A Week on Feeld with a single writer embracing the sexiness of possibility

Welcome to a week on Feeld with Fopé, 30, a queer and non-binary writer and nightlife connoisseur based in London. After a long year of back-to-back relationships, they’re newly single and discovering the particular thrill of having no idea who might walk into their life next. This week is about flirting with possibility: hot nights, questionable decisions, new crushes—and remembering that being single can feel less like waiting for something to happen, and more like being completely alive in the present. 

Wednesday

I start the week recording a podcast with someone I have a tiny crush on. Not a serious crush, but the kind where—every time he laughs at something I say—my brain immediately goes: “wow, I’m actually hilarious.” Suddenly I’m sitting straighter, my stories are better, and my timing is sharper. I am performing the most charismatic version of myself for the recording, which feels very meta, because I’m also aware that this is exactly the power of having a crush: You become a slightly shinier version of yourself. And God, I’m shiny.

I leave the recording feeling incredibly confident and just before I walk into the train station, I receive a phone call: I got the job. I’d interviewed for it the week before, and after nine months of unemployment I finally have something. For the best part of a year, every month has been spent chasing money for rent. Calculating what can wait. Moving things around. Sending applications. Refreshing my inbox. Trying to stay hopeful and all the things you’re meant to do when historically your answer has been wanting to jump off a bridge. Years of therapy and good friendships have convinced me of other possibilities, so I stayed optimistic while also knowing optimism does not pay your bills. My hope has been rewarded, and thank fucking God.

It feels silly to say I’m burnt out when my job is literally going to clubs. My work is nightlife, queer spaces, music, and helping people have the best nights of their lives. It sounds like the opposite of burnout. But exhaustion doesn’t care if the thing exhausting you is beautiful. I think the last time I was well rested, I was eleven years old.

I cry happy tears all the way home. After nine months of being constantly in survival mode, possibility feels sexy. I buy myself a pint at the Wetherspoons pub by my house, and I can't stop smiling to myself.

That evening I open Feeld. Not because I’m looking for anything in particular, but because I like the reminder that there is a whole world outside of worrying about rent. I scroll through the people nearby, stopping at the ones whose profiles make me laugh or who have written something that makes me curious. I like people who are a little strange. People who are direct about what they want. People who have clearly put some thought into their profiles rather than just uploading six pictures of themselves in Ibiza. On my own profile, I have a mixture of desires which feels representative of where I am at the moment: I’m open to sex, flirting, dates, and whatever else might happen when two people are curious about each other. Sometimes I connect with someone and we exchange three messages before disappearing into the ether. Sometimes someone sends me something so funny I screenshot it for my friends. Sometimes I just scroll.

I see another writer on the app and they’re cute, so I message a simple: “what do you like to write about?”

Thursday

I spend the afternoon with my mum. A large part of our relationship now is just harmless gossip. The woman who lived down the road from us and used to do my long multicolored braids every time I came home from university has just had another child, but apparently nobody has seen her husband in months. I nod and hum at all the right moments. There is a lull in our conversation so I discreetly open Feeld and look over the bio I’ve had for years. 

I wanna smooch, kiss, make out and be silly under the covers and let’s pretend we’re not constantly thinking about each other and will you roll for me and watch cartoons with me and jump into lakes or rivers with me or maybe just sit in my bathtub and can you wash my hair while I wash yours or will you feed me or rub the nape of my neck and will you come into my kitchen and wrap your arms around my waist and hunger for me?

Hopefully the Jenny Slate fans here will know the reference. Writing a dating profile is a strange exercise. You are essentially trying to explain your entire self to strangers in a few sentences, while also making it clear that you are hot enough to fuck. I’m not sure I have ever been particularly good at being concise, so mine is a mixture of a rambling stream of conscious and unconscious desires and little invitations to ask me questions. 

I have become much less interested in pretending I am looking for one specific thing. 

Being single this summer has made that feel like enough.

Friday

My friend is hosting a birthday Seafood Soirée. At 6 a.m., the group chat receives a delightful picture of fresh fish just chosen at Billingsgate Market. At the dinner table, a new friend Saffron loses her oyster virginity—approaching it with the confidence of someone who definitely hasn’t done this before. The girthy flesh immediately flops onto her face. I think watching people experience things for the first time is one of life's great pleasures.

I decide I’m going home at a reasonable hour. This lasts approximately twelve minutes. A pretty woman pours me another drink and, reader, I cancel my taxi. I am easily convinced to carry on a night, and one pour from a pretty woman is enough for me to eat the £8.41 cancellation fee.

When I eventually make my way home, drunk, I force our cat Miffy to love me through feline manipulation. 

Saturday

Not wearing makeup out has been genuinely life-changing for me. Originally, it was practical. I left my makeup at my stylist’s house. But it’s also too hot, I’m tired, and I cannot be bothered spending an hour creating a face that will disappear by midnight anyway.

Something unexpected has happened, though. For years, going out has always involved a small background calculation. Do I still look good? Has my foundation survived? Am I attractive from this angle?

Now, I’m feeling myself, having fun, and I see someone beautiful looking back at me.

My skin is slick. My face is shiny. I look exactly like everyone else under club lights. It sounds dramatic, but seeing myself enjoying myself without trying to preserve a certain appearance feels like a tiny revolution.

Maybe this is part of being single, too. I have spent so much of my life thinking about whether someone else wants me that it feels strange to realise I can just want myself. I don’t need to be the hottest person in the room. I just want to feel alive in it. There is something liberating about being on Feeld while I slowly become more comfortable with the me I see when nobody is looking. Maybe being single is partly about discovering how I want to be seen, and realising I don’t have to perform for it. I don’t have to perform to be wanted? That’s hogwash, surely?

Sunday

On my Substack, I once described my lifestyle as thus: when the highs are high, the lows are even lower.

