Irrefragable: I Am No Sylvia Plath

“I have my jeans special made for me now,” he said.

I looked down at the dark blue color and back up at him. “Really? They don’t look so special to me.”

“Remember Jesse?”

“From Boston?”

“Well, yeah, but he lives in San Francisco now. He’s a designer and he makes my jeans to fit me perfectly… my boots are Marc Jacobs, too.”

I laughed. “I know,” I said, “You’ve had them forever.”

“But they have a hole. See? Right here.” And he bent over and pressed at where the leather should meet the sole, but didn’t. “I have new tattoos, too,” he continued; then he did this shrug thing where he darts his eyes to the right and shrugs again. He’d been doing since we first met under the fluorescent lights in my on-campus college apartment. Those lights were unforgiving.

“I’ve written songs about you,” he said.

“I’ve written stories about you,” I responded. He smiled and pushed the chair back against the wall away from the desk piled with money, mostly ones, from his long night at the bar. It was 6am, the bar was closed and we were the only two who remained.

“Why don’t you come by to see me more?” he asked, not making eye contact, but instead, focusing on the end of his burning cigarette. But before I could answer him, he went on: “I changed my shirt when I knew you were coming back. I didn’t look good in the other one; this one is better—don’t you think?”

The shirt was a pale grey button down, nothing extraordinary or noteworthy, but a step up from the t-shirt he had on earlier. “And you put on a tie,” I said.

“I did!” he said excitedly, and he pulled at it. “I love it. You bought me a tie once.”

“Timothy, I bought you a lot of things once.”

“You know, you’ll always be my girl, right?” I let out a loud laugh. “I love your laugh,” he said; then again, he shrugged, darted his eyes to the right and shrugged again like a kid unsure of what he just said or meant, or even why he was in the room.

“In some ways, yes.”

***

My friend Briana and I had gone to dinner. We had talked about music, politics and Occupy Wall Street. She had told me about her trip to Italy from where she had just returned, and I told her how I saw Drive and was confused by it. When we finished the last bit of the pitcher of beer, we headed north to the east village for another drink. As we walked past the dark bar, the one that descends into the ground beneath the Japanese restaurant, Timothy was outside smoking a cigarette. He put the cigarette out and moved toward me; he wrapped his arms around me, kissed my cheek and held on, his fingertips somewhere between my shoulder blades, his smoky breath in my ear.

When he stepped back, he looked down at his shirt: “I look so bad,” he said. He pressed his hand against his mouth to hide what had become of his teeth since I loved him in college: they were broken and soft; they were deteriorated from drugs and everything else. Soft teeth do that, I am told.

We agreed we’d come back shortly, and we did. After Briana left around 4am, Timothy and I closed the bar; we sat ourselves on two barstools.

“I got this scar when I fell off my bike,” he said and he showed me the back of his hand, the left one and he pressed on it for a second. “I broke my leg last year, too… but you didn’t know that, did you?”

“I did,” I said.

“But you never came to visit…”

“I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t remember my birthday this year either.”

“Yes, I did,” I laughed, “I just pretended I didn’t.”

“I remembered yours.”

“I know you did. You always do.”

“I do, don’t I? Why is that?”

“Because I ingrained it into your skull like a broken record. I forced you to remember it until your dying day—that’s why.”

“You always made me feel brave,” he said.

“You always made me feel safe,” I responded, and he reached for my leg. I let his hand sit there, admiring the specks of paint imbedded around his cuticles, splashed across his fingertips.

“I’ve been painting a lot. I painted earlier today before work.”

“Good,” I said as I hopped off the stool. “Don’t you have to count that wad of cash piled up over there?” I pointed at the end of the bar.

“I do, I do. Come with me?”

I nodded and walked along next to him to the backroom. He reached for my hand, and I pulled away.

So there I was, in the middle of the night, in a backroom on Avenue A with the first boy I ever loved. The lights were same fluorescent as my apartment where we first met, and it made me let out a slight sigh.

He offered me the chair, but I chose to lean my back against the wall, feeling the paper calendar shuffle against my shirt. His eyes were a paler blue than they had been years before, the freckle on his lower lip was less pronounced than when I used to kiss his mouth on the dark street outside his apartment in Boston, in the elevator in my apartment building in Durham, New Hampshire—he was faded.

When he pushed the chair back against the wall, he grabbed my wrist and pulled me into him. I was standing up, and dropped to my knees. I rested my head on his lap and looked up at him as he messed with my hair.

“I always preferred your hair short,” he said.

“I know.”

From the main part of the bar, “Earth Angel” came on, and he leapt up. “This is my jam!” he said, and again grabbed my wrist.

“I can’t believe you have this on your iPod,” I laughed as he twirled me into him.

“How can I not?” he asked. He pulled me close to him as we danced in the dully lit bar, against the black and white tile that smelled of bleach from being cleaned just shortly after closing time. “Remember that night I came to your parents' house after we hadn’t spoken in three years? I drove all the way from New York that night to see you…”

“I do,” I said, “it was Christmas and we sat on the couch and watched A Christmas Story.”

“I was so nervous that night.” And he twirled me out and dipped me back. Before he could pull me back up, he kissed the base of my throat. I walked away before the song was over and headed to the backroom.

“You know,” I said, “if you actually get this money counted we could probably go somewhere and get food since you said you’re so hungry.”

“Right… the money.”

I stood in the doorway with my hand on my hip in a way that was more authoritative than my nature. As he approached, I noticed he had something on his tie, and reached for it. Like a mother or like someone who knew someone too long, I licked my finger and blotted it away. When I realized what I had done, I looked up at him and apologized. “I guess I’m anal in my old age,” I explained.

“I love it…” and before he could even breathe in between his sentences, he said: “you know, we’ll probably get married.”

“Ha! That’s sort of hard when you’re already engaged to someone else, isn’t it?”

“Maybe. But when we’re old we should get married—we always had so much fun together. You were the most fun of every girl I ever dated.” He sat back down on chair in front of the desk and, again, I took my place on the floor and put my head on his lap.

“You say that to all the girls, I’m sure, Timothy.”

“I don’t! You were always so… crazy.”

“Oh, here we go… I’m the crazy the one. I’m always the crazy one,” I said it like I thought it was funny, but it was mostly just hurtful. “That’s why I’m not the married one, right? That’s why every boy I’ve ever dated married someone else?”

“No,” he said, “That’s not it. You’re not simple; you’re complicated and want too much for people… not so much from them but for them. You wanted me to be a successful painter more than I did. I just wanted to get high and have fun.”

“Is that wrong?” I asked.

“No! Not at all! It just took me awhile to realize it and when I did, you were gone.”

