In a few days it will have been almost exactly a year since I casually 'met' someone. I remember the preceding hours to the tee. I was in the Eau & Gaz apartment in Eppan/Appiano with my co-residents Elif and Masa. We had committed ourselves to getting high; bitching, no, ranting about the general immaturity of men, and how their conditioned proclivities towards a certain state of invulnerability served as barriers to any potential intimacy; and dancing to reggae. Later that evening, after a trippy performance at the Lanserhaus, in which fabricated non-gender specific garments were progressively worn, inhabited, and shed by a group of dancers, the result of an art piece conceived by Helena Dietrich and Janneke Raaphorst, I found myself spending over 45 minutes conversing with a boy from Tramin who looked so remarkably like Littlefinger from Game of Thrones that I was convinced he was as arrogant and scheming. A week later we went on a "date"; the best in my life because I found for the first time the atmosphere to be so convivial that I could shamelessly and fearlessly be "myself". On Wednesday evening, as we occupied a table at a coffee shop in Kaltern/Caldaro, a picturesque town 10 minutes away from his home in Tramin, which I have been co-inhabiting since the beginning of May, I thought of that innocuous evening that would end up dramatically altering the trajectory of my life. Little did I know...

I was stuffing my face with pastry to curb my evening hunger. He was sitting across from me, reading on his Kindle. I was dipping into MFK Fisher's 'The Gastronomical Me'. In between we'd pause to exchange notes; about his experience of living in a climate heavily punctuated by seasonal changes as against my upbringing in Mumbai, where the only dramatic intervention was the annual monsoonal anticipation; about the finer culinary footnotes that facilitated lightness in a Pressknodel, the South Tirolean dumplings he'd prepared for lunch, which he'd submerged in stock; revelations I'd had about how I wanted to spend the rest of my 30s acquiring all kinds of skills as against accumulating degrees; how we both worked better under the pressure of deadlines. When the evening sun shrouded itself behind the surrounding Alpine ranges and a chill began to set in, we decided it was time to return home. As we began to put our things away, I remembered a long-standing fantasy I'd had, one of few involving not being 'single', in which I imagined my ideal partner as someone I could be alone with. And here I was, in another continent, so eerily joyous, having found someone with whom I could so securely and ecstatically share my autonomy.