Dear L.,

I keep thinking of you recently. You’re the only one I know roughly my age who got married and divorced all within a pretty short period of time. I never thought I’d be thinking so much about divorce only a few months after I got married, but I am. At least I am from time to time, and when those times come around they come around big time.

I remember thinking, before G. and I got married, that if everything else leaked out of our relationship like so much air out of an air mattress at least what we’d have left is that we could talk. G. and I always talked and talked – I remember marveling at how good a communicator he was. I fell in love with him during our lengthy morning conversations, when we’d sit around the living room of my apartment by the floor-to-ceiling windows and long white muslin drapes drinking scalding mugs of black coffee and talk and talk and talk – about what? Everything, it felt like – until we were both miserably late to work and embarrassed by how late we were but thrilled, completely thrilled, to have found the one person to whom each of us could talk and talk and talk that way and never get bored.

What I never considered was, what if he stopped being interested in what I had to say? I was so busy reveling in how it felt to have someone so gripped by my stray insights that I never stopped to imagine that such intense concentration might waver – and certainly not after only a few months of marriage. Just the same way that it never occurred to me that G. himself would ever stop sharing his thoughts and ideas with me, which he has.

So, though you and I have talked a lot about your divorce and why you felt like you had to leave, I’m wondering if it boiled down to the fact that you and E. just stopped talking the way you once did. And if you just couldn’t stand how sad and invisible that made you feel. And if you made the decision to leave him, say, one night after eating dinner at a restaurant.

I wonder if when you were driving home you passed along a street you don’t travel on much and it reminded you of an experience that still resonated for you. And I wonder if you started to tell him about that experience, if you started to set up the story and tell him why you had been on that street, and just at the point where you were about to get to the beautiful, poignant point of the story, E. cut you off, irritated that you were driving too slow or that the windshield washer light was on and you hadn’t noticed it, and you realized at that moment, not only has he not heard a word I just said but he hasn’t heard a word I’ve said in months. And I wonder if at that moment you just stopped talking, if you just closed your lips and turned on the radio and said to yourself, enough of this, I think I’ve had enough.

Is that how it happened? I really need to know.

xxox, B.

First, a letter from Brandi to Danny:

A journal entry by Danny. Danny apparently received Brandi’s note (above) in the middle of writing this:

A poem entitled "Square Deal" that was found next to the other documents. The two palindromes below were written on the back of the poem, for reasons still unclear:

Danny’s application for a job at McDonald’s:

EMAIL # 1

From: lawn-news1@amazon.com
Subject: New stores are springing up at Amazon.com

Dear Amazon Customer,

I have an extreme case of spring fever. And Amazon.com’s new Lawn & Patio and Kitchen stores have a lot to do with it.

Our Lawn & Patio store has everything you need to spruce up your yard. Weber grills, Black & Decker mulching mowers, Fiskars tree pruners – the selection is amazing. And if it’s information you’re looking for, we’ve got buying guides and articles that will turn brown thumbs green and green thumbs greener. Come explore: http://www.amazon.com/lawnandpatio

Does spring bring out the chef in you? Then try our new Kitchen store. It’s brimming with thousands of culinary essentials for novices and gourmets alike. Calphalon, Cuisinart, Henckels, KitchenAid – we’ve got all the top brands. Go to: http://www.amazon.com/kitchen

So stop by Amazon.com today. And get the things you need to make the most of the season.

Sincerely, David Risher
Senior VP and Avid Amazon.com Shopper

EMAIL # 2

To: lawn-news1@amazon.com
Subject: Amazon dot me faster

Dear Amazon.com,

I’ve got the fever too. For you, Amazon. You feel the spring in the air? I feel it in my step. Your new Lawn & Patio and Kitchen stores have a lot to do with it, but then there’s also the tremendous savings on books and music and toys and ideas. Webers and Deckers and pruners – I can feel the surge in my blood, the ache and the longing of this crush.

You ask me, “Does spring bring out the chef in you?” You are such a tease, Amazon. That’s what I admire about you. I say “admire,” because that is truly what I feel toward you: admiration and respect. This is more than consumer lust – the impulsive desire to buy, buy, buy you out till we’re both dry and empty, panting for breath and mouthing the words “supply,” “demand,” “supply,” “demand,” with each in-breath and out-breath.

No, Amazon. Though this physical desire resides within me, my feelings toward you as a corporation are infinitely more complex. This is about more than consumption, Amazon. It is even about more than obsession. It is about love. There, I said it: L-O-V-E.

Sincerely,

Daniel Arp
Rabid Amazon.com shopper

EMAIL # 3

From: orders@amazon.com
Subject: Your Amazon.com Inquiry

Dear Daniel,

Greetings from Amazon.com.

