St. Valentine's Day Massacre: 81st Year Commemorative Edition

A little blood, a little moonlight. See, I'm not so useless after all.

"When You Have The Gift, Like We Do..."

VII.

What the palm reader said. We wait until we are settled—sidled—onto bar stools, wind left whipping—wincing outside—to talk about indentations and impressions and fates. Kay’s aura is relatively clean and Stevi has a cracked crown and I, well. My heart is blocked.

“She said I have to free my brother from limbo,” I confess.

“How are you supposed to do that?” Stevi wonders.

“No fucking clue. Maybe instead of calling her hotline I should sleep with another Crowley Brother?”

Our cackles hit the ceiling before our chins tilt upward and, elbows bent, we wield beer cans like archers, aiming acutely. For all the ill prognoses, we can’t dismantle the mirth. Kay is first to leave.

“There she goes, there she goes again.” But we don’t grieve.

This was supposed to be my year to be selfish and now I’m half-considering what munitions are required for an overnight in purgatory. I am $20 poorer and cannot contentedly believe such restlessness could be my vocation, that such a waiting room could even exist. I can only shrug and sigh. And acquiesce.

I will spelunk for story’s sake. I will set you free, on my own terms. If you promise not to climb on my back.



VI.

“Ter, raise your hand,” Dean implores.

“Why, what was the question?” I ask dazedly.

“The question was, ‘Who actually liked high school?’”

My palm obligingly shoots up and the room giggles, not at my expense, but at my distance, distinction. I am a girl off-tempo, particularly this evening, and never quite deserving of the extemporaneous Most Likely to Succeed.

My forearm retracts when I remember that I had dreams.



V.

I lose three pounds while I’m home for Christmas. I want to gorge on meats and cheeses and pastries, but I can’t choke it down. The refrigerator squeals at me, smugly, like a malevolent bottled-nosed dolphin, every time the door is opened and closed. The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with me—only what’s not wrong with me—and I frankly stop caring after I am prescribed something strong and given permission to get back on the bottle.

When I am autopsied, you will find your burden, writhing or swimming or circulating. I take on your burden, and yours, and yours. People will tell you that I’m mature, that I’m responsible, that I’m an old soul. I hate that. They can’t see me collapsing under the weight of their shortcomings.

“Why do you keep chasing after your brother?” My mother is serious, almost grave, and she turns my chin with her right hand so I can’t divert my gaze. “Why do go for these charity cases? You’re not going to save him.”

When you cut open my insides, it will be hard to tell that I was striving for immutable beauty. That I was trying for ineffable truth.



IV.

Boxing Day feels like a blanket. I am somewhere else, but clothed and centered. I don’t parade my quixotic residue in a sad or impaired or lofty way. It’s just how it is; I moved. But this couch is still crouched in my heart; this basement is still my brethren. I make promises to play songs on a guitar, songs that I never learned. I drink more than I need and stay longer than I intend. My left hand delivers a heavy pour into a steaming mug at my right, and a boy who knew Older Brother compliments, “Definitely his sister.” Or, I take it as a compliment. The intonation crosses air to remind me of blood we shared. And I remind the boy that I met him 14 years ago, maybe, when my dad drove him home to save a batch of cookies he accidentally left in the oven.

There are new friends in old places because I choose centrifugal force.



III.

I can’t think about One without thinking of The Other. I’m prone, squirming, sweating, reliving the 11 courses of Christmas dinner, the table wine and lager, the rote of early morning catechism. Littlest Brother wants to know why lone tears keep forming at the crest of my eye, submitting to gravity in soundless cascade, and I can only lie: I’m drunk. There’s a worm eating my stomach. I’ll tell you when you’re older.

Anger was never my forte; it never seemed an evolved enough emotion to dedicate myself to fully. I’m reluctant to dabble in negative space. But what I would tell One—I deserved better than I Don’t Know. And what I would tell The Other—You got your Validation of Marketability and I got my Free Beers, so let’s call it a draw. I am loath to loathe, but I can escape. I will escape and sing.



II.

“Discretion is the better part of valor,” he says.

