So you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts.

I am imperfect but I am growing increasingly happy with my imperfections, rendering them void. I am not dependent on someone else for my happiness.  I choose my feelings and I am in control of when I have them and when I don't.  I can have whatever I want as long as I remember I need to work for it and just because I have it doesn't mean I quit working.  I am allowed to decide what the rules are.  I can also decide when they will change.  But I can't decide to change them just because it's easy.  I can stop chasing the attributes of other people and focus on my own.

Walking through a forest at the gloaming and watching the sun come up over a large body of water both elicit a suspension of disbelief, from what I don't know because those two things are about as real as real gets.  Perhaps a suspension of time and place where imperfections are beautiful because they are only compared to other imperfect things.

One year, twelve days.

That's how long it took for me to feel normal.

I have been overwhelmed by a need to write but I haven't had enough hardship lately to do so.  But here I am, inspired by happiness.  Who is this person I'm becoming?  Is this what I am supposed to be, what I always have been?

One year and twelve days ago I put on my running shoes and met some friends.  And I ran  And hated it.  I was slow and uncoordinated.  And it hurt.  But I kept running because it hurt less than the pain I had in my heart and I felt like I deserved it.  So I kept running.  Most people say they run because it clears their mind, that they can focus their entire being on that one task and it helps them find some kind of peace.  I ran because I wanted to be alone and be hurt.  Every run was another hour I had alone with my body, another hour of pain, another hour away from you.

Then four months and twenty-eight days ago I put on my running shoes and met some friends.  And I ran.  I ran thirteen and one tenth miles.  And it hurt.  But I didn't notice that until later.  What I did notice was over five thousand other runners and their families rejoicing in their victories.  A woman hugged me as I crossed the finish line and put a medal around my neck.  A man I didn't know offered me a slice of an orange and a bottle of water.  I had searched years for a sense of belonging and I had finally found it at the intersection of Delaware and West Huron.  I was home and I was loved.

Did it take me too long to realize that happiness doesn't always mean being happy?  I had wasted so much time waiting to find some kind of meaning and closure in all the pain and heartache that I couldn't see all of the beauty surrounding me.  I have found friends in strangers, love in darkness, and when I look in the mirror I see myself.

I started running because I wanted to get away from something.  I keep running because the more I do, the closer I get to me.

All you think of lately is getting underneath me.

In the beginning there is one.  Whether or not it is a part of a whole is still unanswerable but I think I am moving closer to stating with most certainty that there can be one without another.  Otherwise how would we know what being lonely feels like? 

He tells me that when it comes to gene mutations, sometimes it isn’t just the gene itself, it’s the things that are occurring around the gene or the cell that make it act a certain way.

When a cell is supposed to die and it doesn’t we call it a tumor.  When a person is supposed to die and it doesn’t we call it a survivor.

There is a school of thought that says educated women are more likely to be seduced because they can logically reason their attractedness to suitors.  I believe I may fall into this school of thought.  Perhaps it was invented for only me.

I've ruined everything that I've ever loved.

When I meet him we are colleagues at a chain coffee shop. We both like to follow the rules but I am better at it than he is and this drives him insane. I mismark cups on purpose to see how far I can push him. He proposes to me at the end of our first shift together after I write raz g.tea instead of R GT. I decide that I will keep him as mine only under the condition that he continues to make me feel the way he does on this day.

I realize I am not pretending when I find myself getting jealous of the girl he knows through Twitter. When he talks about her I know it isn't going to work. She is young, and deceptive, and weak. She is only comforted by the idea of him, his body terrifies her. It elates me. I express my feelings for him on a Starbucks cup. I think that he accepts.

He drives his mother’s car to Washington DC to take her on a first date. The night he comes back he meets me at our work and kisses me in the parking lot. Not just the spot near my car but in the middle of the thoroughfare. He is wearing an FBC kit only at the time I don’t know it is called a kit and he scolds me because I call it a jersey. I purposefully wear that black dress. We eat dinner at the restaurant across the parking lot and I drink beers because I am nervous about being on a date with someone who doesn’t drink.