What a refreshing message! I so enjoyed your accolades, and am very glad to know that we have such a devoted customer. It is so nice to hear that you enjoy shopping with us, and you are not afraid to tell us! Thank you so much for taking the time to write in.

I do hope that you will continue your adoration, and that we continue to show you the best service, prices, and selection that you could ever find. Please let us know if there is ever anything we may do for you. I hope that you are able to find a treasure or two soon, as to quench your thirst for Amazon.com.

Thank you so much, Daniel, for your kind and heartfelt words. I look forward to your next visit. I hope that you have a pleasant day!

Best regards,

Jenna L.
Earth’s Biggest Selection

EMAIL # 4

To: orders@amazon.com
Subject: Re: Your Amazon.com Inquiry

Dear Amazon,

Oh wow. Wow wow wow. Wow wow wow wow. You’re so turning me on right now to savings. I want to gobble ‘em up like candy.

I hope you don’t consider it too forward of me that I sent you an e-card, Amazon. (It’s a little note with a picture of the suicidal virgins. Hope you like it!) I just wanted to repay you for your warm, affectionate reply to my message. It meant a lot to me, as has the witty back-and-forth I’ve enjoyed with you while surfing your web site. “Click here, Daniel Arp.” “Click there, Daniel Arp.” You big tease. I’ll click anywhere you want, Amazon.

I just had an impulse: Could you give me an address to send you flowers?

I’m usually not this forward with corporations, but I really think there’s something special about you, Amazon.

Whoa, I just thought of something: Do you sell flowers? Cause if you do I could just order them from you then send them back to you. Hold on, let me check your web site. Back in a sec…

Damn, no flowers. I guess I’ll have to get them elsewhere. But I don’t want to go anywhere else. This is where I want to be: right here with you. I feel so close to you right now, Amazon.

I would like very much if you gave me a call, Amazon. You could tell me some of your special offers. I could provide you with some special offers of my own. It wouldn’t have to be a big deal, Amazon, we could just talk about whatever came to mind. I could tell you my idea for a tattoo.

Enticed?

Daniel Arp
Earth’s Biggest Predilection…for you, Amazon

EMAIL # 5

From: orders@amazon.com
Subject: Your Amazon.com Order

Dear Mr. Arp:

Greetings from Amazon.com!

Thanks you for you kind words and your card. While we appreciate your offer to send us flowers, it certainly is not necessary. Your kind words are more than good enough for us.

It is because of customer comments like yours that we strive to be the very best. I would like to extend our thanks to you for your loyalty and very kind feedback. Without such customers as you, we could not continue to provide the service and selection you’ve come to expect from our store. Your comments are greatly appreciated, and I sincerely thank you for choosing Amazon.com!

Best regards,

Michael L.
Amazon.com
Earth’s Biggest Selection

EMAIL # 6

To: orders@amazon.com
Subject: Re: Your Amazon.com Order

Dear Amazon:

I am death, and you are life, Amazon. I count the hours between each rendezvous as though counting the drip drip drip from that sad old rooftop, a Chinese water torture of waiting, waiting for the next check, the next mouse click and impulse-buy, my leg jerking as though from electric shock waiting to buy and purchase and own. If I could only own you, Amazon. I see the smiling face of your founder, Jeff Bezos, inside a shipping box on the cover of Time Magazine, and I think, “If only…” How much is Jeff Bezos’s smiling Man of the Year face worth? Alas, too much for my meager means. Shipping alone would be a nightmare of cost and consequence. They would have to sedate him and send him in a cage, like a circus animal. To subdue him they’d have to shock him repeatedly with a cattle prod. I don’t want that. Especially since they’d have to do the same for me, while I waited in my lonely afternoon corner for the delivery of a lifetime, the delivery of you, Amazon, to my vacant residential doorstep.

I have entered the Amazone. I see you everywhere, wherever I walk, your zippy logo imprinted on the leaves of trees and blades of grass, the ground I tread sprinkled with the rose petals of your name: Amazon, Amazon, Amazon, the aching wounded primitive call.

I know I can help you. Why did you never call when I asked? Why did you refuse my offer of flowers? I want only to make you happy, Amazon, to hear your voice. My idea for a tattoo? Your logo across my forehead. Your logo on my back. Your logo running like racing stripes down my legs. I am willing to become a human billboard to please you! How can you refuse my offer? There has never been a more devoted customer, for customers treat corporations like dust or rocks, treat them only like they are there, not like the living, breathing, sweating presences they are, teeming with life and desire. So sweat on me Amazon. Bleed out your icons, your slogans, your mergers and acquisitions, and make sure all those drip-drip-drips fall on me, your devoted servant, the one below you on bended knee.