“It’s knowing when to fight,” I volunteer.

“Shakespeare said that. But what do I know? I’m just your cab driver.”

“With all due respect, sir. William Shakespeare didn’t drive me home tonight.”

He smiles with his eyes closed. I exit before he can speak. I need a bed and I don’t wait for my change.



I.

I was conceived after a wedding, which I knew. I was a week late, which always surprised me. (I mostly make excuses to leave bed early because I realize this doesn’t last forever.) And, my mother tells me now—as I unwrap a layer of aluminum foil, a layer of banana leaf, to reveal chocolate molé and sweet corn masa, a chunk of pork and a strip of pimiento—she tried to dislodge me from her womb by eating only tamales, but I wouldn’t budge. Then she tried to induce labor with a gigantic heart-shaped box of chocolate. Only when the grid was emptied, and the snowstorm had stopped, and the post-Valentine’s Day sales died, could I fathom an entrance.

She tells this story like my foray into living was regal and pronounced. When I unwrap layers it reminds her of lengths. I hope that after twenty-five years I may weave a tale of indigestion for my brood.

This is a happy anecdote that will never make it to a book. To you, it hasn’t made a murmur. But I keep it here, waiting for something to kick.

A Brief History of Dads

If you've tried looking me up, the DSM IV doesn't have a place for my kind. So here it is, succinct susceptibilities to explain my predilection for the older gents. By no means complete, but some of the features that make me complete, birth to present.


1985

Pushed out of the uterus on the early morning of Mardi Gras. Adapts well to the notion of being naked and ogled by elders in exchange for beads.

Spends crucial mental- and pulmonary-development months starring as The Lucky Baby at Babylon Lanes, a tobacco-tarnished talisman passed around her parents’ bowling circle.

1986

Dad introduces his wobbly, clapping daughter to the Amazin’ Mets in a victory against Houston on July 3. Apt preparation for the coke-snorting, room-wrecking, egomaniacal jocks who would hit on his wobbly, clapping daughter in fraternity houses 20 years later.

1987

Demands to dress up as “Chinese food” for Halloween, prompting her mother to tailor a politically incorrect interpretation of a Japanese geisha and forevermore equip her with an alias to entertain businessmen at tea houses in Kyoto.

1988

Imaginary boyfriend, Billy, debuts. He is 21, drives a red Cadillac, lives on Mexico Island and does not win Mom’s imaginary approval.

Learns how to play poker in Atlantic City, and is thereby inducted into one of the largest of old man milieus before entering kindergarten.

1989

Develops first pseudo-sexual crush on Mike, her public pool’s swim instructor. Foreign to effectual flirting, takes to splashing at inopportune, unrequited moments. Never advances beyond the level of Guppy.

1990

Develops first pseudo-puppy crush on Steven, the oldest kid on the school bus. Vaguely familiar with the biological concept of peacocking, she is drawn to his Reebok Pumps and his ability to consume a whole cupcake in two bites.

1992

Sees her grandfather for a final visit before mandatory estrangement, the direct result of him trying to strangle her grandmother with a telephone cord. The first of the familial males to isolate her, she mourns a Dennis the Menace-watching and soft-boiled egg-eating partner-in-crime.

1993

Seeks counsel in her five-years-older BFF on How to Write a Dirty Letter. Drops a note that alludes to “playing doctor” in the sweatshirt hood of yet another schoolbus crush—Sean, the freckled, brace-faced and ribbed sweater-wearing elder statesman of Hobart Route 9.

1994

Takes the amateur pornography short story circuit by storm with an offering penned by herself and a sleepover accomplice, in which protagonist Sydney Cartwell, an Australian with a BIG PENIS, decides to HAVE SEX while using A CONDOM with a girl who says MMM. For an entire paragraph. Her mother finds the story on loose leaf paper in her bookshelf. The accomplice is, undoubtedly, never invited to sleep over again.

Harbors an improbable crush on Rob, the affably misunderstood community college professor who runs an astronomy course in her enrichment workshop. Quickly learns that inflatable starlabs are the most romantic place to meet your fellow air sign.

