to the bathroom without someone trying to catch your eye.”
“What happened?”
“The apps happened. The internet happened. Everyone decided it was easier to stay home and scroll than to put on clothes and come out.” He gestured around the room. “This is what’s left. The diehards. The ones who can’t let go.”
“Or the ones who remember what was good about it,” Victor said.
“Same thing, isn’t it?”
I want to say something about dying.
Everything dies. People die. Places die. Communities die. This is not tragedy; it is the nature of things. The tragedy is not death but forgetting—the erasure of what existed, the loss of memory, the pretense that what is gone was never real.
The Phoenix was dying. Julian could feel it—the emptiness, the age, the sense of an ending. Someday, probably soon, it would close its doors for the last time, and the building would become something else, and no one would remember that men had gathered here, had found each other here, had loved and lost and fought and survived here.
But for now, it was still alive. For now, there were still men at the bar and music on the speakers and drinks being poured. For now, it was still a place where the old ways could be practiced, could be taught, could be passed on.
Victor had brought Julian here for this. Not to mourn, but to witness. To see what was being lost, and in seeing it, to keep some part of it alive.
“Show me how it worked,” Julian said.
“What?”
“The old way. In here. How did you do it?”
Victor smiled. “You want a demonstration?”
“If you’re willing.”
Victor looked around the room. His eyes moved from face to face, assessing, evaluating—but not the way the app did. He was looking for something specific. A signal. A willingness.
“There,” he said. “The man at the table by the window. Don’t look directly.”
Julian glanced sideways. The man was perhaps sixty, distinguished-looking, sitting alone with a glass of red wine.
“Watch,” Victor said.
He stood up from the bar and walked across the room. Not directly—he took an angled path, stopping to look at the jukebox, making his approach seem casual. When he reached the table, he did not sit down. He stood nearby, half-turned toward the man, and said something Julian could not hear.
The man looked up. He smiled. He gestured at the empty chair across from him.
Victor sat down.
Julian watched them talk. He could not hear the conversation, but he could see the body language—the leaning in, the eye contact, the small gestures of interest and engagement. Two men, meeting the old way, in a place that existed for this purpose.
After ten minutes, Victor stood up. He shook the man’s hand, said something that made him laugh, and walked back to the bar.
“That’s how it’s done,” he said.
“What did you say?”
“I asked if the seat was taken. He said no. I introduced myself. We talked.” Victor shrugged. “That’s all. No app. No profile. Just two people, in the same place, deciding to talk to each other.”
“Did you get his number?”
“He gave me his card. We might have dinner next week.” Victor smiled. “I’m sixty-two, Julian. I’ve been doing this for forty years. It still works. It will always work, as long as there are people willing to try.”
Julian spent the next hour practicing.
He approached three men—one politely declined, one was not interested in men his age, one turned out to be straight and at the bar with a gay friend. None of the approaches led anywhere. But each one felt meaningful—a small act of presence, a brief connection, a moment of being seen and seeing.
“You’re getting better,” Victor said, as they left the bar.
“It still feels awkward.”
“It always feels awkward. That’s not the point. The point is doing it anyway.”
They walked in silence for a while. The city was different at night—softer, quieter, the crowds thinned out, the streets belong to a different population.
“Thank you,” Julian said.
“For what?”
“For showing me this. The bar, the old ways, all of it. I didn’t know any of this existed.”
“It exists. It’s dying, but it exists. And now you know. And maybe you’ll tell someone else. And maybe they’ll tell someone else. That’s how things survive—not by never changing, but by being passed on.”
I want to say something about transmission.
We are all links in a chain. The knowledge we have, the skills we possess, the ways of being that make us who we are—all of these were transmitted to us by someone else. Our parents, our teachers, our mentors, the strangers who showed us how to do things we did not know how to do.
Victor was transmitting something to Julian. Not just technique—not just how to make eye contact or approach a stranger. He was transmitting a way of being. A way of being present. A way of being free.
This transmission was not guaranteed. Most knowledge dies with those who possess it—dies because it is never passed on, because no one asks to learn, because the chain is broken. The old ways were dying because the young were not learning them. Victor had almost given up hope.
But Julian had asked. Julian had wanted to learn. And so the chain continued, at least for one more link.
This is how things survive. Not by being preserved in amber, unchanging, dead. But by being passed on, transformed, kept alive in the hands and eyes and bodies of the next generation.
“One more thing,” Victor said, as they reached the corner where they would part.
“Yes?”
“The apps will try to pull you back. They’re designed to. When you’re lonely, when you’re tired, when you’ve had a bad day—the app will be there, promising easy connection, promising that you don’t have to do the hard work anymore.”
“I know.”
“And sometimes you’ll use it. Sometimes you’ll give in. That’s okay. I’m not asking you to be a monk. I’m asking you to know what you’re doing when you do it. To choose consciously, not automatically. To remember that there’s another way.”
“I’ll remember.”
“Good.” Victor put a hand on Julian’s shoulder. “You’re doing well. Better than I expected. You have something—a willingness to try, a willingness to be present. That’s rare now. Hold onto it.”
They parted. Julian walked home through the night city, thinking about the bar, about Victor, about the chain of transmission that had stretched back forty years and now, somehow, included him.
He did not open the app.
It happened on a Wednesday night.