“I couldn’t watch,” I said; then I got angry. “You dropped out of art school!”

“I don’t think I would have if we stayed together… there’s no fucking way you would have allowed it.”

He was right. He had wanted to be the next Jean-Michel Basquiat; I was going to be the next Sylvia Plath. In some ways, we both succeeded: like Basquiat, Timothy fell victim to drugs; and like Plath, I fell victim to my depression.

I looked at the time, it was almost 8am, and the sun was beginning to make its presence known through the blinds of the bar window. I rolled my head from one side to the other and sighed. “It’s late… or early rather. I should go.” I stood up from where I was sitting on the floor, and reached for my bag.

“Not yet,” he said, “stay a little longer.”

I turned to face him and his faded freckle on his lower lip, the dullness of his eyes, the way the scar, the one next to his right eye, had become less apparent. His hair was still a light ginger, and his skin, that I once in too many poetry classes compared to tissue paper, was still pale and almost transparent—just like tissue paper.

I put my hands on his flat stomach as I stood between his legs. “One last time,” he said. Again, I let out a loud laugh.

“How about you come back to me when you’re the next Basquiat like you had planned?”

“Then you’ll marry me?” he said as he smiled and slid his fingers between mine.

“Sure.” I rolled my eyes.

“Seriously!”

“Yeah, seriously…” I slung my canvas bag over my shoulder.

“Did I get you that bag?” he asked hopeful.

“No,” I said.

“It looks like something I gave you.”

“You never gave me a bag…”

“But everything I did—”

I continued the sentence for him: “Yes, everything you did give me I still have tucked away.”

“Good. Me, too.”

“I know.” I kissed his cheek, as he pulled at my skirt hem and started to slide his hand up the inside of my leg. I turned around and started walking toward the door.

“You know, if any of them break your heart, I’ll kill them, right?” he called out.

“I know, Timothy.” I didn’t turn around; I just unlocked the door and slipped into the morning. It was almost 9am, and I was hungry.

I walked the three blocks home, poured myself into my pajamas and ordered an omelet from the diner around the corner. After two bites, I was too exhausted to eat. It’s exhausting to revisit your past, and even more exhausting to admit to yourself the timing was perfect, but the people in the equation were wrong. Timothy is never going to be Jean-Michel Basquiat and I’m never going to be Sylvia Plath, and although I mourn the silliness of it all, I think it’s better this way.

Ersatz: A Burned Out Light Bulb

I put down the book and rolled onto my side. The window was dirty, and the lights from the streets below, the ones to the south that I had memorized, were hazy and blurry. Had I needed a clearer view, I would have reached for a rag, a substance full of ammonia or bleach; but I preferred it that way: disguising the truth.

The truth is hard to tell. I think I’ve obscured it so far off from its original form, that had it been made of clay, a perfect figure with all its limbs attached, it would now be a torso that lacked the necessary parts to escape my reconfiguring of it all. I have this way of altering things to my whim, to the way I need them to be; it is not a gift.

He sat in the window and stared into the sky as if trying to take it down with his gaze—that’s how I would write him; but the truth is, he was just leaning against the wall and there was no window in sight. And when I wrote that he looked at me, smiled, and ran the back of his hand against his cheek as if trying to wipe away food, the truth was there was no smile at all, just a straight look, a blankness, a lack of recognition. It would be as though we had never met, as if we’d just bumped shoulders one night in a bar.

I find my version of him in the protagonist of my favorite books, and I, somehow, draw myself into the mix. I’m the table beneath his flat palm, the whiskey he drinks, and the moisture from his bottom lip that is left on the rim of a glass. I’m the streets on which he walks; I’m the burned out light bulb in his bedroom, the one he can’t quite reach to replace. No one wants to be a burned out light bulb.

I use him. I make no apologies for this, nor will I ever write the ending as it will actually be. He’ll be taller or shorter, his skin will be darker or lighter, the scars will find themselves to other parts of his body, and he’ll be wearing a red sweater—this part I’ve already decided. There will be a sidewalk involved, but I won’t be in the makeup of it; I will not be locked down in gravel and dirt. I will probably wear something extravagant, like a gown I can’t afford and have no reason to be wearing at all. And the music, the song that will play during the credits, during the acknowledgements, during the endless thank yous that won’t bear his name, will be something only he will understand.

The chosen font of the words will have no meaning; the time of day will not serve as a backdrop that hints at a sequel. But the front window of the store, the one that will be just off to the left of this finale, will be smudged with fingerprints; and the fluorescent lights just on the other side will be brighter than necessary. Yes, I think that will do.

Harmartia: Geronimo’s Trampoline

Geronimo was in need of a haircut. His curly white bouffant hung like a white cloud over his eyes, and although I’m sure he could see quite fine, it must have been quite hazy under there.

I had just pulled into the driveway when I saw the tiny white furball running around the backyard shaking a stuffed animal twice his size. When I heard a woman yell his name, I again checked the address. I seemed to be at the right place.

“Geronimo! Stop being so insolent! If you don’t behave, you won’t be able to watch Days of Our Lives later!” yelled the elderly woman. Had she just said it once, I would have thought it was my ears playing tricks on me, but she threw out the threat a second and third time, so there really was no doubt. The small dog was running the risk of missing out on Days of Our Lives, and had I known anything about soap operas, I would have understood just how dire the threat was—it was about to start.

Geronimo, who couldn’t have weighed more than five pounds, dropped what pieces of stuffed animal remained and made a beeline into the house. The woman, decked out in pink gabardine pants and a yellow t-shirt that read “York, Maine” with a smiling lighthouse on it, and having realized she was being watched, turned around and looked at me.

“I’m Amanda,” I said. “I’m here to work with David and Sean.” My initial response was to tell her I wasn’t selling anything, that I wasn’t there to do her any harm, all normal things a possible bad egg might say in defense of their creepy behavior, but for once the truth came out, and I said it again: “I’m here to work with David and Sean.”

“Oh,” was her response. It came out flatly as if she had already decided she did not care for me. She pushed her hair that was equally white and puffy as Geronimo’s off her forehead. “I’m Annie. I’m Helen’s sister. I come by to check on her everyday.”

At that moment I knew two things: Helen owned the small house just on the outskirts of downtown Portsmouth, and her nephew, David, had somehow finagled his way into using her dining room for his startup company. His reason being, as he told me over the phone: “Helen didn’t need it anyway.”

Sean had been a one-night stand of my friend Holly. They had met at the Coat of Arms one night in Portsmouth where most people in town met for one-night stands, and somewhere during mid-coitus he said that he was starting a company with his friend David and they needed someone to edit their marketing material. Having been unemployed since graduation and my degree on my parents’ wall mocking me on a daily basis, Holly immediately thought of me. Then, as she explained it, she came.