1995

Copes with the stroke of her non-estranged grandfather, a pitfall that renders the mental and physical faculties of her biggest fan completely non-responsive. Noticing the incalculable vacancy in his eyes when she floats her softball sportsmanship trophy before his face, she internalizes this as her symbolic death of patriarchs.

1996

Wooed by the wondrous world of America Online chat rooms in a hot, dial-up minute, she lures such luminaries such as SirSexySam, Shlngboy99 and KingSc0rp with pictures of girls cut from magazines and promises of future nudies.

1997

Develops the most inappropriate, never-to-be-seen-or-mentioned-again crush possible on her brother’s uncle—no, not her uncle—at her brother’s understatedly tragic funeral. Um. Don’t judge her grief.

1998

Male history teacher wins her over with such lines as, “You’re much too fun for the Ivy League,” and “Yours was the second-bloodiest diorama I graded this year.”

Fine-tunes the finite identity of Julee Wellington, her promiscuous 23-year-old Manhattanite artist Instant Messenger alter ego. Forms lasting correspondence with Brian from Seattle, with help from a picture of her friend’s skate punk older sister. And promises of nudies.

1999

Reads Lolita. Claims to not see “what all the fuss is about,” but curses her rearing and genetics for not allowing a nymphet pre-pubescence to take hold.

Watches Robin Ventura hit his legendary Grand Single in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series on television, in a 15-inning game lasting five hours and 46 minutes. Masturbates for the same length of time immediately following the game.

2000

Remains completely undaunted when mother gives birth to a miracle baby and the hometown populace immediately assumes it’s hers.


2001

Wins first prize in a poetry contest for an entry with graphic references to statutory rape. Reads prize-winning free verse in a hotel banquet room before her parents. Oh, joy.

2002

Watches the movie Beautiful Girls. Not Timothy Hutton’s best role, but it basically. explains. everything.


2003

Male English teacher writes in her senior yearbook, “Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.” Swoon.

Loses virginity to a junior after senior prom. Never sleeps with a younger guy again. Ever.

2004

Assumes a three-year-long crush on The Boy in the Study Lounge, the lone of her dormitory contemporaries to use a trucker hat to hide male pattern baldness and wear old man slippers to solve problem sets.

Finds a minefield of dejected dads when she starts working the overnight shift at Home Depot. Just sayin’.

2005

Creates a football home game T-shirt slogan that attempts, for the first time, to elucidate her long-standing unnatural proclivity in a Big Ten forum. Ahem: Thank Your Dad for Parents Weekend.

2006

Nearing blackout, puckers up for the kiss that lives in Evanston infamy—her coordinates, Bill’s Blues, and her victim, a 50-year-old golf course groundskeeper unflatteringly dubbed “Mike the Irish” by his cohorts.

2007

Tiring of peers, opts to date a 37-year-old part-time tennis instructor, beach bum, drunk driver, progeny of an electrical engineering professor and Mike the Irish acquaintance. Breaks it off after he texts her a picture of a rainbow, but not before employing his brute strength to help her move to a new Lakeview apartment.

Joins an intermediate-level co-recreational slow pitch softball team in Roscoe Village. Embraces her veritable-ringer status as the cookie-baking, sock-wearing, youngest 20-something on a 30-something squad.


2008

Forms the band Weekend Dad with Kay and Espe. The Hawaiian shirt-and-Doobie Brothers concept never makes it past the first rehearsal.

Finds unhappiness with a 34-year-old reformed heroin addict and ex-convict bartender who is evicted during their courtship. What else is new.

Tries to semi-retire the term “dad” in favor of the acronym “IUs” (Irresponsible Uncles) to better describe her conquests. “Dad” rebounds as the irremovable colloquialism when she considers the probability of her trysts’ seeds’ whereabouts.

Forms a fleeting penpalship with a 43-year-old NASA rocket scientist and microbrewery stakeholder from Maryland. His Julie Newmar fetish take correspondence to a taxing level, then a very terminated level.


2009

Sensing distance from her roots when she takes to dating guys within ten years of her own age, registers “worldsgreatestfather” as her personalized Facebook URL. Blessed be.

