Please Like Me (Lauren/You)

Gang Keow Wan

"So what did you do today?", I ask, leaning forward with my elbows on the table.

We just ordered and have been waiting comfortably for our food to arrive.
I am on a date right now. Her name is Amanda and I met her at the grocery store, she was buying vegetables, I was buying chips.

I know close to nothing about her, as this is our first date, but I do know she is a vegetarian, which attracts me for some reason, although I don't quite understand why, nor have I put much thought into it.

We're at this vegetarian restaurant, which is much like the kind of place I would never have come to on my own; Amanda picked the place.
All of the walls are green, everything smells like eucalyptus incense, and there was a Buddha statue by the entrance.
I guess Amanda is that kind of vegetarian, I had not seen this coming.

She looked up at me, smiling sweetly before replying to my question, "Ah, my dance class was cancelled, so I got a Reiki massage and I just feel incredible"

I pause before smiling awkwardly and squinting my eyes at her.
"Reiki?"
"Yeah", she smiles.
"That's the massage where they don't touch you?", I hesitantly question.

I can see her quick frown before she just smiles at me again, placing both her hands on top of the table, "Yeah, so, it's about energy. They put energy into your body"
"Yeah, why would you pay someone to not touch you?"
Amanda lets out an airy awkward laugh before gesturing her hands, "Okay, so like I said, they align your energy-"
"There's just, like, billions of people that'll touch you for zero dollars", I state, raising my eyebrows, "Like, do you go to restaurants and pay for them to not feed you?"

She pauses, an awkward smile on her face, before hesitantly defending herself, "Oh, well... so like, it's an ancient ritual from Japan. It's thousands of years old"
I eye her, wheezing lightly and shrugging, "It's old so it must be good, right? Oh, and it's Asian!", I exclaim as she politely giggles.

"I really don't understand why middle-class white people think that Asians are magic", I comment, frowning and looking around.
Amanda chuckles, shaking her head, "Okay, well, I don't think they're magic"
"Yeah, they just mastered energy", I wheeze, squinting my eyes at Amanda, who just eyes me blankly, "I mean, what is this energy? How are they manufacturing this energy?"

I hear Amanda sigh, shaking her head, before speaking up, "Look, it just-"
"Where does it come from?"
"Okay. It just makes me feel good", she sighs.
I hum and nod, looking down at my lap.
"It's not thousands of years old, by the way, it's about 80 years old", I mumble.
"No, I'm pretty sure it's thousands", she awkwardly chuckles.

I look at her for a moment, before grabbing my cell phone and unlocking it.
I can feel Amanda's eyes on me the whole time, I can almost feel the frown on her face directed at me while I distractedly type onto the screen.
"What are you doing?", she quietly questions.
"Googling."

I hear her sigh before setting my phone aside and looking up at her, "Yeah, it was invented in 1922"
She eyes me blankly before smiling politely and nodding, "Okay, so it's like 100 years old. We were both wrong"
"Well, I was pretty close", I comment, chuckling, as I hear her sigh once again, "I mean, 80 is a lot closer to 100 than 100 is to thousands"

She quietly scoffs at me, shaking her head and looking down at the table, "Why can't you just leave things? Let people believe what they want to believe?"
I sigh, leaning back onto my seat and looking up at the ceiling, before raising both my hands and nodding, "Okay, I'm sorry. I'm not not letting you believe it", I pause for a moment, raising my eyebrows and looking down at the table, before continuing, slowly, "Just trying to understand, you know, why an adult would pay someone money to lay naked in a room with somebody that's either crazy or lying to them"