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.