“That’s the part of the evening I didn’t need to hear,” I told her over the phone the next morning.

“But it was so weird,” she said, “I said your name and pop! Maybe I’m a lesbian.”

“Well that will suck for you, because you’re not my type.”

She gave me Sean’s contact information, and he and I agreed I’d start the following Monday. It was also during that conversation that Sean put David on the phone with me to explain that Helen, his aunt and owner of the house who was so kind as to hand over that dining room was “sick.” He didn’t explain in what matter or form she was “sick,” she just was and I should be aware of it. I assumed cancer; I figured she was probably bald and for some reason he felt the need to prepare me as if I had never seen a cancer patient before.

After giving me the once over, Annie let me into the house and showed me where the boys were staked out. The dining room table, which had been pushed out of the way so this business could get up and off the ground, was against the wall and the accompanying chairs had been piled on top of it. I noticed the cheap chandelier was resting on the top chair along with several broken light bulb shards.

“We didn’t need it,” said David.

“It was too girly,” continued Sean.

I rolled my eyes. So that’s how this is going to be.

Both of the boys were 22 years old, I was 23; and while I had an exact idea of what I wanted to do with my life, they did not. They had both been sports management majors, and since the Red Sox had not called to hire either one of them in some capacity since graduation, this was the next best thing. They couldn’t pay me except for lunch—which actually translated to whatever I could find in Helen’s fridge—but eventually there would be stock options.

“Stock options?” I asked. I thought David was joking.

“Yeah,” he said quite seriously, “stock options.”

“And what is it you guys do again?”

“We’re a business that decides the net worth of other businesses’ computer hardware,” he explained in a way that seemed as though he were trying to convince his parents for some sort of startup cash. He also explained that no other company of its kind had existed, so “we’re getting in at the best time—we’ll be loaded by spring.” I knew by spring, I’d be in New York City; I also knew if these two bumbling idiots were millionaires by then, I’d cut off my right arm and throw in the towel on everything.

There was a loud knock at the door. Annie was on the other side of the glass pane pointing to the doorknob to be unlocked. “We have to lock it or Geronimo will push his way through,” explained David, “it doesn’t latch otherwise.”

I opened the door for her as Geronimo raced over my foot and into the piles of paper on the floor.

“David!” she snapped. “Did you tell Amanda about Helen yet?”

“Yes,” he said coldly trying to grab Geronimo who weaved in and out of his legs at the speed of the jackrabbit. “Annie get this fucking dog out of here! We’re about to have a business meeting!”

Annie rolled her eyes, pushed past me and snatched up the troublemaking dog. Then she turned to me and pointed her wrinkled finger that badly needed a manicure in my face. “The Kit-Kats are off limits! But you can have anything else you want! Kit-Kats are Helen’s favorite…” she said.

I was struck by her seriousness. I was also struck by David’s seriousness when he asked me to take the “minutes” for our business meeting that was mostly about how many slices of pizza they ate the night before at Sal’s, and how the cashier had “awesome jugs.”

But I kept going back to “work.” Not because I thought I’d learn anything, but because it was something to do and I couldn’t find a job anyway.

After about three weeks, Annie cornered me just when I was getting out of my car. I had barely shut the door behind me when I turned to see her coming right at me, clearly on a mission.

“Helen says she hasn’t met you yet,” she said, mildly suspicious. I wasn’t sure what she was getting at, or why she felt it necessary to approach me in such an aggressive manner. I wasn’t sure what she thought I was up to, but if I was overdoing my welcome on the pudding pops, I would cut back to three a day if need be.

“I’m only here a couple days a week for a few hours,” I explained, “so no, I haven’t met her yet.”

“Well you should,” snapped Annie, “it’s her house you’re using.” She wasn’t being mean or rude, but instead curt. It was the New Englander way of being curt; the way people from Maine are suspect of those from New Hampshire, and the New Hampshire folk are suspicious of the Massachusetts crowd and all of them are mildly confused by Connecticut.

It was true that I should meet Helen at some point, but I wasn’t about to barge into her bedroom and have a good ole’ fashion sit down. This was something I kindly explained to Annie in as few words as possible: “Yes. I should meet Helen.”

The thing was I had heard Helen. The bathroom was right next to her bedroom, and although I had never heard any talking, I had heard deep breaths that were similar to a yoga class. I had also heard the bed squeak on several occasions. Since I was consuming all the free diet Coke I possibly could, I spent a good amount of time in the bathroom peeing, so I had also spent a good amount of time wondering what the hell the deal was with this Helen woman.

I said it out loud again, “Yes. I should meet Helen.”

“She’s up today,” said Annie pointing to the side door, “she’s in there watching Wheel of Fortune.” What it is with old people and Wheel of Fortune, I’ll never understand, but it seems to be some sort of staple for their kind.

Although I was timid about meeting this woman who was dying, by what I wasn’t told but was able to deduce with my quick-thinking brain, I knew that since she was “up” I really couldn’t avoid it.

I was somewhat terrified. Such a big deal had been made out of Helen, that I was sure I’d walk into the room, the room that I had no chance of walking around to get to the dining room, and see a horribly deformed woman; that I was walking into a remake of The Elephant Man, but that no one had the guts to formulate the exact words. I hesitantly stood next to Annie unsure of what I should do. I scratched the nape of my neck, so my fingers would have a purpose while I stood there wondering why it was so dire that I scurry in there immediately and present myself to the woman.

From inside the house I could hear a gruff voice that scolded Geronimo. “Get off me!” it yelled, and then the voice yelled out for Annie.

“I don’t know why that dog insists on jumping on Helen every chance he gets,” she said. “He’s lucky Days Our Lives is over.” Annie didn’t say that sentence at me, but rather in my presence, and it made me feel a little uneasy.

I followed the petite woman, who was yet again sporting pink gabardine pants, inside the house…

When I told people the story later, the part about how I didn’t initially see Helen, they were confused. I chalk it up to the fact that I’m sort of a space cadet, I’m too often unaware of my surroundings and mostly it’s this sorry attempt at self-preservation. I have this ability to totally turn off, if I need to; I think that’s what I did.

Helen was seated on the couch to my left when I walked into the room. My focus was on Annie’s back, which was right in front of me, so it wasn’t until the gruff voice asked if I was Amanda that I turned around to face the direction from which it was coming. When I saw the elusive Helen, I immediately bit my tongue to prevent my jaw from dropping. I bit it so hard that I could taste the blood as it oozed into the rest of my mouth.