My best friend calls me because she is injured and I make him go with me to Wegman’s to purchase an ACE bandage and some aspirin. We deliver the supplies and we play darts in her apartment because I am too drunk to drive and he beats me. We go to the beach and come close to being arrested for trespassing as we are making love on a rock. The police officer that is at the scene is one of the regular customers at our coffee shop.

The distance from me to him is 458 miles. Or three years. Whichever comes first. There will be a time when we think it will be too hard to keep going. It is hard because I am in a city looking at the same thing he is looking at in a different city. We will learn to live this way, but not yet.

I am concerned that our entire relationship can be chalked up to these markings on Starbucks cups, me taking his last name, a shot, and mutual hate for things. When he writes my name on his arm I am concerned that I will feel compelled to write his name on my arm as well. Every man after him will have to live with the fact that they are not the first man to do this.

I write love letters to him on the bar because we cannot exist outside of this place.

And I love the sound of you walking away.

I don’t know how to say “thank you” for breaking my heart and actually mean it, because to say that you broke my heart would imply that you have some power over me still.  And that I still had a heart for you to break.  That is simply untrue.

I have no illusions about you anymore.  You are a child in a man’s body.  You do man things like mow the lawn, change your oil, and use your penis but you still have to tell me that you don’t love me anymore over the phone.  And that is okay.  Because you are someone else’s problem now.

Now I am my own problem too.  I have to put myself to bed when I've had too much to drink and cook enough food for just myself and find a new way to wash the middle of my back since I shower alone.  But it’s doable. 

When I sit at the coffee shop now, I can go back to imagining my pretend life with other men.  I can think about the fancy parties that adults go to, and the problem of choosing the right wine to go with the cedar smoked salmon, and who’s car we will take for our weekend trip to The City.  These are the problems I want to have.  Instead I think about how I will bury a friend.

I am taking an online class on Computer Science offered by a school I never thought I would attend.  It has made me think about life in ones and zeros.  Either it exists, or it doesn't exist.  Either I remember you or I don’t.  I choose to remember you or I don’t.  But as soon as I remember that I chose to forget you, I remember you.  And the solid line between ones and zeros fades away. My heart breaks just a little more.

Never is a promise and you can't afford to lie.

I am supposed to be writing a memoir. Instead I am drinking beer and being consumed with computer solitaire. The feeling I get when I flip move a red seven to a black eight only to find another red seven underneath it is paramount to madness, I’m certain. At the very least it is the same feeling I had when you said, “forever” and then when I flipped over your card you said, “goodbye.”

When you throw away a person they do not go away. Leaving a person isn’t as easy as dying. You still have to look over your shoulder in the grocery store and hastily remember license plate numbers when you see someone driving the same car as the discarded person. You have to remember how to eat the foods you ate while you were with that person and drive the places you used to drive to before you knew them. Breaking up is a lot like quitting cigarettes. I am doing both at the same time.

Then there comes a time when you learn how to do things you used to do with the discarded person with a new person. I am learning how to be alone. And it isn’t that being alone is bad, but it can be bad for me. Being alone makes me anxious. I think one part of it is that I feel like I am being left out of something but the other part of me is worried that if I start to be comfortable being alone then I might become comfortable with other things too. How do we learn to disassociate lonely from alone? How do I?

The new person I am learning to do things with is smarter than I am which leads me to try harder to impress him. I think the hardest part of being in a relationship is remembering who you were before you had a relationship. But maybe the best part is deciding who you want to be from now on. I want to be me.

There are always those moments when you think that you could have saved it from falling apart. But I think the older I get I realize that things fall apart so that other things can come together. I haven’t figured out why this is important yet. I do feel like dating when I was a teenager either prepared me for this or ruined it for me. When you date someone while you live with your parents you can't fathom the idea of doing things without your other. But as an adult why would I want to?