Tributosaurus

Acceptance is malleable, 12 years having known you hidden, 12 exhumed. We overlap. Specious zipped sterility. To anything I give humans; circling packless, patchwork of whereabouts, requesting cirrhosis as finale. Slept with two brothers to figure you out. Human skull, utility knife, two beer bottles filled with piss. Why I shared a room with the younger, perioding between the legs. Strategy, soundly, to make not noise; rope on flannel, tightened till I belted. Uniformed reform, prepared for auspicious noon. Sleeping bag, minus musk, Seminole Indians to distract me. (Bitch didn't do her half of the report.) Overcast, overture. Canon, cannon, canyon; easy to fossilize. Finalize, as a mutable thing.

From the Archives of a Very Dead Brother

Internal debate: One of many warning signs?

My Heart's Just Not In It

September makes a good case for reincarnation—tired-but-crisp panoramic, silent-but-rustling demeanor. I feel old tracing the contours of new objects. This is supposed to be makeout weather, but it's making me wither.

For the purposes of this blog, I'm on extended book leave. You might see me in a coffee shop, slouching, backspacing, contrabanding my banishment. I haven't been stringing sentences to my liking. Memories are in danger of being corroded by revisionists. Five weeks ago, my mom apologized for letting my brother abuse me as a child. I can't be so sure that he did.

Simply: I'm getting to a point where I will have known my brother dead as long as he was alive. I'm nearing a limit of minor authority and major storytelling; I'll turn the option to audience to determine relevancy. When People in Bars ask how many siblings, I might just cut him from the list. It will pain me, in the beginning.

Superficially: this is the third straight week my morning commute has involved fantasies of hurling myself before an oncoming train or being carried away by red balloons or being kidnapped by a schemer who mistakes my family for having savings. Something is off. I'm her anxious kid, and sometimes her grisly one, but never more than that. Never requiring disinfectant, reprimand, tourniquet. She’s overheard me eulogize, “Life is beautiful, even when it isn’t.”

It seems as if I want to jettison baggage, but I keep boarding passengers. Zealots with charisma—always unemployed—accusing me of sacrificing dreams to day jobs while accepting my handouts. Rasputins who drink my beer, make my clothes smell like cigarettes, eat ribeye steaks in my bed. Amazed at how easily I bruise. This is where I could use, at least, the disinfectant and the reprimand.

But tourniquet, I turn to quit. I wither in this weather, when I should know better. We all know better. I could afford to sit up straight.

Mass Romantic at Critical Mass

When everyone had viciously paired off—girl with boy, in bathroom, in coat closet—my crush had left because his crush disappeared—I left. I went to find my shoes, I waded through vomit on the stairwell to find my shoes, and I left. It was the 54,864th time I had wished the story ended differently, and the 54,864th time I had done nothing to protest.

..

Geoff thought he owed it to me to wipe the slate clean. “Every time she saw you in here, she told me, she wanted to win,” his confession, on New Year’s. I have this terrible habit of returning to the scene of the crime at critical points of absolution.

“How do you mean?” I ask. I’m naïve, but maybe not.

“Courtney. She would ask me, ‘Is that Bobby’s girl?’ And then she would tell me that, the times when you would leave, she would go home and sleep with him and consider it a victory, considering your popularity here.”

I just assumed that Bobby, a fuck-up at so many things in life, was at least faithful to me. I indulged most of him—jail time, drug addiction, eviction, forgery, unpaid tabs, onions from a previous tenant rotting in the refrigerator, pathologies, fisticuffs, fetishes. I shrugged bemusedly when I started getting phone calls asking for him by birth name (the calls bore a welcomed semblance to the Popcorn & Movies Video calls that would plead for me to return Dead Brother’s porno rentals on behalf of his soul). I turned my head when he ruined his best friend’s credit. But now I knew there was a Courtney and another girl named Terror, who spelled it differently. Now I knew that I would spend January 1 drinking until blackout and January 2 getting tested for everything.

