14 Honest Venmo Captions
September 15, $18.95
Sometimes I text to ask for your buzzer number even though I know it by heart. You open the door in your college t-shirt, the one with the bubble letters and the monster with whiskers, and I take my socks off and you order dumplings with little green skins and I burp and tell you I’m burping, etc. Relationships are habits.
September 19, $18.70
Every conversation in New York is about money. Even if it’s not about money, it’s about money. Tonight we’re sitting next to two paisley ties, four brass cufflinks, three office-carpet haircuts, and two white-faced watches that could easily crush our student loan debts between their skinny second hands.
We can barely pay rent.
October 5, $30.22
To be totally honest, this one might make me overdraw my bank account, but I’m doing it anyway.
December 18, $18.95
Phone thing. Button thing. Door thing. Shoe thing. Sock thing. Couch thing. Computer thing. Talk thing. Kiss thing. Eye thing. Door thing. Lock thing. Every routine is just a bunch of things. We are just a bunch of things. Office jobs with Assistant titles that still seem to matter. Disney character refrigerator magnets. Your buzzer number, which I still know by heart and still sometimes pretend not to.
March 23, $18.44
It’s two days after a fight we do not call a fight. You know this already, but I can’t be funny when I think you’re judging me. I can never be funny around you when I want to be funny around you.
March 29, $19.12
I almost concuss myself trying to find your Wi-Fi password, which is printed on the side of your router because you never changed it to a word. Stupid. And then: a hairline silence between bites, and you take off your socks and lean your forehead against mine during the credits to Parks and Rec.
November 14, $17.22
You tell me you don’t see yourself here. On Nassau Street, with the other half of my veal parm dissolving in your belly. I say OK and then I say where does anyone see themselves, though. Where does anyone see themselves except at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, at one of those cherry wood desks with the glamorous grain and a glass of iced coffee and a slate gray MacBook. I say why. I say wait stop watch your foot you’re about to step in a puddle.
November 29, $9.25
You always eat bananas without the skins. And then your fingers get all banana-y and I laugh at you and you touch me with your banana fingers and nothing’s stupider.
December 4, $10.20
You told me you were leaving.
December 15, $22.20
My office holiday party was at the circus, and you came. We hadn’t been to a circus since before we could read. The first thing the announcer said was the acrobats were a family. They were from Minsk. They wore dark purple leotards. They held each other by the ankles and threw each other over wooden bars that hung from black wires. You held my wrist and I kept imagining what it must be like to trust someone that much, to be okay with them holding you by the ankles and throwing your body into space.
February 19, $18.13
One of those goodbye dinners where people think of things to say in advance, but no one says them. There was this moment when we were waiting for the check and the credit card machine was broken, so we stared at the scratched-up pizza sticker on the table and said nothing. Less than nothing. Took back the words we’d said and folded them up and put them in our pockets.
February 19, $8.18
I’ve never stared at a spot of nose grease on the window for an entire cab ride before.
February 23, $18.22
I’ve never been in love. Have you? Has anybody? Is this not the right place to talk about it? When I hear love songs on the radio or in the cough syrup aisle in CVS, I automatically convert the “you” to my career, my ego, or the parts of myself that don’t shut up. I know, it’s selfish. But it helps me relate. I’m sure other people do this, though maybe not. We never talked about it.
February 28, $18.19
It’s been a little over a year, and we’ve passed $18.something back and forth between us twenty-something times. Which means we’re ending where we started. Probably. I’m not sure. I haven’t counted everything.
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