To call Helen fat, would be wrong; to call her obese, even by American standards, would be a far understatement. I was unsure what the adjective was for a woman that size. Besides What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? I had never in all my life seen such a large person.

Helen lounged on the navy blue couch; across her mid-section was the quilt that normally sat folded on the armrest. The quilt, of basic size and made of pastel pieces of fabric that Annie had made for Helen—probably long ago—looked like a misplaced piece of eccentric wallpaper amongst an orange landscape for which it was too small. The orange fabric was, for lack of a better word, a sheet that seemed to be fastened around Helen with what looked like safety pins.

“If I had known this was one of the days you’d be coming to work, I would have worn my festive cape,” she said laughing. I smirked. I couldn’t tell if she was acknowledging the elephant in the room, or if she dabbled in witchcraft.

Her face was very oval and long, and despite her body weight, it wasn’t as fat as one would assume. She wore completely out of date glasses, that were large and tinted brown, and her hair was a natural salt-and-pepper, had been swept up under a plastic headband—the kind you’d find in the kiddie aisle at a drug store.

Although it was quite comfortable in the room, her skin, even that of her forearm, was covered in a thin layer of droplets, that I assumed was sweat; and on her left ring finger was a gold band that had the skin not grown around it over time, probably would have immediately cut the circulation off of anyone else forced to wear such an obscenely small piece of jewelry. Her presence made the room smell like sweat and rose oil, the kind you’d pour over a potpourri dish.

I wanted to ask her how her day was so as to appear normal and civil, but I couldn’t look her in the eye. I could only scan her, take her all in as a whole then shift my glance upward, past her head and at the generic acrylic painting on the wall. It also didn’t help that she was eating a tuna fish sandwich and Geronimo was perched on her shoulder like a parrot waiting for the leftovers.

“I have to get to work,” I said. “But it was nice meeting you, Helen.” As I walked into the “office”—the boys had insisted that’s what it should be called—I heard Annie ask Helen if she wanted another sandwich.

And so the story went like this, according to David when we decided to blow off work and head downtown later to the decks for beer:

Helen had been in love a long time ago. Helen had not always been this way. Helen wanted to be a writer, but failed at it. Helen got depressed. Helen ate herself into a monstrosity. Helen’s husband left her. Helen just kept getting bigger, and based on the food in her house, Helen had no intentions of getting the scale to move backward.

“That’s what happens when you don’t fulfill you destiny, man,” said David as he took a sip of his beer. “You get fat and your husband leaves you.”

I pulled at my stomach under my dress and quickly tried to do the math as to how many pudding pops I had consumed over the last few weeks. I also thought about my own hopes to be a writer, the five pages I was into my “novel,” and how then, at 23, I had given myself until I was 25 years old to make it in the writing world. I did not want to be Helen. I did not have enough skin on my body to stretch so far so as to be Helen.

A couple weeks went by and I only heard Helen in her bedroom. I realized that what sounded like a yoga class, was a breathing machine and it was absolutely necessary for her to survive when she slept. I continued to “work” with the boys, eat too many pudding pops and, when I got home at night, I stared at the five pages of my novel before typing the word “fuck” and closing the file. I was up to well over 100 “fucks;” all other words had been used far less.

One afternoon I showed up at the house to find a fire engine in the driveway. I parked on the side of the road and my thoughts almost immediately went to Helen having dropped dead of a heart attack. I opened the back door to a room of chaos.

Helen was lying in the middle of the floor; her perfectly fastened sheet was around her waist revealing the largest pair of beige granny panties I had ever seen. Around her stood six firefighters as well as Annie, Sean and David. Helen was squealing at the top of her lungs as she rolled back and forth in a sorry attempt at getting back to a standing position.

The look on my face said it all as one of the fire fighters touched my arm and told me “it happens all the time;” it being Helen falling and the fire department needing to be called. Although the six men stood there ready to save the day, as all firemen do, Helen refused to comply. The fireman holding a wooden board was leaning on it as if he’d been there for hours and was officially done with the situation, while the chief was trying to calmly speak to Helen.

“Helen, you know how this is going to go down,” he said. “We’re going to roll you onto the board and prop you back up.”

“No!” She shrieked. “There have to be more of you! There have to be eight of you to lift me!” Although she was quite defiant in the fact that she wouldn’t roll onto the board, she also wouldn’t stop flopping back and forth on the floor as if she had no control, as if her body was so desperate to get back onto sturdy ground that it would stop at nothing. I looked at David and Sean, who walked away and headed into the office. As for me, I was stuck on the other side of Helen; there was no way I was going to make it into the office until she was picked back up and put either on the couch or in her walker.

As Helen fought with the firemen, Annie was in the kitchen making them snacks, and Geronimo, who must have gotten into some sort of mud outside, was darting back and forth over Helen’s massive stomach. Every time he stopped to enjoy a bounce, as if she were his own private trampoline, Helen would call out for him to get off of her.

I looked around at the faces in the room. I wanted someone to crack a smile over what was going on, someone to break the awkwardness of this woman who was probably pushing 500 pounds rolling on a living room floor, while her sister made snacks for firemen, a dirty miniature poodle ran around in circles as if it were his birthday party, and I, stared in horror, selfishly thinking that was my future. Helen was my future.

Suddenly David came out of the office. “Helen, if you’re going to be there all day you’re going to have to at least have them move the couch so Amanda can get in here in work.” He said it so dryly, so unaffected, that I was even more embarrassed than I had been just minutes before. The firemen nodded, moved the couch, and I walked around Helen, who was now calling out for Annie to make her a sandwich, too.

I couldn’t say a word. David handed me a packet of marketing material to go over, and I immediately noticed that the word “convenience” had been misspelled in the very first sentence. As I glanced further down, it was misspelled the whole way down the page. There was nothing “convenient” about those two sitting in that dining room in their mesh shorts talking about the Celtics and drinking Dunkin’ Donuts coffee; there was nothing convenient about the fact that I was driving an hour to a pretend job in which I was being paid in pudding pops.

In the other room I could hear Helen as she continued to yell while the firemen tried to talk sense into her, but she refused to listen. Geronimo began to bark, and David yelled for everyone to shut up. Although I was sitting behind them, and neither of the boys could see my face, Sean suddenly said: “It will be fine. They’ll send in the extra firemen and the get her back on her feet eventually.” I looked over my shoulder at the chairs piled on the dining room table, and the window just to the right of it. I decided I would not be staying; I decided I would not be coming back.

Through the glass paned door I could see the same scenario in the living room that I just left behind—there was no way I was walking through that again.

