The lonliness leads to bad dreams, and the bad dreams lead me to calling you.

Kim Iverson is a waste of air. Today I dye my hair black and realize that willing yourself sober, doesn't make you sober. I sometimes find myself secretly rooting for USC when they play Oregon just because I think I need something else to fight with my mom about.

He is never my lover. He just knows things about me that I don’t know other people can know. I find out that he owns a copy of The Secret Language of Birthdays and uses it frequently as a reference tool to screen his friends. He cuts off the lit ends of cigarettes so that he doesn’t inhale the flame retardant. He teaches me the sign of a true adult friend is that they consider you when you are not around.

He dismantles me. I do not know if it is his sex or his personality. It might be his tattoo, or his bass. He cleans Sharpie off of me and never tells anyone. He gives me the feeling that I am looking at a photograph of us from far away. A black and white photograph, where he is holding me around his waist by my legs; it is raining and it is summer. My face is very close to his, the water dripping down our foreheads intersects at our noses. I sag a little as he bends his knees.

I often confuse the feeling of neglect with the feeling of love.

Wasting away again.

I make up fantastic stories about how I meet him because we meet on the internet before one in five relationships were started that way. He is easy to hurt because he is small. I am also not the one to hurt him the most. I am usually honest. He introduces me to Schrodinger’s Cat, and Albert Camus. I can’t remember much about him other than that stupid sweater. I have never known a person so long yet they mattered so little. I can not tell you what his favorite food was, or what he would order at a bar.

On a trip to Key West, I meet my grandfather in the form of a drunken stranger. What I mean is this. We have drinks in a bar that doesn’t ID me which is vital since I am only twenty. And this drunken stranger, who I suppose is not really a stranger but just a woman I didn’t know very well at the time, ingests too much alcohol. She becomes violent and enraged; she becomes uncontrollable. In an effort to take her back to somewhere safe we hail a cab. Upon eyeing her, covered in blood and vomit and screaming, we are not permitted to enter. I send the men in the cab to retrieve the car that will then come back and get us to take her somewhere safe. As we sit on the bench outside of the Green Parrot, I wonder. As she screams that no one will help her, as she screams that she is dying and no one will save her, I wonder. As she tries calling her father to tell him goodbye, as she is certain that dying must feel like this, I wonder. What is happening to me? When we arrive somewhere safe she throws anything she can reach like a child learning how to use their arms. And when we wake up it is over and there is calm in the house. On returning home my mother asks me if we went to the Green Parrot and I am shocked that she would ask such a question. Yes mom, yes we did. And she begins to cry a little as she tells me that her father drank himself to death and died on the bench outside the bar, alone.

I just want to go swimming.

He is never my lover, but we are in love. Friend love, I think. First, he is a large coffee with cream and sugar. He brings his very old laptop to the café and grades papers and lets me read the really bad ones. Then he is my professor. He gives me an A on a paper when I don’t deserve it, and I know it. I re-write the paper anyway. Then he is a dry gin and vodka martini or a Molson Canadian or a Guinness. We think we wouldn’t drink as much if the bookstore would hold normal hours. Now he is my first friend to get married and have a child. His wife despises me because I drink too much and tell her how much I love her husband.

The night before he moves away we meet at K. Gallagher’s. I don't know if I have ever cried so hard for someone who did not die, or sleep with me.

I find a key to the city in front of the Old Pink on Allen Street on a Sunday morning. I walk past it three times before picking it up. It is probably a duplicate. Also on this day I find a fortune missing its cookie. It says, “No one is standing in your way anymore, it is time to move forward.” I tend to dislike Allen Street on a Saturday night, but with out it there would be no Sunday morning. Or maybe there would. It probably wouldn’t be the same. I probably would not like it as much.

We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl.

Today at work I am told that I need to check myself. People find me crude, and harsh. I think I am just honest.