I wake up after hibernating for fourteen hours. It’s 11 p.m. and my mouth is dry. I come downstairs and my nocturnal housemate is watching the season three finale of Survival of the Thickest, which I settle in to watch—it’s genuinely charming and funny.

I open Feeld, once again. At this point it feels like an instinctual reflex. There is a new message from someone I had been flirting with earlier in the week. I read it, smile, decide I’ll reply in the morning, then promptly forget about it. (Sorry!) Ten minutes later I’m somehow back on the app. This is the particular torture of being single: there is always the possibility that something interesting is about to happen, even when you are horizontal, dehydrated, and eating whatever you can find in the kitchen.  

I like chasing that feeling. Not necessarily the promise of a date or a shag, but the feeling that your life could change direction at any moment. 

Monday

My life is stupid. My phone rings. It’s a big gay magazine and they want me to write a monthly curated list of where to go in London and New York.

The strange thing about actually following your dreams is that, when your circumstances finally change, it takes a while before your nervous system catches up.

The same thing is happening with being single. I am technically free, but sometimes my brain still behaves as though I am waiting for  my scene partner, a co-lead, or a co-conspirator. I open Feeld and there are messages sitting there from people I don’t know. I could reply. I could flirt. I could meet someone. I could delete the app. There is no deadline. This is not school. I can simply do whatever I want.

I am starting to realize that I really like having options.

Tuesday

I sleep the day away and wake up once again at 11 p.m. I’m annoyed with myself, but there is something quite nice about accidentally becoming nocturnal. I think I’m at my best under the nighttime sky. I spend the night with the moon, and write until the sun comes up. I think there is something beautiful about having your own system, even when it looks slightly chaotic from the outside.

Maybe dating can work like that too. I definitely have my best conversations late at night. There’s something about both of us knowing we should be asleep and yet choosing, instead, to chat into the darkness. I don’t know why I’ve spent so much time believing there is a correct way to be single. In the past, it sometimes felt like being single just meant waiting for my next relationship. Now, I’m realizing I can be single in a way that makes more sense to me. It seems like everyone else on Feeld is doing it. I can be authentic. Messy. Horny. Occasionally romantic. Always a night owl.

Wednesday

I spend far too long deciding what to wear to Arca’s album listening party at algha’s plantroom. This is one of my favorite parts of nightlife: the ritual, the ceremony. The moment when an ordinary Wednesday starts to feel like it could become the story you tell for weeks in the smoking area.

Being single has taught me to appreciate anticipation. Sometimes the build-up is the best part. The moment before something happens is where all the electricity lives. Whole universes exist in a crush. 

Arca’s album listening party is exactly as chaotic as I hoped. I look around the dark industrial space—eyes blurring from the excessive smoke machine and the indoor cigarettes —and marvel at how the people in a room can transform it. This time next month I’ll be holding monthly writing salons in this very same space. It’s funny to imagine amongst the sweat and wiggling bodies tonight. Someone announces that Arca is in a limousine parked two streets away and that she may appear at any second. Do we know if it is true? No. Does that matter? Absolutely not. The intrigue alone it creates is the point.

(She never appears.)

Outside, I talk to Arca fans aged 18, 19, and 20 respectively. I groan as they tell me their ages but secretly preen when they are shocked to learn I am 30.

Later, I am delivered to Mr Essex in an Uber he orders. We met on Feeld, three months prior, at 6 a.m. He had been enchanted by my very direct offer of a morning blow job. Every time we meet, I am running on the last vestiges of party fumes and the sun is steadily rising. We fuck on his balcony overlooking a six-lane roundabout.

It is so hot. I’m wearing a full lace frontal, twenty-six inches, and blindingly blonde. I love being a sexy clown.

At 2:16 a.m. I vomit up the Chinese takeaway I had enthusiastically demolished earlier in his second bathroom. The color is a vibrant orange. There are whole rice kernels. I stare at them in confusion.

Mr Essex exists in my life in a very particular way. I turn up, we have sex and he pays for my Uber. It’s simple. But he keeps trying to blur the lines by asking about my life, telling me about his mother, whom he loves dearly, and his father, who he spent his entire life trying to please.

I am stubborn, and I try to dance and weave around his curious questions, but he won’t let me. I try to explain that I’m bruised from enduring five separate relationships in just the last year alone. None ended well. I am protecting myself. I can’t afford to be hurt again. Let me stay here where no one can ever truly get to know me, or hurt me. I’m annoyed because he can clearly see through the performance.

The wig. The jokes. The flirting. The exaggerated confidence. I am the all-seeing, all-powerful, all-knowing being he will worship tonight. It’s the version of myself that knows exactly how to be wanted. But as I writhe on his lap, nipples taut, underwear soaked, he tells me I am smart and funny. He tells me that, even if I didn’t suck his dick like a whore, he would still want me there.

I’m embarrassed. Not because I don’t believe him. 

It’s just, I’m bruised and there is something terrifying about someone seeing you clearly. Mr Essex is meant to be just for fun. I have never seen him in the daytime. At six in the morning he orders me an Uber and he kisses me sweetly by the door. I get into the car smiling, and for the first time in a long while, I save his number.

I don’t know what that means yet.

I used to think being single was about waiting for something to happen. Waiting for the right person, the right relationship, the right moment to change everything. This summer has felt different. I have started to enjoy the bit before I know what will happen. The message before the date. The crush before the kiss. The night before I know whether I’m going home alone.

There is so much life in not knowing.

So, yes, I am still single. I am also hot and alive and broke and tired and occasionally vomiting up the night. I have a new job. I have a cat who barely respects me. I have a phone full of people I might never see again and one newly saved number I might.

For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel like I need to know what comes next.

I’m enjoying the possibility.

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