Tom had canceled their plans—work emergency, he said, couldn’t be helped. Julian understood. He said the right things. It was fine.
But it wasn’t fine. He was alone in his apartment, and the evening stretched out before him empty, and the weight in his chest—which had been lighter lately, manageable—suddenly felt heavier than it had in weeks.
He tried to read. He couldn’t focus. He tried to watch something. Nothing held his attention. He thought about going out—to the coffee shop, to The Phoenix, anywhere—but the thought of walking into a place alone, of having to summon the energy to approach strangers, exhausted him before he started.
His phone was on the table. The app was still there—he had never deleted it. He had just stopped opening it. But it was there, waiting, the little icon that promised easy connection, promised that he didn’t have to do any of the hard work, promised that someone was just a swipe away.
He opened the app.
I want to say something about addiction.
We use the word loosely—addicted to coffee, addicted to a TV show, addicted to checking email. But addiction is not a metaphor. It is a pattern of behavior that continues despite causing harm, driven by compulsions that override rational choice.
The apps are designed to be addictive. This is not an accident. The people who build them study addiction, model it, engineer their products to exploit it. Variable reinforcement schedules, the same mechanisms that keep gamblers pulling slot machines. Social validation hooks, the same drives that make people check their phones hundreds of times a day. The careful optimization of every notification, every nudge, every feature to maximize engagement.
Julian had been clean—not the right word, but close—for weeks. He had felt the pull of the app, the urge to check, the compulsion to scroll. But he had resisted. He had replaced the addiction with something else: the practice Victor was teaching him, the small daily disciplines of presence.
But addiction does not disappear. It waits. It watches for weakness—for the lonely night, the canceled plan, the moment when willpower is low and the promise of easy relief is strongest.
Julian’s relapse was not a failure of character. It was the normal trajectory of addiction recovery. The question was not whether he would relapse, but what he would do after.
The grid loaded. Faces and torsos, arranged by distance. The nearest was 127 feet away. Then 203 feet. Then 315 feet.
Julian started scrolling.
The motion was automatic, thoughtless. His thumb swiped up, and the grid refreshed, and new faces appeared, and his thumb swiped again. He was not really looking—not the way Victor had taught him to look. He was processing. Evaluating. Sorting.
Within minutes, he was deep in the scroll—that particular trance state where time disappears and nothing exists except the endless stream of images. He messaged a few people. Received a few messages. Started conversations that went nowhere, that followed the familiar script:
Hey.
Hey.
What’s up?
Not much. You?
Just hanging out. Looking for?
Whatever.
The emptiness of it. The meaninglessness. He had done this thousands of times, and it had never led anywhere—or rather, it had led to hookups that left him feeling worse than before, to connections that dissolved as soon as they formed, to the perpetual promise that the next swipe, the next message, the next match would be different.
It was never different. It was always the same.
After an hour, he stopped.
He put the phone down and sat in the dark, breathing, trying to understand what had just happened. He felt worse than he had before—the loneliness more acute, the weight heavier. The app had promised relief, and it had delivered nothing except another hour of his life spent staring at a screen.
He thought about Victor. About what Victor would say if he knew. He thought about Tom, about the real connection they were building, and how different it felt from anything on the app.
He thought about the man he had been five weeks ago, before he met Victor in the park. That man had believed the app was the only way. That man had scrolled for hours every night, had measured his worth in matches and messages, had been slowly drowning without knowing it.
Julian was not that man anymore. Or rather, he was—he had just proven he was—but he was also becoming someone else. The relapse was not the end. It was a test.
He picked up his phone and deleted the app.
Not just closed it—deleted it. He watched the icon disappear, watched the phone ask if he was sure, tapped yes. Gone.
He could always download it again. The app would be there, waiting, whenever he wanted it. But for now, it was gone. For now, the temptation was one step further away.
I want to say something about quitting.
We think of quitting as a single moment—the decision to stop, the final cigarette, the last drink. But quitting is not a moment. It is a practice. It is something you do every day, every hour, every time the craving hits and you choose not to act on it.
Julian deleted the app. This was significant. But it was not the end of anything—it was a beginning. Tomorrow he would wake up and the craving would be there, and he would have to choose again. And the day after that. And the day after that.
The practice Victor was teaching him was a substitute for the addiction, but it was also something more. It was a positive practice—not just the absence of scrolling, but the presence of something else. Eye contact. Approach. Connection. The daily discipline of being present in the world.
This is how addiction is overcome. Not by willpower alone, but by replacement. By filling the space where the addiction lived with something better, something that gives what the addiction promised but could never deliver.
Julian called Victor the next morning.
“I relapsed,” he said.
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Because everyone relapses. It’s part of the process. The question is what you do next.”
“I deleted the app.”
“Good. That’s the right response. But you have to know—deleting it is not enough. The pull will still be there. The loneliness will still hit you. The app will still be one download away.”
“I know. I just... I wanted to tell you. I wanted someone to know.”
There was a pause on the line. Then Victor said: “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For telling me. For trusting me. That’s not nothing.” Another pause. “Come to the apartment this afternoon. There’s something I need to tell you.”
“What?”
“This afternoon. We’ll talk.”
Julian went to Victor’s apartment.
The door was open when he arrived—unusual. He knocked anyway, and Victor’s voice called him in.