“Kay, it shouldn’t bother me like it does, but it does. I thought I was the one unsociopathic and unselfish thing he had.”

“Terror, stay there. We’re coming to get you and we’re bringing you to Little Vietnam and we’re not coming back to Lakeview for a really long time.”

My head drooped in my bowl and my hair entwined with pho noodles and I meditated on the positives of coming up negative.

..

I only went home with you because you looked like Charlie Day—he’s the likeable one on that show—except in the morning, you didn’t. Your boss had announced last call and I knew I had, maybe, 45 seconds to convey my best and worst intentions; which, I swear, I only needed five of those seconds, wallflower I’m not. Even though I had sworn off bartenders, swore I was cured, I told you my name and why I was staring, and you said, “I work here, you don’t have to go.” You were an actor (once) and I indulged this, until I couldn’t, and so I suggested a 4 a.m. tour. You took me to inspect the lines, showed me the inventory, told me the names of ghosts haunting the bar. We caught a cab on Armitage, and before you told the driver where we were going, turned to me and started, “I don’t mean to be forward, but…”

You didn’t ask me any questions and your radiator made it too noisy to sleep. Your apartment was messy; you owned trunks and instruments and chairs without knowing their histories, a personal vexation; you owned books whose plots and characters you didn’t understand. You thought we were kindreds because we cried at the same two Eels shows. The only thought that stalled my morning beeline for the door, my half-sweater still half-off, was that maybe I should steal your pot. But Logan Square is far too incestuous for souvenirs.

..

Because, the rule is, Sir, that in those 45 minutes, I am not an abstract. In those 45 minutes, because my night could have wound any which way, and I chose you, I must insist that you care about the one you’re with. Even if you must lie. I can only live regretless when I know the present is accounted for.

..

“I want to make pretentious mix CDs for you.” – m4w, 23, Logan Square

I didn’t go in trying to prove that I could, connect with a peer, that is, maybe. That I could have sex that didn’t make me sad or dizzy or prompt me to count plaster cracks or ceiling tiles. I found you in Strictly Platonic. And you were good on your promises, and I on mine—e-mails, B-sides, bourbon pecan truffles, apple pear pie. It took an adorably long time for you to undo my belt—“It’s a military issue”—and you fake-snored and I thought you could be enough for a Chicago winter. But we watched a movie with subtitles and at the credits you pulled away. “I might be moving to Los Angeles this weekend.”

That is, maybe. This town is selfish.

..

I will tell you swiftly: you are not my soulmate so stop texting me. I don’t know what that word means. “It was so good meeting you. I would like to take you out to dinner sometime.” *Meeting* you. I am wary of gerunds. Regretful that I know stories about your mom, the school teacher who remarried your dad’s best friend; and your lesbian stepsister—you two are inseparable; and the intricacies of Minnesota, sleepier than I had guessed. Buddy, you have no idea who you’re dealing with. You interrupted when I tried to count off ghosts who matter to me.

..

For my birthday I wanted nothing more than to serve guests drinks while wearing roller skates for eight hours in my party dress. This domestic subservience fetish may be the salient (rather, lone) anti-archetypal trait a Type A mother passed on to her Type A daughter. I find it endearing, and maybe you do too?

A guest texts me while I’m blow-drying, eyelining, blushing.

“Is ur 80yo boyfriend gonna be there?”

I don’t know which boyfriend he’s talking about, 80 years old or otherwise. Shrug.

I text back. “He has his kids this weekend.”

..

“How many guys did you date this week?” I hang up. I hang up on Dad. I’ve never hung up on a parent—I am (typically) that mature—but I’ve never heard him drip so snidely, judgmentally, at this distance. He calls two minutes later. “I’m sorry. I know there are a lot of losers out there. I wouldn’t want you to rush into making a mistake.” I don’t rush; I painstake. “Eff you, lemme talk to Mom,” I demand.

My dad is in the business of odds, it seems. He likes to tell me when the Mega Millions jackpot is running above $100 million, and what recent karma (I think Catholics call it something else) is sectioning off his prize share. I should have leveled. “See, Dad. The odds of you winning the lottery are one in 175,711,536, whereas as the odds of getting someone to come home with me is about one in two.” Or. The sad part is that I think I’m leveling.

