Depth Perception

1: I Write Sins, Not Tragedies

7:20pm, Wednesday

Juliet felt weird as she went through the door of the bar.

The cool air of the mid-Spring Melbourne night was rapidly replaced with lukewarm stillness.

Juliet walked through the bar to the back beer garden. Once there, she went up to a person who always ran these events, a non-binary person named Blaze.

"Welcome! Your name?" Asked Blaze.

"Juliet." She replied.

After looking for a few seconds through a few pages of sticky nametags, they came to the one with Juliet's name on it, and handed it to her. As she was attaching it to the front of her red and black flannel shirt, Blaze went on.

"Right, here's your dating card, I'll explain how to use that later, and here's a pen."

"Thanks." She replied, taking the small piece of paper and pen.

"We'll be starting in about 10 minutes."

Juliet had been to enough of these to know how this went by now.

She went to the back of the queue of people lining up at the bar to order drinks.

Juliet took a look around at the other attendees as she waited in line.

Speed dating got complicated when you did it with queer people. You couldn't just lump everyone into one simple 'boys date girls' group. Sometimes they put everyone of any gender and sexuality into a single group, and just said 'you'll date people you aren't necessarily attracted to, deal with it'. Other times, like this one, split it into two groups: gay men, and sapphics. Juliet was in the latter.

She still felt a little uneasy sometimes about going to a lesbian dating event, even though she had every right to be there.

The event was openly trans-friendly, and if anyone had any problem with her being trans, they had the easy option of just not ticking 'I'd like to see this person again' on the date card.

And plus, it wasn't like it was hard to tell that she was trans...

Fucking genetics, she thought.

The night started, and the first set of dates went pretty much the same way this always went.

Juliet had never been good with small talk. Unfortunately, that's pretty much all speed dating entailed. 5 minutes of talking to a complete stranger, then, after a bell rang, move along the line and spend 5 minutes talking to another complete stranger. After 10 dates, there was a half-hour break, and then another 10 before the night ended.

She found her mind just went blank sometimes when it came time to open/continue a conversation, especially when there was an attractive girl sitting in front of her. It wasn't surprising. She was literally on medication for ADHD.

There were literally little cue cards on the tables with 'first date questions' of varying quality written on them in case you got stuck.

Juliet found herself having to defer to them a lot...

The bell rang, and yet another unremarkable date ended with a girl named Paris who worked with at-risk youth. They both said their goodbyes and good-lucks, and then both went to move to the seat to their right, same as everyone else was.

These nights were always quite draining for Juliet. She didn't do particularly well with rejection, and speed dating always had a lot of that for her.

Juliet looked up at the new person sitting across the table from her and...

Holy shit...