Victor was sitting in his chair by the window, looking tired. There were papers on the table in front of him—medical papers, Julian realized, with dates and diagnoses he could not read.
“Sit down,” Victor said.
Julian sat.
“I’m sick,” Victor said. “I’ve been sick for a while. The doctors say I have perhaps a year, perhaps less.”
Julian felt something cold move through him. “Sick with what?”
“Does it matter? The details are boring. What matters is that I won’t be here forever. What matters is that I need to pass on what I know before I go.”
“That’s why you approached me. In the park.”
“Partly. I’ve been looking for someone to teach for years. Most young men aren’t interested. They think the apps are the only way. They don’t want to learn the old ways from an old man.” Victor smiled. “You were different. You were already unhappy. You were already looking for something else.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t. I didn’t tell you. I wanted you to learn because you wanted to learn, not because you felt sorry for me.” He gestured at the papers. “But now you need to know. Because the time is limited. Because I need to teach you everything I can, while I can.”
I want to say something about mortality.
We live as if we have forever. We postpone the important things, the difficult things, the things that require courage and presence. We tell ourselves there will be time—time to connect, time to love, time to live.
But there is not always time. The body fails. The breath stops. The consciousness that was you—that particular pattern, that unique perspective—ends, and does not resume.
Victor knew this. He had known it for months, had carried the knowledge with him as he sat in the park and watched Julian scroll. He had seen a young man drowning and had decided to try one more time—to pass on what he knew, to keep the chain unbroken, before the chain ended with him.
Julian understood now why Victor had approached him. It was not random kindness. It was urgency. It was a dying man trying to give away his treasures before the darkness came.
“What do you want me to do?” Julian asked.
“Keep learning. Keep practicing. And when I’m gone—when you know what I know—pass it on. Find someone else who’s drowning. Throw them a line. Teach them what I’ve taught you.”
“I’m not ready.”
“No one is ever ready. You do it anyway.” Victor leaned forward. “I didn’t wait until I was ready to teach you. I just started. You’ll do the same. You’ll find someone who needs what you have, and you’ll give it to them, and they’ll carry it forward.”
“What if I can’t?”
“You can. I’ve seen it in you. The willingness. The presence. The capacity to approach, to risk, to be free.” Victor’s eyes were bright, fierce. “You are the next link in the chain, Julian. I didn’t choose you at random. I chose you because I saw something in you. Don’t let me down.”
Julian did not know what to say. The weight in his chest was different now—not the loneliness he had carried for years, but something else. Something like purpose.
“I won’t,” he said. “I’ll try.”
“That’s all any of us can do. Try. Fail. Try again. Keep trying until the trying is done.”
They talked for hours.
Victor told him everything—the techniques, the signals, the philosophy. The history of cruising, from the parks of the seventies to the apps of today. The losses, the survivors, the community that had been and was now dying. He talked until his voice was hoarse, until the sun had set and the apartment was dark, until everything he knew had been poured out.
At the end, Julian stood to leave.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Don’t thank me. Just do it. Live it. Pass it on.”
“I will.”
He walked home through the night city. The app was gone from his phone. The pull was still there, would be there for a long time. But so was something else—the knowledge, the practice, the chain that now included him.
Victor was dying. The Phoenix was dying. The old ways were dying.
But not yet. Not completely. Not as long as someone remembered. Not as long as someone practiced. Not as long as the chain continued.
Julian would be that someone. He had promised. He would try.
Julian had dinner with Tom that Friday.
It was their fifth date—or sixth, depending on how you counted. Tom had cooked, which he did well, in the small apartment he rented in a neighborhood Julian had never been to before the apps were deleted from his phone.
They ate and talked and drank wine. Tom told stories about his work, about the clients who drove him crazy and the projects that kept him sane. Julian told stories about tech support, about the strange problems people had with their computers, about the loneliness of working from home.
“I’ve been thinking,” Tom said, as they were finishing the meal.
“About what?”
“About how we met. It was weird, you know? Nobody does that anymore.”
“Approaches strangers in coffee shops?”
“Yeah. I mean, I must have had a thousand conversations on apps. Probably met fifty guys in person from them. But I can’t remember any of them doing what you did. Just walking up and saying hello.”
Julian smiled. “I was terrified.”
“You didn’t look terrified.”
“I was. My heart was pounding. I was sure you were going to tell me to go away.”
“I thought about it.” Tom grinned. “For like half a second. But there was something about you—the way you just came over, no games, no pretense. It was refreshing.”
“My mentor taught me.”
“Your mentor?”
“Victor. The old man who’s been teaching me the old ways.”
Julian had mentioned Victor before, but only in passing. Now, with the wine loosening his tongue and the intimacy of the evening surrounding them, he told Tom everything. The meeting in the park. The lessons. The history. Victor’s illness.
Tom listened without interrupting. When Julian finished, he was quiet for a long moment.
“That’s beautiful,” he said. “And sad.”
“It’s both.”
“The chain of transmission. The dying art. An old man trying to pass on what he knows before he goes.” Tom reached across the table and took Julian’s hand. “I’m glad he found you. I’m glad you said yes.”
“Me too.”
I want to say something about intimacy.