White Blank Page

Writing about you is harder than it looks because words mean more when they are about you. They must be truthful and clear. It is hard because I am in a city looking at the same thing you are looking at in a different city. Soon, we will learn to live this way, but not yet. It is hard because you both define and deviate from the notions I have about things. It is hard because I can't figure you out.

You make me feel less than whole in that you show me where I fall short. When you talk about her I know it isn't going to work. She is young, and deceptive, and weak. She is only comforted by the idea of you, your body terrifies her. It elates me.

On the night that we are almost arrested on the beach I begin to question my ability to control myself around you.

I need the smell of summer, I need its noises in my ear.

At first, he is gentle with me in the park. He is the idea of the man I want to be with but he is not the man. He can never understand this concept or why I don't need him to call. I just want to make him think I do. Writing is often about the inability to communicate, sounds don’t always let us say what we want. However I could tell him anything and he would suck it all in and keep it. He would never give it to anyone else. He nearly collapsed after the last time. I thought he would die in my bed and I was worried I would have to explain it to the police.

My favorite thing about him is that he is gone before I wake up. Only he leaves his socks behind, and so I wash them and carry them around for weeks in my purse. He is thankful when I return them, however he looks very uncomfortable.

I think I am close to finding the thing I am looking for, even though I still don’t know what it is.

I am unsure whether or not I am opposed to monogamy, or if I am just one of those people that always wants the things that I cannot have.

I'm sitting in this house alone, wondering why I left home.

If the distance between where they are going and where you are standing cannot be measured, is an awkward bridge a bridge that goes nowhere?

There are three laws of planetary motion: The planets orbit the sun in ellipses. As a planet moves around its orbit, it sweeps out equal areas in equal times. More distant planets orbit the sun at slower average speeds.

I meet him through work, and he does not realize that I am not willing to be a mother to his daughter. He fills me, but goes limp in the car. He buys a new car and sends me a text every once in a while to ask how I am. I stop responding.

My propensity for Jewish men leads me to him. Which leads me right back to where I started.

There was a time when I thought I would never get any better or worse. I would remain the same for the rest of my life and I was okay with this. I remember always wanting to marry a man who wrote like William Carlos Williams. I remember how beautiful I felt when I spoke French. Then I woke up older and had no idea who I was or who I was becoming.

Finding Love Outside the Bathroom

Mary let herself be pounded with hot water. The shower she took was impersonal. Mary used a washcloth instead of her hands and felt afraid of her body and the things she had done to it. She could not notice the subtle imperfections in her body the way should could when she rubbed the bar of Yardley Lavender soap directly on her skin. Mary inhaled the steam and let it collect in the bottoms of her lungs until it couldn’t be contained anymore and the warmth of the air entered into her blood stream. It ran through her, navigating her veins and capillaries until it ended up back in her lungs, where she decided to let it out.

She stepped out of the claw foot tub and onto the shagged bathmat. With her wet hair suctioned to her body, she reached to the rack for her towel. She squeezed the excess water from her hair because she enjoyed the sound it made against the bathroom floor and wrapped the towel around her. This was her least favorite part about taking showers, because Mary only had one towel and hated the way her long hair stuck to her back when it was wet.

She reached for the pack of cigarettes that was on the coffee table but remembered it was empty just as she picked it up. She dashed over to her freezer and rejoiced as she grabbed the last pack out of her carton. The first drag of the first cigarette out of a pack of frozen cigarettes was always Mary’s favorite because it was the only one that did not taste like a cheap cigarette. She squinted her eyes as she lit it, cupping her hand around the flame from her lighter, as if a magic gust of wind was going to suddenly blow through her home at just that moment. She slid gracefully over to her couch and ashed in a beer bottle. She could afford an ashtray, but liked the aesthetic of the bottle better. She could also afford a bigger place but liked that she could use the excuse of not having any room for company, especially her mother.