I got up and leaned my hips into the table. I was unsure how to proceed, so instead of over-analyzing it, I just climbed onto it, apologized to Helen in my head for putting my dirty sneakers on her table, and reached over to unlock the window. When I pushed it up, it made a loud snap and I feared I had broken something, but everything seemed to still be intact. David and Sean turned around.

“What the fuck are you doing?” asked David. “If we open a window we’ll be wasting the air conditioning.”

“I need air,” I replied as I pushed up the screen. Then for reasons I’ll never really understand I jumped out the window. It wasn’t even a jump as much as I let myself fall. If I had jumped that would insinuate some sort of momentum on my part, but I didn’t have room for momentum; I only had room to dangle and drop. I landed in the shrubbery and laid there for what seemed like forever trying to figure out why I had thought that leaping out the window was a sane move. Sean got to the window first and stared down at me. My legs were badly scratched and although I had fallen less than six feet, my back hurt, too.

“What did David tell you about the air conditioning?” he asked.

The sunburnt grass felt scratchy against my shoulder blades, and my mangled legs that were perfectly tanned from the summer were now straddling a green bush that looked like some sort of dwarf Christmas tree. I had my bag in one hand and my car keys in the other; and sadly all I kept thinking was why I didn’t grab a pudding pop for the road.

I put my hand over my eyes to block out the sun and said to Sean, “he said it would be wasted if I opened the window.” I got back up just as I saw the firemen coming into the dining room to see what the noise had been. I couldn’t tell if I was embarrassed or shocked or just plain out of mind. I limped across the street to my car, put it in drive and drove in completely the wrong direction for almost 20 minutes.

Although I never saw any of them again, Holly would still occasionally run into Sean. He did ask her once if she knew why I left so strangely out the window that day, but Holly, having known me since 4^th grade, explained that sometimes I’m too impulsive for my own good. It’s true, I am impulsive, but I wasn’t being impulsive that day. That day, I was acting on one of my other negative traits: selfishness. As I listened to the commotion in the house that day, as I sat in the dining room trying to block it out as I watched the indentation my sneakers made against the plush brown carpet, I had to jump. I knew two things in that moment: Annie would be in pink gabardine pants the next day; and although Helen and Geronimo might not be able to escape, I could.

Elegiac: A Story About Near Escapes

I turned my back on you. That’s what I did. I sort of spun on my heel, as if introducing a dance that I had no intention of finishing. That’s what I did. Had we been in a movie, I would have looked over my shoulder to see you watching me walk away. This was not a movie; you never watch me walk away. I turned on my heel, dramatically, for nothing. I felt the grinding of the sidewalk against the bottom of my shoes for no good reason. The sensation felt empty. I shrugged. I shrug at facts.

There was this haziness over head, a golden reverberation against an already dimly lit sky, and I took it as a notice; I took it as my gunshot against the sound of us shuffling along on the ground; earth bound for the moment. And when I knew you were out of sight, I ran. I ran as fast as I could, and when I stumbled, I laughed; and when my legs gave out and I tumbled to the ground ripping a hole in my flesh, I got up and kept moving. I couldn’t tell you my intention; I couldn’t even tell myself. All I knew was I was trying to out run you; I was trying to beat you at the game you had been winning for too long.

The length of Houston is longer than it looks on a map, and I was out of breath before I reached Broadway; I was out of gumption before I woke up that morning. My shoes were not made for this; my heart was not prepared for this tactic, but still I brought my knees up with each inhale and let them pound against the cement with each exhale; and the balls of my feet ached before I reached Sullivan.

And I couldn’t tell you if you asked me why; and I couldn’t draw it on a map if you begged for a sketch, and if you asked what these scars meant, I’d probably lie, and the places in which I stash you for safe keeping are these parts of me of which I hate best (I hate best)… and I’d lie about them, too.

It was somewhere around Sixth Avenue where I noticed the sky was no longer golden, but more pink – the west side glows pink. It was somewhere around Greenwich that I realized I was bleeding from parts of me that were not bleeding when I started. I was somewhere around the West Side Highway when I seriously considered making a break for it. And the parked cars were louder than the ones that moved, the people who stood on the pier in silence were louder than my breath that gasped for recognition.

The problem was this: I had had an emotional morning is all. I had not woken up on the right side of the bed; I had forgotten to set my alarm clock; I had realized too much before noon, and it was easier to blame you for it all than stab at the parts of me I love best and condemn them for having existed in the first place.

If only I could terminate you on command; if only I could bring you back from the dead when I was done; if only I knew the way to implant myself inside you like a mad scientist, the kind you see in old movies, the kind covered in ketchup for effect and the ones who are full of heart but half of a brain… yes, that would do.

I don’t have ketchup in my refrigerator; and that mad scientist apron, well, I left it on the hanger in New Hampshire. But I remember the way you feel inside me, and I remember the way it felt to rest my fingertips against your spin in a makeshift tent for the hiding. However, had I been a mad scientist, this would not be an issue, the reason to run, that is…

I would have stood over a caldron knee-deep in sewage and magic; I would have contrived, as the best scientists do, a reason, or at the very least an excerpt from a foreign text that only 2 of us understand. That’s what I would have done.

I lost you somewhere between 11pm and next year; I lost you in the cushions that have long stopped being comfortable… cushions are sometimes replaced with worn down broken springs, the ones I used to love, and the ones that now leave me bruised with every turn. We don’t put couches out to pasture, but maybe we should.

I turned my back on you. That’s what I did. I was tired, you see; and my morning, well it was not something not worth mentioning. Instead, I did this thing where I spun on my heel as if introducing a dance, I had no intention of finishing… but you stopped leading me months ago, so there was no point anyway. And I looked up at the sky, that was some sort of golden, as if ripped from a comic book, where I’m not the heroine, and I knew… it was the parts of me I hate best.

At least now I’ve confirmed the importance of parked cars, the way they stand there and reflect life, as I heard them making sounds the entire way west. I am not a parked car, and neither are you, and that is the problem.

Indite: A Story About Pretending

Bjorn Borg.

That was the name that was scribbled on the cotton underwear that snuggly pressed against his body. In comparison to his usual boxers that hung from his hipbones, he now looked like a kid in Underoos. Part of me wished he had a cape to match. His left leg was straight, and his right knee slightly bent as he stood looking at me waiting for me to leave. And although my blood boiled and something inside me raged, I stared back at him as if penning every detail along the folds in my brain, the ones that waver, the ones that encompass my flawed limbic system. I had yet to find a cure for suppressing my memory.