We use the word to mean sex—”intimate relations,” the euphemism goes. But intimacy is not sex. Intimacy is closeness. It is the experience of being known by another person, of letting them see who you really are, without the filters and curations that we normally use to protect ourselves.
Sex can be intimate. It can also be the opposite of intimate—anonymous, disconnected, two bodies meeting without two selves meeting. The apps have made the second kind easy. They have made the first kind harder, because they have trained us to present images rather than selves, to optimize rather than reveal.
What Julian had with Tom was intimacy. Not just the physical attraction, not just the dinners and the dates. But the willingness to be seen—to tell the truth about who he was, how he felt, what he was learning. To let Tom know him, really know him, the way Victor had known Martin.
This was what the old ways made possible. Not guaranteed—nothing was guaranteed—but possible. The space for intimacy to develop. The conditions under which two people could actually see each other.
They went to bed together.
It was not their first time, but it felt different somehow. Slower. More present. Julian was aware of Tom’s body in a way he had not been before—the warmth of his skin, the sound of his breathing, the particular way he moved.
Afterward, they lay in the dark, not speaking.
“Can I ask you something?” Tom said.
“Anything.”
“Are we... is this... I mean, what are we doing here?”
Julian thought about it. The question was important—the kind of question that could not be answered casually, that deserved honesty.
“I don’t know exactly,” he said. “But I know I want to keep doing it. I know I feel something with you that I’ve never felt before. I know I want to see where this goes.”
“That’s a lot of ‘I don’t knows.’”
“I know. But it’s honest. I’m trying to be honest.”
Tom was quiet for a moment. Then he said: “I want to keep doing this too. I want to see where it goes. I’m scared—I’ve been hurt before, I don’t trust easily. But there’s something about you. The way you approached me. The way you’re learning from that old man. The way you’re trying to be present.” He paused. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”
“I’ve never been anyone like me. Victor is teaching me how to be someone I never knew I could be.”
“Then I’m grateful to him. And to you. For doing the work.”
They fell asleep tangled together.
In the morning, Julian woke early. He lay still, watching Tom breathe, thinking about the past weeks—the lessons, the approaches, the relapse, Victor’s revelation.
He had changed. Not completely, not permanently—change was never complete or permanent—but significantly. He was not the man who had scrolled for hours in the dark, who had measured his worth in matches, who had been drowning without knowing it.
He was someone who could approach a stranger. Someone who could survive rejection. Someone who could be present, could connect, could build something real.
And now he was here, in this bed, with this man, feeling something that might be the beginning of love.
I want to say something about love.
We have so many words for it—falling in love, being in love, making love—as if it’s something that happens to us, something we experience passively, something that arrives without our participation.
But love is not passive. Love is active. It is something we do, not something we feel. Or rather: the feeling follows the doing. We love by showing up. We love by being present. We love by the accumulated choices we make every day—to pay attention, to be honest, to stay.
Julian was not in love with Tom. Not yet. It was too early for that. But he was doing the things that might lead to love. He was showing up. He was being present. He was letting himself be seen.
This was what Victor had given him. Not love itself—no one can give that—but the capacity for it. The skills, the courage, the willingness to try.
Julian went to see Victor that afternoon.
Victor looked worse than he had the week before—thinner, more tired, his movements slower. But his eyes were still sharp, still curious, still present.
“How is Tom?” Victor asked.
“Good. It’s good.” Julian smiled. “I think something might be happening.”
“Something?”
“Something real. Something that might matter.”
Victor nodded. “That’s what it feels like. When it’s real. Different from anything on the apps.”
“Completely different.”
“Good.” Victor leaned back in his chair. “That’s what I wanted for you. Not just the techniques. Not just the philosophy. But the experience of something real. The proof that it’s still possible.”
“It’s possible. You made it possible.”
“No. I showed you the way. You did the walking.” Victor’s eyes were bright. “You’ll do the same for someone else, someday. You’ll find someone who’s drowning, and you’ll show them the way, and they’ll do the walking.”
“The chain.”
“The chain. It’s all we have. It’s how anything survives. Teacher to student. Hand to hand. Generation to generation.”
They talked for an hour—about Tom, about the practice, about the bar and the city and the slow dying of the old ways. Victor’s voice was weaker than it had been, but his mind was sharp. He was racing against time, trying to give Julian everything he had left.
At the end, Julian stood to leave.
“I’ll see you next week,” he said.
“I hope so.” Victor smiled. “But if not—if I’m not here—remember what I’ve taught you. Remember why it matters. And don’t forget to live. Don’t spend so much time thinking about the approach that you forget to actually approach. Don’t spend so much time being present that you forget to enjoy the presence.”
“I won’t forget.”
“Good. Now go. Tom is waiting. The real is waiting. Don’t keep it waiting.”
Julian walked to the door. He looked back at Victor—the old man in the chair, surrounded by books, surrounded by photographs of the dead, still trying, still teaching, still alive.
“Thank you,” Julian said. “For everything.”
“Go,” Victor said. “Live.”
Julian went.
Victor died on a Tuesday in November.
Julian found out from Marcus, the bartender at The Phoenix. Victor had listed Marcus as an emergency contact—one of the few people left who knew him, who would notice if he was gone. Marcus called Julian’s number, which Victor had given him “in case of emergency.”
“He went peacefully,” Marcus said. “In his sleep, they think. He’d been getting worse.”