I don’t hunt for sport. I am guilty of peacocking, chasing boys who make me cringe, over-committing time to casualties. You are not trophies, but aversions averred. We don’t have much time! But never sport.

At the end of Raising Arizona. “But I saw an old couple being visited by their children, and all their grandchildren too. The old couple weren't screwed up. And neither were their kids or their grandkids.” I cry because I want that.

..

“How come your room looks like a hotel?” Kay quizzes me from home.

“I don’t… know?” I inflect, uncertain. “How does it look like a hotel?”

“Your bed is made. Who is this guy?”

“Oh, that’s Sean. We met at InnJoy. Total Captain America. He’s from Oregon and teaches physics to minority students in Garfield Park and bikes everywhere and lived in Guatemala and speaks better Spanish than I do and he gave me a book to read on government-assisted coups, it’s weird.”

“Sounds weird.”

“Yeah, also, he’s really aerodynamic. He has a shaved head and the rest of him is kind of hairless. I guess it helps out with his superhero speed and costume.”

“So are you going to get a date out of this?”

“I dunno. I can’t date a Captain America. I mean, how long until he finds out that I’m a complete asshole?”

“You’re not an asshole!”

Which counts, if only a little bit, coming from the roommate who punched a friend in the head while vomiting over a balcony.

“But I'm not Wonder Woman, unless we're going by my FICO score.”

..

Back to odds. I try so hard 100 percent of the time, I leap so fast for love, that it’s only natural to believe (in a vacuum) that someone would try for me.

And that’s how I found myself flailing and screaming and crying at a party (unprecedented) and kicked out of three cabs in one night at a windchill of 25-below-zero, wearing only one mitten and lugging a fifth of whiskey, dripping on and over and inside my messenger bag.

I kicked myself out of three cabs to vomit in the snow. I’m scrupulous.

The first cab let me go. The second cab didn’t want to. “Miss, stay here. I can’t let you freeze to death.” The driver clutched my palm with his right, stroked the back of my hand with his left, the engine idling. This was the human contact I had been waiting for all week. Most girls would have freaked. “Miss, I can’t let you go. I’m not saying this as your cab driver,” he intoned. “I’m saying this as your friend.”

Always was a flight risk, Friend. The third cab didn’t want to let me go, either. “I’m new in town.” Breaks off, reaches for the glove compartment. “Here, I have some napkins. I’m new in town and I’m looking for friends. Will you be my friend?”

I exit. Still immaculate, but I feel like irrefutable trash. How, I wonder as I stumble up sickly fluorescent stairs, did they see the goodness in me?

..

Captain America calls and I’m not sure if I want to answer. I pick up; I don’t bother to disguise my surprise.

“This is really awkward for me,” he begins. “The doctor said I should tell everyone I’ve been in close contact with…”

This is it. This is the end. The death of my sex life. People are never who they seem to be and there is no such thing as a liquor-logged 3 a.m. lesson learned and I need to cloister myself and, of course we were protected, but stop it, don’t look at me. Holy fuck. Bobby didn’t give me anything communicable—not after cheating on me with two girls or getting evicted or the cat with fleas or those onions that would probably still be in the crisper had I been able to go back to bed that morning without the mold haunting my dreams. Captain America, you ruined my life.

“The doctor said I have bed bugs.”

I exhale and then I pause and then I repeat his last words, alternating pitch on the syllables: relief on “bed”, levity on “bugs”...

“Bed bugs? Bed bugs?”

“It’s not really that funny,” he insists. “It’s pretty painful.”

“Oh, no. I’m a writer—this is hilarious.” I catch my breath. “It could have been something so much worse.”

“Well, I suppose that’s one way to look at it. Let me know when you read that book. Maybe we can do lunch and talk about it.”

“Yeah, sure.”