I had not slept enough, and my veins were still full of alcohol. When I breathed out I could taste beer, and my throat, too parched to scream, seemed to be on its own mission to strangle me, but my mouth always won that race. He had a large bottle of whiskey in his hands, the one I had tried not once or twice, but three times to throw out the window. I was unsure of the point I was trying to make; I just knew I wanted to hear glass break. Christoffer held on to it for dear life, of course, as if it were a baby that he was saving for later, a prized possession he’d show off to his friends who would all swoon, pinch its cheeks and remark on how much it looked just like him: unwashed and bottled for further consumption.

Although I wanted to reach for the bottle again, and probably did in my absence of focus, I mostly thought of a photo on my father’s desk. It was a picture of my sister and I in our matching Underoos and wellies standing under a sprinkler in the backyard. It must have been 1984. I had stared at the photo so many times, I had thought I could remember that day, but the truth was I was mistaken. I could pretend I remembered the way the sun created a glare against the sprinkler that darted around in a circular motion, and I could pretend that was the day my sister stepped on a bee, but I’d be wrong. Just like I’d be wrong when I would later think back to him in his Bjorn Borg underwear. I’d choose to be wrong for the sake of self-preservation or literary license or simply because I could.

The weekend before we had wandered Brooklyn. I remember my shins began to sweat as they do on days that are achingly humid. It’s hard to imagine shins sweating, but there’s a breaking point for everything. We went from bar to bar, not on a mission, not with a purpose, but instead a slovenly attempt as soaking up the Saturday. We found ourselves in Greenpoint, we took a seat at one of those long communal tables, the sort you’d find in a German beer hall, or a bar in Brooklyn that likes to pretend it’s a German beer hall. It was supposed to have rained, but there wasn’t a cloud in sight. I reached down to touch my lower legs and pushed the beads of sweat toward my ankles as he opened his umbrella and looked toward the sky. He looked like a Disney character that an illustrator had forgotten to give song, but he twirled his umbrella over his shoulder anyway. I felt bad for not fearing he’d injury someone walking by us.

“If we sit here long enough like this, then those ugly people will go away,” was how he justified his decision. The people, whom he defined as ugly, those who were most likely not from the neighborhood, not from Brooklyn, and perhaps not even from Manhattan, looked at us with glances that could only be surmised as annoyance. But it didn’t matter, he explained, because we had been there first.

When he closed the umbrella to focus on his beer, he put his hands flat on the table and pointed at the white lines that ran from east to west across his nails. He told me that since he’d given up pushing his cuticles down, the lines had started to go away.

I rolled my eyes at what he thought was an epiphany in regards to nail aesthetics. I told him it was in his head. I tried to push at his overgrown cuticles, and he pulled away.

“But I can’t see the half moons,” I said. I looked at my own nails, covered in chipped mint green polish and realized he would have had to be a girl to understand my reference. His fingernails no longer showcased half moons.

A friend of mine and her fiancé came to join us, and less than 20 minutes in we knew that the social situation was failing. As we walked along behind them toward another bar, Christoffer grabbed my arm and whispered: “We need to go to Chinatown and find trouble. We need to shake them.” I looked at his smile, his widening eyes as if a revelation had set in and agreed to one more drink, then we’d head out. We were looking for scary things: opium dens and massage parlors that gave happy endings, maybe the Chinese mob, too. It’s easy to pretend you’re the star of your own film noir in Chinatown if the nighttime lighting is just right.

And when we left not much longer having feigned other social obligations, we hobbled along Bedford Avenue. I stopped to look at a menu at a bar, and he called out: “That’s how the story will start!” I stopped and turned around to face him. “We went to Chinatown looking for opium dens and massage parlors.”

I walked toward him and tucked my arm in his. “You can’t lock your arm in Jackson’s, can you?” he asked. It was true. Two-year-old nephews are too short for such things. The feel of his shirt in the crook of my inner elbow, and his quick pace made me rush to catch up. I remember thinking how my pen could never keep up with this. I remember thinking I should have just washed his dishes and left the towel on the floor. There should have been at least something for him to pick up; I shouldn’t have to be the only one with a reminder.

We found the cheesiest place in Chinatown we could for dinner: pink linens and matching cloth napkins. I put my chin in the fattest part of my palm and watched him order the creepiest thing on the menu. I opted for rice; it seemed safe. We both ordered a Chinese beer. We needed fuel for our adventure. When his fish arrived, the kind that still has its face intact, I watched him pull bones from his mouth with each bite, and I looked away. I feared I’d gag, I feared I’d throw up. But it wasn’t about the fish. I had ingested too much of something else.

I focused on the buttons of his shirt to stabilize myself; the way my hot pink watch he wore contrasted against his tan skin. I looked away again. I was stuck in repeat mode. I was a record that skipped. I had yet to find a cure for suppressing my memory.

We paid the check. We walked down a side street off Canal. We wanted to find something unnerving, a stairwell that headed into another world. Perhaps even with appropriate lighting a film noir is only relegated to Hollywood sets and Jack Nicholson pictures.

The karaoke bar was a bust. The alleys that reeked of fish and slippery with aquatic intestines came up empty. I rubbed my arm that was moist with humidity as he eyed a massage parlor and announced again: “That’s how the story will start!”

I looked up at the neon sign. I was exhausted, and although I should have been feeding off of his excitement, I just wanted to shower. I wanted to rest my body against my bed, or against him, or against anything that would provide a temporary spine for my back. I agreed to the massage knowing full well it would require some effort to stay awake.

There would be no happy ending to either of our massages. Instead, my slight dozing off abruptly came to an end when he called out my last name to see how I liked it. With a final push against my lower back that almost made me moan as if I were coming, I thanked the masseuse, and gathered my things. In the waiting area Christoffer stood, arms flailing as he tried to get directions to a bar where we’d find trouble. But we were in Chinatown, not Thailand and we didn’t have the energy to fight the Staten Island crowds at whatever the massage parlor owner deemed “hip.”

Instead we bought ingredients for omelets the next morning and headed to my apartment. My skin was still damp with humidity.

A week later, with Hurricane Irene having created a mass hysteria that New York hadn’t seen since the Christmas before, he stood before me in his Bjorn Borg underwear. My fingertips were slightly ripped from the ribbed cap of the whiskey bottle I had tried to destroy, the whiskey he bottle he clutched like a baby. I wanted to tell him I was scared to be alone, that I was scared to sit in the dark should the lights go out and my flashlight, the one I had had since college, failed me. It didn’t matter; he had made other plans and I was not part of them. I was not his concern.

Before I could leave I unleashed my fury; before I could smack myself into silence, I let the alcohol, the fucking alcohol that would eventually be the death of me, unravel like a torn ribbon that has no place in a performance, unwrap itself against him. In that moment, I loved him less.

