If you still love me, I deserve to know.

He is a professor, poet, and probably not the best idea. I kiss him because I like his hands, but realize the more I look at them that they are just regular hands. I steal from him the idea of mourning changes in form, even though I am pretty sure I give it to him in the first place. We write poetry in my kitchen. He drinks merlot, I hate fucking merlot. We stop talking after we eat steak sandwiches at Founding Fathers pub. I am almost raped later this night.

He writes about me in his blog and I blush as I read it because he talks about how I was shirtless in candle light. He uses my name and this both excites and terrifies me.

Alice is a student in Buffalo while I am a teacher. She is never one of my students though. I justify the sex because I meet her at a Starbucks function, where we are both part-time employees, and figure it is open territory and our teacher-student relationship can be chalked up to coincidence. We flirt when I order my beverage. She is young and deceptive and has eyes, that in retrospect I know, I should have known better.

After the meeting my manager and some other partners walk to Gallagher’s for beer to wash off the propaganda. Alice is there watching the Sabres shit the bed yet again. She joins us during intermission and sits next to me while we discuss Iggy Pop, Jack Spicer, and how shitty Buffalo really is. She plays with my hand under the table and I am immediately hooked. That night we make out on her futon in the college party house she lives in. I look around to make sure there aren’t any of my students present.

After she tells me she’s not going to sleep with me, she stands up shirtless in jeans her hair waving over her shoulders. Under candlelight I say, “Stop, I want to remember this.”

You will never be a philosopher.

I learn from him that I am terrified of monogamy with the wrong person. I never have to tell him, he just knows. I become an alcoholic. He makes me clumsy. I am his third and I love knowing this. He uses Yardley Lavender soap and Dial hand disinfectant. His hands crack from washing them so much. He keeps a piece of a tree in his drawer that he carved out of the same tree Ernest Hemmingway carved his initials into. He feels creative around me, I think because I make him furious. He thinks he is crazy, but I think he is just practical. I get the furniture, and I’m certain he takes most of my good records, but he will never admit to this. He makes me tell every detail about sleeping with another man.