I hang up and I laugh. Just a little bit, and then a lot. Buddy, that’s the only way to look at it. Trademark guffaw, head thrown back, I can’t contain myself; I roll off the bed. “FUCK.” The floor hits hard and doesn’t care that my life has gone back to normal. Pause. Raucous laughter resumes! I continue laughing under my bed, knees tucked at my chest, feet hitting the radiator. It sounded like he had a lot of calls to make.

..

I haven’t burnt out, and despite your fears, I don’t expect to. Sad and beautiful are inextricable adjectives. I believe that, and so long as the two words remain appendages to these nighttime ambiguities, I don’t worry about me. You don’t worry about me, and I don’t worry about me either.

..

“Free Asobi Seksu ticket for victim of ennui.” I posted that Craigslist ad because I needed someone who needed to believe (again). Know that the audition was an invitation to distraction, because I can’t take myself too seriously.

The Winner, tattooed all over, in only black ink—brackets and prime numbers and summation signs. His ennui extended to writing unsettling letters to his ex-girlfriend on Craigslist and I would be lying if I didn’t admit that his muted serial killer tendencies—unemployed and roommateless and lifeless art hanging as a reminder that he didn’t matriculate; immaculately clean apartment that he insisted was dirty; not wanting to ask me to take my shoes off at the door, but twitching when I pretended I wouldn’t; a dog, Harvey, named after the Jimmy Stewart film—turned me way, way on. Loneliness packaged in pleasantry—“we’re the hottest people here”; “you’re wise beyond your years”; “I can’t thank you enough.” We ended on a “see you soon,” a beautifully sad see-you-soon, him in boxer shorts and me bounding to Casual Friday in a recycled, off-the-shoulder, ripe with Empty Bottle beer-and-hipster stench, and me being the one of us two who actually believed it.

I thought I learned my lesson, but I drank half a bottle of Bushmill’s just to make sure.

..

I spend my days alternately wanting greatness and praying I am swallowed by the jaws of dark matter. It will take a special person to understand my desires to be both famous and infamous. I am self-aware; I know how to read for comprehension, how to write for an audience. But these are compromises, not avenues.

It was the 54,865th time the cab driver had no idea where I lived, and maybe the first time I wasn’t sure I could help him out.

..

“Do you want to come over?” I ask.

“I’m not sure. I don’t want to be like that guy in your blog. That’s Not the Kind of Love I’m Used To.”

“There were different elements at play,” I insist. “There was another girl there that I didn’t write about in case she read this, it was complicated.”

I have more damaging first impressions than anything I could possibly hide here, but I am forced to consider that I might have never been the underdog that I think I am.

..

Her husband is dead by the first week of May and my Bartender regards me, not differently, not peripherally, but not quite directly, as if I’m either in the foreground or background of objects: short (whiskey) or tall (Pabst Blue Ribbon), edible (bereavement casseroles) or legible (sympathy cards); tangible and memorable (photographs) or untouchable and inconsequential (“I’m going to have to ask you to leave”). But with this foreshortening, she is strongest for me, in a way I didn’t ask of her.

“I loved him so much, Terror. I had to prepare for this day. He’s 15 years older, oh, but I loved him so much. I didn’t want to have to leave him. I would stay for 12 hours and drink coffee and rest in that uncomfortable chair until I could see him smile. That’s how he would repay me, because that’s all I needed to see. And I told him. Whenever you’re ready to go.”

I take a sip from the short, a gulp from the tall. “It would be my great fortune to have a fraction of those feelings.”

“Niña. It will take you time. You see things nobody else sees.”

Getting back to ghosts. I don’t see them, but I feel their urgency. We’re going to die soon. We don’t have much time! With love, you’re supposed to be fundamental and rapture-ready. And you can scratch your head—why now, Terror?—but this has always been me, matchmaking and leaning against walls at parties and scoffing at mortals, knowing that the world will see me as a cynic, but acquiescing to the notion because it’s somewhat cynical to believe that you’re the last living romantic.

..

Interlude: This Isn’t the Kind of Love That I’m Used To.

..

I practically gave you the lead for your story: Air Sex Championships lead to real sex. I hope this works out, if only to tell everybody how we met.

Everything else I said last night? Let’s not over-think it.