Julian did not know what to say. He had known it was coming—Victor had told him, had prepared him. But knowing and experiencing were different things. The knowing was abstract; the experiencing was the phone call, the silence after Marcus hung up, the sudden absence where Victor had been.
He sat in his apartment for a long time, not moving.
I want to say something about death.
We treat it as an ending—as if the person who dies simply stops, as if everything they were and knew and loved stops with them. But death is not an ending. It is a transformation. What the person was—their body, their presence—ends. But what they gave—the knowledge, the love, the chain of transmission—continues.
Victor was dead. This was true. But Victor was also alive—in Julian, in the skills he had taught, in the approach that Julian would practice for the rest of his life. Death ends the person but not the gift. The gift continues, passed hand to hand, as long as anyone remembers.
Julian sat in his apartment and grieved. But he was also, without knowing it, becoming what Victor had wanted him to become—the next link, the continuation, the proof that the chain was not broken.
The memorial was at The Phoenix.
Marcus had organized it—had put up flyers, called the few people who still came to the bar, spread the word through the thinning network of survivors. A Tuesday evening, the bar closed to the public, the space reserved for those who had known Victor.
Julian arrived early. The bar was strange in the daylight, without the dim lighting and the music—just a room, aging and worn, full of chairs and tables and the smell of decades of drinks.
People began to arrive. Old men, mostly—Victor’s generation, the survivors. Paul was there, the man Victor had approached to demonstrate the old ways. Marcus stood behind the bar, not pouring drinks, just being present.
They told stories. Victor as a young man, cruising the piers. Victor in the plague years, holding friends as they died. Victor in the aftermath, rebuilding, trying to keep the old ways alive. Victor in the final years, watching the apps destroy everything he had known, never giving up, still approaching strangers in parks.
Julian listened. Some of the stories he knew; Victor had told him. Others were new—glimpses of a life that had been full and painful and brave.
When it was his turn to speak, Julian stood.
“I knew Victor for two months,” he said. “That’s nothing, compared to most of you. But in those two months, he changed my life.”
He told them about the park, about the lessons, about the approach. He told them about Tom, about the real connection that had grown from Victor’s teaching. He told them about the chain—the idea that knowledge was passed from teacher to student, generation to generation, and that Victor’s death did not end it.
“He wanted me to pass it on,” Julian said. “To find someone else who was drowning, and throw them a line. I don’t know if I’m ready. I don’t know if I can do what he did. But I’m going to try.”
The old men nodded. They understood. They had been where Julian was—young, taught by someone older, carrying the knowledge forward.
“To Victor,” Paul said, raising his glass.
“To Victor,” they echoed.
I want to say something about community.
We think of community as a place or a group—the gay community, the neighborhood community. But community is not a thing. It is a practice. It is the accumulated acts of showing up, of being present, of caring for each other across the distances that separate us.
The people in The Phoenix that evening were a community. Not because they all knew each other—some of them were meeting for the first time. But because they shared something: the memory of Victor, the experience of the old ways, the commitment to keeping the chain unbroken.
Julian was part of this community now. Not because of who he was, but because of what he was willing to do. He had received the gift, and he had committed to passing it on. That made him a link in the chain, a member of the community, a carrier of the flame.
After the memorial, Julian walked to Victor’s apartment.
The landlord had not yet changed the locks—there was no family to claim Victor’s things, no estate to administer. Julian let himself in with the key Victor had given him “in case of emergency.”
The apartment was the same as always—the books, the photographs, the chair by the window. But Victor was not in it, and the absence was enormous.
Julian sat in Victor’s chair. He looked at the photographs on the wall—Martin on the beach, the friends who had died, the world that had vanished. He thought about everything Victor had taught him, everything he had received, everything he was now responsible for.
On the table, there was an envelope with Julian’s name on it.
He opened it.
Julian,
If you’re reading this, I’m gone. Don’t grieve too long—I’ve lived a full life, and I’ve done what I came to do. You are what I came to do. You are my final gift to the world.
I want you to have the apartment. The rent is controlled; they can’t raise it much. Use it as a space for teaching, if you want. Invite people over. Show them the photographs. Tell them the stories. Keep the old ways alive.
The books are yours. The photographs are yours. Everything I have is yours—not because you earned it, but because you received it. You opened yourself to what I had to give. Most people don’t. You did.
I don’t have advice for you. You don’t need advice. You know what to do. You know how to see, how to approach, how to be present. You know the risks and the rewards. You know why it matters.
Just do it. Just live it. Just pass it on.
The chain continues. Thank you for being the next link.
Victor
Julian sat in the chair and cried.
I want to say something about inheritance.
We usually mean money, property, the material things that pass from the dead to the living. But the real inheritance is not material. It is the knowledge, the wisdom, the ways of being that the dead have accumulated and now give to those who survive them.
Victor had left Julian his apartment, his books, his photographs. But these were just containers for the real inheritance—the practices, the philosophy, the approach. The understanding of what it meant to be present, to be free, to be human in a world that was trying to make us all into data.
This inheritance was now Julian’s. Not to preserve, not to protect, but to use—to practice, to teach, to pass on. The inheritance was alive only as long as it was practiced. The moment it became merely remembered, it would begin to die.