She walked out of her studio and lowered her sunglasses. She often thought that this was why sunglasses were invented, to help with hangovers. Her hair was still wet from her shower but this was okay because she didn’t want to be mistaken for a girl who didn’t shower, since her mother always told her those were the girls that ended up smelly and alone. The setting sun bothered her. Her eyes squinted even with the sunglasses so her feet walked her body east, away from the sun. Her hands dangled at her sides as she floated down the sidewalk and to her spot, the Café 59. She opened the door and placed her things at a table next to the windows. Mary retrieved her dark roast, in a mug, and sat herself in her chair. She pretended to open the book she brought, but not to read. Her book was simply a mask she wore in public, like a pair of white earphones, or a newspaper. She liked to use these things to keep herself alone in crowded areas and carried these things with her at all times.

Mary had taken to watching a couple that sat on the upper level in the far corner. She knew they were on a first or second date because she over heard them say things that made them sound like they were interviewing each other. Mary wanted someone to ask her these types of questions. She had really good, thought out answers to these questions. All Mary got to do was sling cheap, Greek, food at drunks at 4:00 AM and flirt with men in suits that would never think to ask her on a date. She didn’t quite understand what her mother had that she didn’t. However, Mary assumed her mother still did not know about her last boyfriend, the one that Mary had neatly scooped up after her mother had left him feeling very poorly about himself. She felt like someone else finally knew what her mother was; a cougar in every sense of the word.

Mary saw the couple get up to leave. The man helped the lady with her coat. Mary pretended to sip her black coffee as they were leaving. He opened the door and she smiled approvingly. Mary estimated how long their relationship would last and gave it only a few months on account of the man looking too much like her brother. Fucking crack-head, she thought, even though she knew Johnny would never touch real drugs. Bored and lonely, her gaze searched the lobby until she found another man to look at.

He was a dark man with dark hair and dark eyes that mimicked the ones her father had given her. He had no paper and no earphones but sitting in front of him was a book by Nietzsche. Mary looked at him while he was looking at her and this made her eyes race down to the book she had just realized was not open. How embarrassing, she thought. Mary had been caught. She hurried to open her book before he had time to figure out what was going on. She would glance up frequently to find this dark haired stranger’s intent dark eyes temporarily locking with hers. She felt the book she was pretending to read was sending him the wrong message about her. Or more so, she heard her mother say, “Jesus Christ Mary, what the Hell are you doing?” She put away the collected works of Sylvia Plath in search of something better. She roughed up her bag for a bit but before her hands had landed on, “The Essential Foucault,” he had actually opened his book and began to read from it. Damn.

The disappointment of being caught reading the wrong book had put Mary in an anxious mood. She walked to the bathroom. She didn’t even have to pee, but she wanted to let people see her walk to the bathroom so they would know she was either well hydrated or bulimic. This was not a trait she enjoyed, but one that her mother had thrust upon her since childhood, as though if Mary did not use the bathroom at every opportunity she might piss herself and wind up smelly and alone. She sat on the toilet with her pants up. Mary wondered when she would be able to look at a man and know. She didn’t know what she would know when she looked at him, but she figured people have to know something they’ve never known before to spend their life with one person. Mary barely had enough love for herself and her rat, let alone another person. She thought she might want to get out of the bathroom before people thought she was a person who shit in public bathrooms. No one likes those people.

She stood in the doorway and stared at the man and noticed he had closed his book again. He was digging through his bag and didn’t appear to be looking for anything. She sauntered to her table, making extra sure to bump the air with her hips. She sat down and glanced up to find him still staring at her. He grinned and put his head back in his bag as he pulled out “The Road Not Taken.” This is getting weird, Mary thought. She bolted up and silently stormed over to his table and fell into a chair.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“The same thing you are doing,” he replied.

“I doubt that. I would never try to pick someone up at a coffee shop, that’s just, so,” she paused. “Besides, how do you even know what I’m doing?”

“You couldn’t be more obvious if you were sitting there with your Walkman on,” he said while grinning at the look of feigned confusion on her face. “And why would I want to pick someone up when I could just look like I’m picking someone up?”