I like to think that he is still waiting for me, and when I move back to New York, we will run into each other on the street and fall in love again. I am not surprised to see Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” as I write this, but I take it as a sign that I need to read it again in a new context. I also need to finish thinking about my life in New York. I always start thinking about it, but I get frightened very easily, and think I might remember something that I purposefully forgot.

My life in New York smells like cannabis smoke being blown through a toilet paper tube stuffed with dryer sheets. It is rotting leaves and fresh garbage, men’s cologne that lingers in my bed long after its wearer has gone home. It feels like the cool breeze of the G train as I wait, warm and sticky, for hours because it is never on time. It feels like a seventeen year old’s ambition mixed with a seventeen year old’s disillusionment. But mostly it is like a dream. I am unsure it ever really happened. The only thing that I know still remains is the love I leave in Queens.

Perhaps because New York is in some kind of suspension of time and space where I can have everything I want. Or maybe I can have everything I want because it never lasts. He will only be mine as long as I am in the City. As soon as I leave we belong to other people.

When I move back to Buffalo from Brooklyn I do the following things with my body: I walk to the gas station and buy a bottle of iced tea and a pack of Camel 99’s. I smoke one. I get a pedicure. I apply eyeliner to my top lids. I smoke another cigarette. I drive to Starbucks. I pick up an Art Voice, read it, and then give it to a much older man that I think is cute. I toy with the idea of marrying him.

If Jackson Pollock were an economist, he would study the way things don't always add up.

He has a tattoo of a lion or Bob Marley on his left shoulder. He makes me shake and takes me for a cheeseburger, and pays with a one-hundred dollar bill. He never cares that I am young. His dad is dead. He gets me addicted to the idea of cocaine.

I sniff a large line of cocaine up my nose through a twenty-dollar bill. I let it drip down the back of my throat. It has a very sterile taste, unlike acid blotters, which taste like mint. He moves his hand towards my face and wipes the white residue from under my nostrils. I sit facing him and cry in my underwear. I look around briefly, notice the mirrors glimmering and the walls breathing. I am immobile. I am impenetrable. I am dying. Colors reach past my eyes into my brain, wrapping it up and smothering it until it burst into fragments of life. They make every touch feel like sex, the kind of sex where you can’t stop shaking.

When I am seventeen I move to Brooklyn to attend art school. My first semester at Pratt I have a GPA of 2.3 and a BAC of .1 or more. It is here that I form my relationship with chemical reactions.

I always feel like I am being left out of something. I think Chester is the only person who understands this because he lives in New York City and men don’t love him the way he deserves to be loved.

You say your life is a seduction novel, and I agree. I feel seduced just by reading it.

Today I make cookies and press my dress pants for work tomorrow. It is a rum and apple cider kind of evening outside, even though I am inside. I am wearing a new lotion and it is irritating my nose. I eat about two-hundred calories five times today and do yoga with Jack.

He is awkward in the same way that “awkward” is spelled awkwardly. After me, he dates a girl who is better than me because she is older, taller, and has longer hair and tells me so in an email on MySpace. I know it is also because she has bigger lips and his virginity.

I sometimes forget who I go to school with because I have pretend conversations with Leo Tolstoy. I skip school a lot. I lie and tell people I am celebrating a Jewish holiday or that I have cancer.

I never mean to hurt him; he just makes it very easy. I am unsure if I love him, but he shows me the difference between love and sex. I enjoy our rides to Johnson’s Falls in his big, blue, Buick. I like wearing his thermals to bed. He is the subject of the only photograph I have ever taken with out my camera.

I'll get your heart racing in my skin tight jeans, be your teenaged dream.

Tonight, I am going to a bar with my mother's tenant. This is after I listen to a radio show about how a woman who goes to Duke is embarrased about a paper she wrote about sleeping with men. When I was in my senior year of college I openly told my entire class exactly how many men I had slept with, some of them were even in the room. A word of advice to this woman; people don't forget these kinds of things and neither will you. I hope you are prepared to never be able to date again with out thinking it's research, because it is.