Julian accepted the inheritance. He accepted the responsibility. He would carry the chain forward.
That night, Julian went to Tom’s apartment.
He told Tom about the memorial, about the letter, about the apartment that was now his. Tom listened, held him, let him grieve.
“What are you going to do?” Tom asked.
“What Victor asked. Keep practicing. Keep approaching. And eventually... teach someone else.”
“That’s a lot.”
“It is. But it’s also simple. It’s just what I’ve been doing. What I’ll keep doing. Living it, not just knowing it.”
Tom was quiet for a moment. Then he said: “I want to learn.”
“Learn what?”
“What Victor taught you. The approach. The old ways. You’ve told me about it, but I’ve never done it. I’ve never approached anyone in person.”
Julian looked at him. Tom—the man he had met by approaching, the man who had said yes, the man who was becoming someone Julian loved.
“You want me to teach you?”
“Yes. If you’re willing.”
Julian thought about Victor. About the chain. About the way knowledge passed from teacher to student, generation to generation.
“Okay,” he said. “Tomorrow. We’ll go to a coffee shop. I’ll show you.”
The chain continued. The inheritance was passed on. Victor was dead, but Victor was also alive—in Julian, in Tom, in whoever Tom would teach, in the endless succession of links stretching forward into a future Julian could not see but could, in this moment, begin to make possible.
They met at the coffee shop the next morning.
It was the same coffee shop where Julian had practiced his first approaches—the place without Wi-Fi, where people still looked at each other instead of at screens. Julian sat in the same seat Victor had sat in, and Tom sat across from him, nervous, uncertain, exactly as Julian had been three months ago.
“First we just watch,” Julian said. “We observe. We see people, instead of processing them.”
“What’s the difference?”
Julian smiled. It was the same question he had asked. “Processing is quick. It’s categorizing—man, woman, old, young, attractive, not. It’s what the apps have trained us to do. Seeing is slower. It’s actually looking at a person. Noticing the details. Imagining who they are.”
He pointed to a woman sitting near the window, reading a newspaper. “Tell me about her.”
Tom looked. “She’s... reading.”
“Yes. What else?”
Tom looked harder. “She’s not just reading. She’s frowning. Concentrating. Like she’s reading something difficult, something that requires her full attention.”
“Good. What else?”
“Her coffee is cold—she’s been here a while. She’s wearing a wedding ring. She keeps looking at her phone, but not picking it up. Like she’s waiting for a message that hasn’t come.”
“Good.” Julian nodded. “That’s seeing. You’re letting her be real to you, not just a category.”
Tom practiced for an hour. He watched the people in the coffee shop, described what he saw, learned to slow down and actually look. Julian guided him gently, the way Victor had guided him, asking questions, pushing deeper, teaching by attention rather than instruction.
I want to say something about teaching.
We think of teaching as transmission—the transfer of knowledge from one mind to another. But teaching is more than transmission. It is accompaniment. The teacher walks beside the student, pointing at things, asking questions, helping the student see what is already there.
Julian was not transmitting knowledge to Tom. He was helping Tom discover what he already knew—how to see, how to be present, how to approach. These capacities were not foreign to Tom. They were human capacities, buried under years of app use, waiting to be recovered.
This is what Victor had understood. The old ways were not skills to be acquired from outside. They were native capacities to be recovered from within. The teacher’s job was not to give the student something new, but to help the student remember something forgotten.
After the watching came the looking.
“Now,” Julian said, “we practice eye contact. When you pass someone on the street, look at their face. If they look back, hold the gaze for a moment. Just a moment. Then let it go.”
They walked. Julian led Tom through the neighborhood, past coffee shops and bodegas and construction sites. Tom practiced looking at faces, catching eyes, holding the brief contact that was the beginning of everything.
“This feels weird,” Tom said.
“It always feels weird at first. The apps have taught us not to look at each other. Looking feels like an intrusion, a violation. But it’s not. It’s acknowledgment. It’s saying: I see you. You’re real.”
“And if they get angry?”
“Some will. Most won’t. Most people are starving for acknowledgment. They want to be seen, even if they don’t know it.”
Tom tried. He looked at faces, caught eyes, received a range of responses—surprise, discomfort, smiles, blank stares. Each contact was brief, but each one was real.
“This is amazing,” Tom said, after an hour. “I’ve lived in this city for three years. I’ve never looked at anyone.”
“Neither had I. Not until Victor taught me.”
“And now you’re teaching me.”
“And now I’m teaching you. That’s how it works. The chain continues.”
I want to say something about chains.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. But a chain is also only as long as its final link. For a chain to continue, someone must always be adding new links—forging connections, passing on knowledge, ensuring that what has been received is not lost.
Julian was adding a link. By teaching Tom, he was extending the chain beyond himself—ensuring that even if Julian was hit by a bus tomorrow, the knowledge would continue. Victor had taught Julian. Julian was teaching Tom. Someday Tom would teach someone else.
This is how human knowledge survives. Not in books, not in databases, but in living practice—in the hands and eyes and bodies of people who have learned and are passing on what they know.
The next week, they practiced approach.
Julian took Tom back to the coffee shop and pointed out someone—a man about their age, sitting alone, looking up from his phone occasionally.
“Approach him,” Julian said.
Tom’s face went pale. “I can’t.”