“So that maybe you could meet someone else who doesn’t really want to pick someone up? Why are you reading that? Is it any good?” she motioned towards his book.

“No. Maybe, I haven’t read it,” he blurted. How do you feel about G.I. Joes?”

“I haven’t played with them in years,” she said. “My mother threw all of mine out because, well, she didn’t really need a reason.”

“I have some in my pocket; do you want to play with them?”

“Mmm… Not here.”

Mary’s eyes followed him to the bathroom before her body. She knocked on the door before she entered but opened the door before he replied. She entered the door head first, her tiny fingers clutching the door as she slinked in, perhaps worried that the bathroom floor might give way with the weight of two people on it. She locked the door behind her and sat with this man on the floor as he pulled out his G.I. Joes one by one. Mary did not yet know anything new, so she assumed this was not the man she was going to marry. This did however give people an opportunity to see her walk into the bathroom with a man so that they would know she was not a lesbian. This was less of a concern of her mother’s than it was of Mary’s since she was often hit on by women. At least she thought they were women. He pulled a flask out of his jeans pocket, unscrewed it, and took a swig. He motioned it towards her but she pulled out her own, smaller silver version, from her bra and sloshed it in her mouth.

“What are you shooting,” he asked?

“You.” She motioned her head towards her first infantry, which she had neatly aligned, and prepared to invade his territory. She had never met a man with this many G.I. Joes, perhaps even more than her brothers had combined. But this might have been because her dad was a Navy S.E.A.L. and having army men in the house would have made him very upset. Mary dated a Marine once, and her dad would get very proud whenever he came around. He would get out of his chair, which grew increasingly difficult towards the end, shake his hand and exclaim,

“Semper Fi!”

Mary was not sure what it was exactly. She knew some of it though. The man was significantly taller than her, but not tall enough to make them an odd couple. The man wore fitted clothing. This was very important because if he did not, she might have failed to see the fledgling gut starting to form under his shirt. She did not love his gut, but it also went to show he was not afraid of it. Perhaps most importantly, he was dark. His eyes were glassy and deep set so he looked like he never got enough sleep, he was tanned so he must have been the Middle-Eastern kind of Jew, rather than the curly red-haired kind, and every time she thought about this it made her feel warm. But that was all she could account for. Beyond those superficial things, she had no idea what she was about to get herself into.

Mary sat with this man for an indeterminable amount of time making “Pow! Pow!” and “You’re dead!” come from the little men and laughter from the big man. She was deciding whether she was drunker than the man, which she was sure she was since she was very small and had not eaten anything yet, when a pounding shook the door. Mary and her man looked at each other in terror. They couldn’t leave the bathroom like this, not with all of these G.I. Joes spread all across the bathroom floor and the stench of booze sitting on their shoulders. And how could they get out anyway, they were drunk. He nodded at her and she put the G.I. Joes in her bag quickly, but still one by one, there was still some need for order. She stood up, dropped her pants and fell on to the toilet. The man poked his head near the door and calmly told the woman knocking that his girlfriend had no bowel muscles so he had to hold her body in a way that her waste could fall out of her and that sometimes this took a while. The woman shook her head at the sight of Mary’s naked bottom leaned over and walked away. He closed the door softly behind her while Mary pulled up her pants. The man stared at Mary as she buttoned her pants, half smiling, half something else. She grabbed her bag and they strolled out of the bathroom together like they were sober. The man sat back down at his table and Mary kissed him on his whiskey warm, red, cheek as she walked out of the café.

On her way home Mary purchased a bag of army men with parachutes and tossed her books into the book drop at the library.

The Extra Man

It always seemed harder for me. Something about writers being people who find writing more difficult than others. I am unsure if I know who told me that, but it is only sometimes true. Like how sometimes wearing all black makes you look thinner, but sometimes it just emphasizes things you meant to hide. Like the fact that you sweat. Because white lines on the sides of your shirt can mean only one thing. And sometimes, wearing all black means that you have something else to hide. Like the fact that you have no idea what you’re doing.