I spend the summers of middle and high school at a sleep away camp in Gainesville, NY. Here I learn how to shoot a bow and arrow, kayak, ride a horse, and fall in love. In my last year as a camper there is a three day camp out. The boys sneak over to our tarp and offer us cigarettes and a sip out of their liquor filled water bottle.

He is in a band. He has gigs. We go to camp together and are in the play The Lion King. I play Simba because I have the best roar and he is Timon, the meercat. This is in complete opposition to our entire relationship. He kisses me in the wardrobe room. I am confronted by a woman in the bathroom at the Show Place Theater on Grant Street. I am eating my lunch alone in the Pratt cafeteria the day I see him on MTV.

He is dyslexic. This makes him very uncomfortable and he cries in my bed after I correct his spelling.

He thinks I am stupid. He teaches me how to drive a standard but not very well. He also teaches me that models are not to be trusted.

He happens on the pull-out couch at the hotel where I work part time as a housekeeper. I spend the night and come downstairs in the morning still wearing my homecoming dress.

The talking leads to touching, and the touching leads to sex, and then there is no mystery left.

I meet him in a bar called Billy Bob’s Family Billiards. I am here with Carolyn to see her boyfriend’s band play their first gig. I lose my virginity in a dress that isn’t mine. He plays a twelve string guitar and drives a white 1987 Monte Carlo S.S. That stands for Super Sport. There are things in life that are hard to understand when they are happening to you until they are explained to you, like diseases. And after your disease goes away you do things differently, as if doing the wrong thing will bring the disease back.

I am sixteen and I get a disease that forms rashes in the shapes of countries on my body and swells my joints to three times their normal size. This is not an exaggeration. He visits me in the hospital and sneaks me out to smoke a cigarette. I have been on steroids for about a week and am feeling jacked. When I smoke the cigarette I collapse outside and prolong my stay for another four days. The name of my disease is the B19 virus, generally referred to as parvovirus B19 or sometimes erythrovirus B19 was the first (and until 2005 the only) known human virus in the family of parvoviruses, genus erythrovirus. B19 virus causes a childhood rash called fifth disease or erythema infectiosum which is commonly called slapped cheek syndrome.

The night will go as follows:

I have an interview tomorrow for a job I have done before. I will most likely drink a beer either way.

When I am in third grade I hide under my teacher’s desk with a boy because that was what we do in third grade. She doesn't come to sit down and it feels like hours that we wait so we come out from under the desk to find a policeman in our classroom, he asks when the last time our teacher had seen us was. She is sobbing. It is the first time I’ve ever been sent to the principal’s office. My mom is in the hospital at the time so they don't tell her what happens. I can't sleep for weeks and my troubled, guilt laden eight-year-old body can't take it anymore so I tell her. She laughs.

Max does the things a first boyfriend should do. He is possibly German, but if he is, he is the dark kind of German. Max kisses me under a white tent as we lay on the grass while he is supposed to be graduating from high school. We are still unsure about kissing so we keep our mouths shut. Laying next to my friend and his friend, I try to imitate their noises. I do not know yet that sounding good at sex is different than being good at sex. Max moves back to Detroit and we rarely speak. I sometimes wonder if he is real.

Mumford and Sons- Little Lion Man

Finding a job is hard. I've never been told how awesome I am at so many things but I'm too awesome at them to get paid to be awesome. I feel like Lester Burnham. Minus the pedophilia. Maybe a little, I just don't know anymore.

I don’t know how I made it through all these years of existence without knowing what a seduction novel was, or let alone that such a genre existed. After a long conversation with my American Literature professor about rational and wayward love, I have realized that my life is a seduction novel. However, I have reversed the roles, and I, the woman, am the seducer that creeps into the hearts of men, twisting my fingers through their manes and beards, cautiously tracing their outlines, curving into impossible dimensions. And as I intentionally avoid their sex, they are reduced to boys, begging mother for a cookie with their milk.

I'm not sure what I mean when I read over this.