As he opened the door, he tucked a jar in my bag and said “just in case.” I was not his concern.

I could have waited until I got outside to stand under the overcast skies to see what that jar was, or I could have, out of dramatic habit thrown it against the floor and made a run for it. Instead three stairs down, I saw it was almond butter and brought it back to him. I wasn’t sure how to word it, but I knew he needed it more than I did. I could pretend I never gave it back to him, I could pretend I never tried to throw the whiskey; I could pretend I couldn’t recall the way he looked in his underwear that morning, or the smell of Mott Street in August, or the comparison of his arm in mine to that of a child… I could pretend. Because as he told me himself, I’m far from stable and in some ways that saves me.

Entelechy: A Story About Urban Legends

“I was sunburned… as if a boiled lobster…” I paused to gather my thoughts. I cleared my throat and started again:

“I was perfectly tanned… against Paulo who was also perfectly tanned. We had been hiking in the outskirts of Rio. We had made love underneath a… big fern, a fern so luscious and dripping with moisture from the rains, it was like the dampness of our sweaty skin that dripped with aching desire… a desire so intense that…”

“Why don’t you let me know when you want to be honest,” said my therapist. I looked at the back of my hand that was blazing red from just two days before, and shifted my attention to a small coffee stain on my skirt. I did not want to start over. I was happier with Paulo in Rio. I was more content being perfectly tanned.

“I was sunburned… as if a boiled lobster…” I sighed at the fact, and pushed my hair behind my ear. I continued, and tried not to get lost in a tropical rainforest. “And having wanted too many beers after the sun beat down on my pale skin, I opted for Williamsburg.”

“Williamsburg?” asked my therapist.

“Yes… is that so hard to imagine?” She shrugged. “So…

I walked into the dully lit bar on Broadway, a bar just underneath the J train. I had been there before and did not care for it. It was just a couple blocks away from my friend Lilit’s place, and lacking energy to hold my own in a conversation, she was the perfect choice for a drinking buddy. She tends to talk more than I, and I just wanted to listen that night. I told her about the vibrators I had received from Trojan at work on Friday; she told me about her upcoming trip to Australia. I pushed at the skin on my arm as if to insure that the red was permanent at least for the time being, and she ran her fingers over her porcelain skin and looked at me. I really should have learned about the wonders of SPF by now.

To the left of us sat a gentleman, of sorts, sporting a bandage on his head and a band t-shirt of which I would normally dismiss had it not been a dully lit bar. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him show interest in our conversation – vibrator talk will do that. When he inquired, and I couldn’t hear him, I asked him to join us. Four beers in, I’m a saint.

His bandage? A bicycle accident. His name? Steve Miller. Like the band? Yes. We asked for I.D. He was tall; taller than any fella I had met in awhile – 6’3” to be exact. Something else we learned from his I.D. He was not my type…

“He was not my type,” I said aloud to my therapist.

“In what way?” she asked.

“In the way that he was alive and not my type sort of way… in the way that I did not care for the band on his shirt, or the fact that he told me he loved the Beatles,” I paused to give her space to comment. But she didn’t, so I continued, “And I felt his shorts should have been a different shade of navy, and that he should not have been drinking the beer he was…”

“What beer was he drinking?”

“I don’t know. Whatever kind I wasn’t drinking… and never would.”

“How can you say that, if you don’t even know?” was her question as she squinted at me with a look the reminded me of my mother’s expression of disbelief.

“I don’t know,” I said again. “But it’s the same way I knew that when I took him home, I would not approve of his boxer choice… and I didn’t.”

“What was wrong with them?”

“They were just not anything that I felt was respectable… they were cotton knit, as opposed to that thin cotton, the type of cotton that boxers should be with an elastic top that is covered in ruched fabric that’s only ruched because of the elastic. There was no fabric to be ruched on his boxers’ top… just elastic. It made me think it was something a poor boy would wear. And I was scared to look too close in case I came across a hole to prove my assumption. It was safer to take his boxers off…”

“So you took him home?”

Had I had balls, I would have scratched and shifted them, swept my sweaty brow like John Wayne and pointed out the obvious: I didn’t just take him home, I fucked him.

“Yeah… and it was awful,” I said. Saying the word out loud crippled me. It was just admitting to the fact that I can’t have sex with strangers. It does nothing for me. I’d be more content eating pizza and watching a bad movie in a language I couldn’t understand.

“How was it so awful?” she asked.

“So…

I had heard of jackrabbit sex. The kind of sex where it’s pump, pump, pump, pump, pump at the rapid speed of a jack rabbit on cocaine trying to get to the finish line in some sort astronomical attempt at breaking a Guinness Book of World Record, but I had never experienced it myself. Until that night, I had assumed such behavior was an urban legend, a term that women used at brunch to describe a bad lay. I had not known that it actually existed, that there were real live guys doing such horrible things with their pelvises to women. It was bad enough that I stupidly thought I could take him home without feeling shitty about it the next day, but now I was being humped at a rate that should not be used unless the man in the equation is about to die and the last chance for the survival of the species is for him to blow his load into the woman’s vagina before he drops dead and all hope for mankind is lost. Then, and only then, is jackrabbit sex permitted – for the survival of the species.

I thought about this, of course, as I lay there staring up at the ceiling and focusing on the spots I had missed when I painted my bedroom wall a few years before. I thought about urban legends, too. Not just the one that was being disproved as I lay there, legs spread eagle, writing sci-fi stories in my head, but all the others you hear growing up. Like the driver behind you in his car who chases you down, to tell you that you have an axe murderer in your back seat – you know, because he, the other driver, can see the silhouette of the axe murderer, whereas you, the driver of your own car who is looking forward, can not.

I also thought of the one about how if you ate Pop Rocks and drank Coke at the same time, your head would explode. I was still fearful of that outcome, but had someone offered me the duo at that moment, I would have tried them… or at least suggested Steve Miller ingest some.

In between my walk down urban legend boulevard and my thoughts to write a bestselling novel about men who die after they come, I debated my own fate. Was I going to have to give in and fake it so he would stop? Was that really how things were going to go down?

I had not faked it in quite some time. I had, of course, faked it several times in my life, but it had been awhile. I tried to recall what sort of production it would entail. I weighed the pros and cons of combining screaming and scratching up his back with my nails. Would that stop this madness? From experience, I knew that his drunken state would probably not allow him to climax, or if it did, we’d be looking at too many hours of this thrusting motion that already had me slamming my head against the wall. He either did not notice, or did not care. My head could take it; my vagina and hips were less than thrilled.