Your panting devoted slave-monkey,

Daniel Arp
Earth’s Biggest Genuflection

November 29, 2000

Paul,

There are traces of guilt in my blood and flecks of blood in my stool. The guilt doesn’t hurt too badly. But every time I turn around before flushing, the blood really worries me. It’s been a problem since I was ten, if you can believe that. I have a real aversion to being probed, so I put it off all these years. At sixteen, there were still no ill effects, and I began rationalizing: if it hasn’t killed me by now it must be harmless. But I’m moving to a new state, and I want a clean bill of health; like a foot soldier. So I’ve resolved to get the problem taken care of within the next two months, before I move; while I still have a job that will pay doctors to remove blood from my stool. I’m leaving in two months, but I told The Little Red-Haired Girl that I was leaving, forever, in three days. I don’t feel that guilty about lying, but I do feel guilty about not feeling guilty. Maybe I’ve turned callous. Maybe I’m bleeding because unprocessed guilt is burning the inner wall of my stomach or intestine like a clump of undigested pizza I shouldn’t have eaten before going to bed with a belly full of beer, at 4 a.m. Maybe the guilt drills a hole and blood drains through it and into my stool. Or maybe the blood is actually leaking down from my broken fucking heart: I lied to protect myself. Along with more lascivious reasons. See, she and I had this agreement, vaguely spoken, that if we ever knew we were never going to see each other again, we could finally have one night of fornication. At the last dramatic moment before I moved, we would fuck, despite her boyfriend (whom she would never leave, despite her feelings for me). Never seeing each other again would ensure that she wouldn’t bear the full weight of her guilt, or worry about wanting more. Can you believe that in almost two years of this drama we haven’t slept together? There were several close calls; the first time, as we were about to conjoin, she said, still smiling: “I’m going to cry after this.” So I pulled her pants up. I often wish I hadn’t. I still love her so much; it’s almost defeated me. I’ve stayed away from her for a couple months. It’s just too hard. But she showed up last weekend, when your boy, the Semi-Famous Author, came down from New York for the reading I set up at a local bar. Jesus, it was insanity. One of the most amazing weekends of my life. Semi-Famous Author has been such an influence on me and it’s always a charge to meet one’s inspirations, especially when they’re thanking me for hooking them up with a beachfront hotel room and a free bar tab. He and I got along really well. At the reading he groped all the women, danced like a fool, talked loudly, and blew up the spot like a rock star should. He was a character: drunk and lecherous and charming and disarming and fun and worth all the attention he was asking for. The Little Red-Haired Girl was not exempt from his unruly love techniques. They danced drunk and furious and clumsy like two kids spinning each other around forever or until one of them inevitably falls and gets hurt. I was busy running around, choreographing the event, making sure the band played on time and that the local authors didn’t drone on too long. But every once in a while I’d stop and watch Semi-Famous Author and The Little Red-Haired Girl. She looked genuinely scared of his enthusiasm at certain moments, but they danced for a long time. Even when Semi-Famous Author kicked over three pint glasses while dancing, and the loud shattering attracted the attention of everyone in the bar; he and The Little Red-Haired Girl didn’t concede a moment to embarrassment. They just kept on spazzing out, on a pile of sharp glass. It was scary and someone should have stopped them. The Little Red-Haired Girl’s best friend slid up next to me and we watched their dance getting faster and faster as they ground thick shards into the wooden dance floor. “I wish her boyfriend was here to see this,” she huffed, annoyed at The Little Red-Haired Girl’s flirtation. “I wish he’d been there all the times she spent the night at my house,” I said, immediately feeling weak for displaying such bitterness. “I’m sorry,” I said. “They’ve been feeding me free beer all night.” Later, as Semi-Famous Author began his drunken, boisterous reading, he bellowed for The Little Red-Haired Girl to join him at the microphone. When she got there, in front of the whole bar, he asked her – the woman I love, the only woman I’ve ever loved – to kiss him. She said no. He begged her. It was hilarious. She offered him her cheek. No. He pulled a twenty from his suit pocket and hung it out tall before her eyes, shaking it like a sandy beach blanket. “I will pay you to kiss me. C’mon.” The crowd at the bar urged her on, save those who know how much I love her. But when she finally kissed him, and the bar erupted in a cheer, it didn’t upset me. He’d schmoozed all the women that evening. That was his deal. Watching Semi-Famous Author kiss The Little Red-Haired Girl was funny and moving: my two inspirations kissing. My immediate life had come full circle. She went and sat down and he held his novel close as he read; in the other palm he held the audience. He was so damn funny. I felt so proud to have brought him to poor, uncultured Tampa. After the reading, he and I came back to my dark apartment for bong hits. He apologized for trying to fuck The Little Red-Haired Girl. “I just don’t control myself very well when I’m drunk,” he said, blowing blue smoke toward my high living room ceiling. “I’m an alcoholic. Explain that to all your girlfriends tomorrow morning. Especially The Little Red-Haired Girl.” I told him not to worry. I felt proud; out of all the women in the bar, he’d picked the one I think of as I fall asleep every night. “She’s crazy about you though.” He continued. “You should go out with her.” Everyone responds that way when I tell how much I love her, and how well she treats me. “Go for it!” they say, as if it’s all just a matter of me not acting on it. It gets irritating, like they’re blaming the whole thing on me. But when Semi-Famous Author said it, I was more amazed than annoyed: I mean, here’s my favorite writer, who not twenty-four hours ago was, to me, but an idealized amalgamation of his literary characters. And now he’s waxing philosophic in my apartment and letting me behind the scenes of the romance that’s been defeating me for almost two years. “She said you’re perfect,” he said, passing me the bong. It was fucking heartbreaking. And that’s when I decided that I couldn’t ever speak to her again. So I lied to her, told her I was leaving Florida two months early. Tomorrow night we will see each other for the “last time.” The lie will enable me to do two things: 1) avoid her for the next few months, thus keeping my poor heart from breaking the rest of the way; and 2) have sex with her NOW. There’s a good chance she’ll change her mind at the last minute. She’s capricious, unpredictable; all those torturous, romantic traits that make people compelling. I have no idea which way this will go. But I do know that it will be dark in my apartment when she knocks, because I plan to keep the lights off. And when she knocks and enters I will close the door behind her and we will hug like we usually do but she will squeeze me much harder because she’ll think she’s losing me. And after a couple minutes of hugging I will ask her, quietly: “How many people are there in the world tonight?” And if she realizes I’m lying, she will say, “How can you manipulate me like this if you really love me?” But I’m hoping she will say: “Two,” so I can ask her, “Who are those two people?” And I hope she will say, “Me and you.” And later, if we’re dancing so blindly as to knock over a pint glass and spill beer on my carpeting, I won’t even clean it up. “Ah, just leave it there,” I’ll say. “I’m moving out in a couple days. What do I care?” And I expect that my heart will be racing, pumping guilty blood to my extremities. I’ll keep you posted.