The boy I am kissing in front of the Pink should have come a few chapters back, but we never consummate our relationship until this point. Possibly because he almost died after our first date. I mean this figuratively. He has moved away from the city of Buffalo and come back more than anyone I know. Mostly he was trying to escape the wasteland of this city, but he was also engaged to a lady in Tennessee, studying in Texas, and doing nothing in New York City. He has written erotic romance stories for magazines, but he wouldn’t show them to me.

The day I meet him is a sunny afternoon in March. He is sitting at Spot Coffee on Elmwood. I order an iced Americano and he looks at me over a Jonathan Ames book called “Metamorphosis.” It’s a series of memoirs by transvestites. Since no one in Buffalo knows who Jonathan Ames is, I walk over. We walk to the park and talk about things that don't matter now, because the rest of this day is a horrible mess. By this I mean that as we are walking around Delaware Park we are ambushed by a bitch of a thunderstorm. I say bitch because only a woman could cry that hard. We are lackadaisical about getting back to somewhere dry. He walks me to my car and even though he is soaking wet I do not give him a ride home.

I do not hear from him for over two years. Then I see him outside of school one day. I ask to borrow his lighter, just to make sure it is him.

I call him late at night and tell him I am going home to get my portfolio and my toothbrush and that I will be over shortly.

We are too destructive to make it work.

I wonder what it is like not to write about sex or drugs or New York City. What do other people write about if not these things? How do I tap human emotion if I am not sure I am human?

I deserved this.

I respond to a man who posts on Craigslist that he can fix any problem. I ask him how one fixes a heart filled with liquid nitrogen. We drink beers together several times. He is a gentle kisser and an artist. His work looks like ink thrown on paper and I don’t know what this means. He sees me kissing another boy in front of the Pink and tells me I will be good material. I am legitimately sorry, but I am unsure what for, exactly. This is how I come to realize that I am incapable of letting myself be loved.

I post for him on Missed Connections about a dream I have. It starts out slow.  He kidnaps me, but I am not scared because I know he is never going to hurt me.  He holds my hand as he guides me blindfolded through the woods.  I get tired and he offers to carry me, only he carries me over his shoulders like a doll or a bow staff.  I fall asleep and when I wake up we are in a cabin and he is making us coffee.  Cream and sugar. He forgets I am lactose intolerant and I get really sick.  He holds my hair while I vomit off the porch.  There was is toilet but a claw foot tub where we take a bath in our clothes.  I fall asleep on him in the tub.  When I wake up I am naked in his bed.  I did not know where he is so I stayed in bed.  He runs in and picks me up; my clothes mysteriously appear on my body.  We have to go and go now.  We run.  We run until I wake up in the morning sopping wet and naked in my bathtub.

I post again after this that I am sorry for the thing I did. I know what it is now. I hope that he isn’t using his sex for revenge.

They don't love you like I love you.

How to make a planet: A large cool cloud of hydrogen and helium begins to collapse under its own self gravity. This leads to increased temperature and rate of motion. The result is a rapidly rotating disk of gas and dust.

This time he tells him. This is okay because I figure out that he uses my sex for revenge. This is okay because he makes me tea right after and eggs over easy with bacon for breakfast and drives me to school. We take his son to see Rain, the Beatles tribute band. His son was named for John Lennon. We rarely talk after this.

The reason I don’t go to AA is not because I want to drink, even though I do, but because if I can learn to live with out alcohol I am scared I will learn to live with out other things too. Like over tweezing my eyebrows and Jewish men and tattoos.

On a night, I meet a boy in a bar. I say boy because he is twenty-three. I sit next to him for no reason other than he reminds me of a man I once loved. He is lovely to talk to and when I put my face near his I can feel his energies enter my body through my nasal cavity. It may have just been cigarette smoke or cocaine.

I have a propensity for strange and unconventional relationships.

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.

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.