I opted for little moans that would escalate into louder moans that would be sprinkled with “oh yes!” I briefly considered saying, “don’t stop,” but since that was the last thing I wanted, I concluded that “oh yes,” would show that I was still alive and hopefully, wouldn’t prolong the fucking assault on my soul…

“Isn’t that a bit dramatic?” asked my therapist.

I wasn’t going to answer her with a sentence. I was going to answer her with a question. “Have you ever had jackrabbit sex?”

“Point taken,” she said.

“So…

I’m moaning “oh yes,” and my phone is ringing and I’m trying to see who it see while Steve Miller is calling out “oh baby,” and I’m thinking to myself that this must be punishment for one of the many evil things I’ve done in this calendar year alone. And my head is knocking into the wall, and I’m pretty sure my neighbors can hear this insanity that’s going on. All the while I’m trying to focus on reaching an imaginary climax, but I’m still trying to remember all the urban legend tales from my youth, and I can’t decide where I want to commit my attention: on my fake orgasm, or my fun trip down memory lane.

I imagine that had it been brighter in my room, he would have seen the perplexed look on my face, as I tried to decide between the two possible thought processes. I settled on getting this guy off me as soon as possible, so I took the volume up to a notch that’s just below screaming, and he starts yelling “come with me, baby!” and I’m actually starting to blush and I have a leg cramp. And since my acting skills are the equivalent to his fucking skills, I figure I should just get to the point and I whisper “I’m coming,” in his ear while I roll my eyes and bite my tongue so I don’t yawn.

Finally, after who-fucking-knows how long, he collapsed on me, out of breath, only to tell me he’s too drunk to come. Oh really? If he had addressed this however long ago, he could have been out the door and I could have been eating pizza and painting my fucking nails hot pink or some equally obnoxious color. But no. Instead I’m dripping in his sweat, and his latex-wrapped dick is shriveling back up and out of me; and my phone is still ringing, I still can’t reach it, and he’s too rude to get up.

I finally roll him off of me, throw on the light, sigh loudly, grab my phone and march to the bathroom with the type of purpose you only see in movies about really important people; movies that, because of him and his suckage of life from me, I can’t even recall at the moment. I grab at my crotch to make sure it’s still there and am quite shocked it’s not covered in bruises and blood and looks like the star of some slasher movie. I suddenly feel the urge to apologize to my vagina, but I don’t because that might be too crazy, and I’m really trying to work on not being too crazy after behavior from recent weeks that may have just put me in the sub-category of ‘crazy but not yet too crazy.’

“And the missed calls?” asked my therapist.

“Christoffer, my sister and Bess… I didn’t call anyone back. I was too ashamed. I knew it was going to take at least the next 12 hours to come to grips with the jackrabbit sex, before I could vocalize what had happened,” I explained.

“Where was Steve Miller while you were in the bathroom?”

“In my room, I’m assuming,” I said, “although after several minutes he asked if he could come in… where he peed in front of me before I could get out of the room fast enough… seriously? And I actually asked him that.”

“What did he say?”

“He held his cock in his hand and said, ‘he’s nice looking, right?’”

“He did not,” said my therapist the exact way my friends had the day after the incident.

“He did,” I said.

“And what did you tell him?”

“So…

I stared at the wonky looking thing. It wasn’t wonky because there was anything particularly off about it, but simply because penises are wonky looking by definition. How does one answer that? Was all I could think.

The bathroom light was the only light on in my apartment, and I stood in the darkness of the kitchen staring in shock at the guy before me who had actually asked me a question I had hoped I would never be asked. It was average – everything about it. It wasn’t big or small, or this or that. It was so average and plain that even when I walked away after giving him my answer I had already forgotten what it looked like. I had wished the question had been that easy to forget, too.

“It’s OK for lacking foreskin,” I said, and turned the light out on him and went to bed. He didn’t ask me the meaning, nor did he offer to leave. He came into my bedroom and curled himself up against me. I couldn’t tell if it was out of obligation – as the rumor is that women have to be held after sex – or if he truly wanted to. Not having any major desire to spoon with someone I didn’t know, I told him that it was a complete lie, the whole thing about women needing to be cuddled after sex, and if he felt the need to do such a thing, it would be best if he left, picked up someone else, fucked her and then snuggled up on her. I, however, would need him to roll to the other side of the bed, if he intended to stay. He kissed the back of my neck and rolled away. A part of me died when I realized the lights from my window were illuminating the outline of his boxers on my bedroom floor. I wondered how wrong it would be to hurl them out the window. But I fell asleep before I could act on it.

“You wanna know how I woke up the next morning?” I asked my therapist.

“We may have to save it for your next session,” she suggested, “we’re running low on time.”

“Oh no, I have to share this painful detail… I’ll pay you extra if need be…. So…

I woke up to Steve Miller kissing my hip and telling me he wants to recite me some of his poetry. Why? I don’t know. I’m lying there cringing as he tries to reach around and touch me in some sorry attempt at having sex again, but having used up my only good line, and being just moments away from giving in and apologizing to my vagina, I immediately shut him down. I tell him my friend Lyndsay is on her way over, that there’s a wedding emergency, and he better scram because she’s really conservative and will judge me for being so scandalous. He dresses slowly in front of me, as if trying to tantalize me so I’ll tell him to stay, to take me now, to fuck me like only a true jackrabbit can, but I don’t. I looked out the window instead and wondered how hot it was going to be.

We exchanged numbers just before he left, and I waited a whole five minutes before I deleted his. I went back to my room, stripped my bed of my sheets, ran them to the cleaners and came home to drown my body and apartment in bleach and Pine-Sol. I wondered if there was something stronger than bleach.

“Do you think it would have been a bad idea to have taken a bleach bath?” I asked my therapist.

“Yes,” she said, “but more importantly, why did you feel the need to rid yourself of him so quickly?”

I paused. I knew I could give her a thousand reasons: the Beatles, the wrong navy colored shorts, the fact that he was from the west coast, the way he sounded like my brother-in-law, or how he had a beard, but he wasn’t Zach Galifianakis so I felt betrayed. The list could have been endless had I wanted it to be.

“It’s the tan line,” I said. “The cross between untouched and scathed; the sun’s work, is what it was. It was the insertion of his shoulder blades against the air. I define it as permeating, like a vulgar task that hangs too low, too broken; unresolved in its absolution.”

“What’s that from?” she asked.

“I wrote it a couple weeks ago,” I explained. We both said nothing. I coughed so as to puncture the room with sound. “I guess the point is, I didn’t write that about Steve Miller. I’m never going to write like that about Steve Miller. I can’t justify it or understand it, but I do know this: Steve Miller’s shoulder blades mean nothing to me.”