“You can. It’s the same as eye contact, just one step further. You walk over. You say hello. You see what happens.”
“What if he rejects me?”
“He might. That’s part of it. Rejection is information, not catastrophe. You survive it and try again.”
Tom stood. He walked across the room—Julian could see his tension, his fear, the effort it took to cross that distance. He stopped beside the man’s table. He said something. The man looked up, surprised.
They talked for a few minutes. Julian could not hear what they were saying, but he could see the body language—the initial wariness, then relaxation, then something like interest. When Tom came back, he was smiling.
“He said yes.”
“Yes to what?”
“Coffee. Next week. He gave me his number.” Tom was practically glowing. “I did it. I actually did it.”
“You did it. How do you feel?”
“Terrified. Exhilarated. Alive.” Tom laughed. “Is this how you felt? When you approached me?”
“Exactly like that. It never stops feeling that way. You just learn to do it anyway.”
I want to say something about fear.
Fear is not the enemy. Fear is information. It tells us that something important is happening, that something is at stake. The goal is not to eliminate fear, but to act despite it.
Tom was afraid. Julian was still afraid, every time he approached. Victor had been afraid too—he had told Julian about the fear, about the way it never went away, no matter how many times you did it.
But they did it anyway. That was the point. Not fearlessness, but fear-plus-action. The willingness to move toward what frightened you, to risk what you had in the hope of getting something better.
This is courage. Not the absence of fear, but the presence of fear plus the decision to act anyway.
Over the following weeks, Tom practiced.
He approached people in coffee shops, in parks, on the street. Some said yes; most said no. He learned to survive rejection, to keep trying, to not take the no as a judgment on his worth. He learned to see, to be present, to approach.
And he and Julian grew closer. Not despite the practice, but because of it. The skills Julian was teaching—presence, attention, the willingness to be seen—were the same skills that made their relationship work. The practice was not separate from the love; it was the foundation for it.
“Thank you,” Tom said one evening, as they lay in bed.
“For what?”
“For teaching me. For being patient. For being who you are.”
“I’m just passing on what I received. Victor taught me. I’m teaching you. Someday you’ll teach someone else.”
“I hope so.” Tom was quiet for a moment. “I wish I’d met him. Victor.”
“You did, in a way. Everything I know came from him. When I teach you, he’s teaching you too. He’s still alive, in that sense. The chain continues.”
“The chain.” Tom smiled. “I like that. The idea that we’re all connected—past, present, future. That what we do now affects what comes after.”
“That’s the only immortality there is. Not living forever, but passing something on. Making something that outlasts you.”
I want to say something about continuity.
Nothing lasts forever. People die. Communities die. Civilizations die. But some things continue—the knowledge that passes from teacher to student, the love that passes from parent to child, the chain of transmission that connects us to the past and the future.
Julian was not immortal. Tom was not immortal. But the practice they were developing, the skills they were learning, the relationship they were building—these would outlast them. Tom would teach someone else. That someone would teach someone else. The chain would continue, link by link, into a future they would never see.
This is the only victory over death. Not avoiding it, but ensuring that something survives it. Making something that matters, and passing it on.
Six months after Victor’s death, Julian opened Victor’s apartment to the community.
He invited people from The Phoenix—the old-timers, the survivors—to come and see the photographs, hear the stories, remember what had been. He invited young men too—friends of friends, people he had met through the practice—to learn about the old ways, to see what cruising had been before the apps.
He stood in the apartment, surrounded by people, and told them about Victor. About the meeting in the park. About the lessons. About the chain.
“I’m not asking you to give up the apps,” he said. “I’m not naive. They’re part of the world we live in. But I am asking you to remember that there’s another way. That presence is possible. That real connection—unmediated, unlogged, free—is still available, if you’re willing to do the work.”
Some of them nodded. Some of them looked skeptical. One young man—barely twenty, nervous, drowning in exactly the way Julian had been drowning a year ago—raised his hand.
“Can you teach me?”
Julian smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I can teach you.”
The chain continued.
One year later.
Julian sat on a bench in the park—the same bench where he had met Victor, the same place where everything had begun. It was autumn again, the air crisp, the leaves turning. A year had passed, and everything had changed.
He was twenty-four now. He was living in Victor’s apartment, surrounded by books and photographs. He was with Tom—really with him, in a way he had never been with anyone. And he was teaching, passing on what he had learned, keeping the chain unbroken.
The young man beside him was named Daniel. He was twenty-two, fresh out of college, working a job he hated, scrolling through apps for hours every night. He was lonely in ways he could not name. He was drowning.
Julian had met him at The Phoenix, which was still open, still surviving. Daniel had come with a friend, had spent most of the night on his phone, had looked up only when Julian approached him.
“You’re not going to find what you’re looking for on that screen,” Julian had said—the same words Victor had said to him, a year ago.
Daniel had looked up, startled. “What?”
And they had started talking. And Daniel had asked to learn. And now here they were, on the bench, beginning.
“The first thing to understand,” Julian said, “is that the apps are not neutral. They’re not just tools. They’re systems that shape your behavior, capture your data, and profit from your loneliness.”
Daniel nodded. He had heard some of this, vaguely, but had never thought about it.
“The second thing is that there’s another way. An old way—the way people connected before the apps, before the internet, before any of this. It’s harder. It requires presence, risk, the willingness to be rejected. But it’s also more real. It leads somewhere the apps can’t take you.”
“Where?”
“To actual connection. To being seen. To freedom.”
I want to say something about endings.
Stories have endings—conclusions, resolutions, the moment when the narrative stops and the reader puts down the book. But life does not have endings, not really. Life has moments—points along a continuous thread, each one leading to the next, each one both an ending and a beginning.
This is not the end of Julian’s story. He will continue—practicing, teaching, loving Tom, growing older. He will face new challenges, new doubts, new opportunities to fail and to succeed. The practice will not end; it will continue, evolving, adapting, remaining alive only because it remains in use.
This is not the end of the old ways. They are dying, yes—the bars closing, the elders dying, the knowledge fading. But they are not dead. They are alive in Julian, in Tom, in Daniel, in everyone who has received the practice and is passing it on. They will continue, in some form, as long as someone remembers, as long as someone practices, as long as the chain remains unbroken.
Julian taught Daniel what Victor had taught him.
He taught him to see—to slow down, to observe, to let people be real. He taught him to make eye contact—to acknowledge others, to be acknowledged, to break the spell of urban anonymity. He taught him to approach—to cross the distance, to speak, to risk rejection and survive it.
Daniel was scared. He was awkward. He failed, more often than he succeeded. But he kept trying, and gradually he began to change—to become present, to be seen, to find his way back to something he had lost without knowing it.
“Thank you,” Daniel said, after one of their sessions. “I don’t know if I can do this. But thank you for trying.”
“You can do it. Everyone can. The apps have made us forget, but they haven’t changed who we are. We’re still human. We still have the capacity to connect, to be present, to be free.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I have to believe it. It’s the only thing that makes the practice worth anything.”
I want to say something about faith.
Not religious faith—not belief in gods or afterlives. But faith in the sense of trust. Trust that the practice matters. Trust that the chain will continue. Trust that even if you cannot see the results, even if the world is dark and getting darker, the small acts of presence and connection are worth doing.
Julian had faith. Not certainty—certainty is for machines. But faith. The willingness to act as if the practice mattered, even without proof that it did.
This is what Victor had given him. Not just the skills, not just the philosophy. But the faith that made the practice possible—the belief that human beings were worth saving, that presence was worth cultivating, that freedom was worth fighting for.
That evening, Julian went home to Tom.
They had been together for a year now—not without difficulty, not without conflict, but together. They had built something, in the spaces between work and sleep, in the accumulated moments of attention and care. It was not perfect. Nothing was perfect. But it was real.
“How was Daniel?” Tom asked.
“He’s learning. Slowly. He’s still scared.”
“Everyone is scared. That’s not the obstacle.”
“No. The obstacle is giving up. The obstacle is deciding it’s too hard, that the apps are easier, that presence is not worth the effort.”
“Will he give up?”
“I don’t know. Some do. Some don’t.” Julian sat down beside Tom. “All I can do is teach. What he does with it is up to him.”
Tom reached for his hand. “That’s all any of us can do. Teach what we know. Live what we believe. Hope the chain continues.”
“Hope.” Julian smiled. “That’s a funny word, coming from you.”
“You’ve changed me. Made me believe in things I used to dismiss as naive.”
“Things like what?”
“Like community. Like transmission. Like the idea that individuals can resist systems, even if they can’t defeat them.” Tom squeezed his hand. “Like love.”
I want to say something about love.
I have said much about it already—that it requires presence, that it requires risk, that it follows from the practice rather than preceding it. But there is one more thing to say.
Love is the point.
Not the skills. Not the philosophy. Not the resistance to systems or the preservation of the old ways. All of these are means. Love is the end—the reason for the practice, the thing that makes it worth doing.
Victor loved Martin. Julian loved Tom. These loves were not accidents. They were consequences—the natural results of presence, attention, the willingness to be seen. They were what happened when you practiced the approach and someone said yes.
The chain continues not because transmission is valuable in itself, but because transmission makes love possible. It passes on the conditions for connection. It keeps alive the practices that let human beings find each other.
This is what Victor gave Julian. This is what Julian is giving Daniel. This is what the chain carries, from link to link, across the generations: the possibility of love.
Later that night, Julian stood at the window of Victor’s apartment.
The city spread out below him—lights, streets, millions of people. Most of them were on their phones right now. Most of them were scrolling, swiping, searching for connection in the place that could not give it. Most of them were drowning.
But some of them were not. Some of them had learned another way. Some of them were out there, in the bars and the parks and the streets, practicing the approach, keeping the chain unbroken, proving that it was still possible to be human.
Julian did not know how many. He did not know if it was enough. He did not know if the old ways would survive another generation, or if they would finally die, forgotten, buried under the weight of apps and algorithms and the relentless optimization of human life.
But he knew what he would do. He would keep practicing. He would keep teaching. He would keep living as if it mattered, even when he was not sure it did.
This was the approach—not just the technique, but the stance. The decision to move toward. The willingness to risk. The faith that on the other side of the fear, there might be something worth finding.
Julian turned from the window. He went to bed. He slept beside Tom, their bodies warm together, their breathing synchronized.
Tomorrow he would wake up. He would practice. He would teach. He would approach.
The chain would continue.
The End
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Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.