Michael Welch

Dallas, Texas
October 27, 2000

Sarah!

With an exclamation point to start with, I bet you’re dying to know what this letter is about. Which is wonderful, because I’m dying to tell you! I haven’t told a soul yet, and you’re the first to know. As usual. I’ve been running around like a “wacky broad,” as Steve would say, trying to contain my excitement and ever-increasing stress at the same time. It’s too much. I’ve got to burst. I said my mother would be the first person I’d tell because she’d kill me if she wasn’t, but she’ll never know about you, so here I go…

I turned twenty-one last Saturday. It was inevitable. Saturday came, the alarm went off at 5:36 a.m., and at 5:37 (the exact minute I came into this world twenty-one years ago) I groaned “Happy Birthday” to myself and went back to sleep until noon. Then the good times rolled.

We’ve come a long way since I last wrote you. I love Steve like nothing else and you’re about to see how much he loves me.

Upon wakening I found a pile of presents at the foot of the bed, all begging me to rip off the wrapping papers. I could almost hear them. I set to it with a shriek. Somehow the things Steve does for me make me feel like a happy little girl so much that I exude eight-year-old excitement from every pore. It’s amazing to realize now how old I felt before. Steve jokingly says I make him feel like a puppy again. I don’t doubt it, the old fart! He’s always covering up gray hairs with Just For Men, no matter how many times I say they make him look distinguished.

The presents ranged from practical (a Smith & Wesson knife, exactly like his own but smaller), to kinky (a Catholic schoolgirl outfit and a fishnet body stocking!), to just what I wanted (a pair of pink plaid pants that I had been eyeing at Hot Topic for over a month). Then he took me to lunch and we went to my favorite place for a nice adrenaline rush, Malibu Speedzone. Speedzone has go-carts that are small replicas of Indy cars. They’re so powerful that you have to have a driver’s license to race there. I always come out with a million bruises and scrapes, but it’s so much fun!

After we spent ourselves driving we rested awhile and then went out to dinner. My brother told me “No one is ever supposed to remember their twenty-first birthday!” But I really didn’t want to get trashed, so we just went to a restaurant called Sol’s Taco Lounge, where I knew I could get my first legal Pina Colada. Boy, drinking when the government says you’re old enough doesn’t make alcohol taste any damn better.

Steve, who normally eats so much that I wonder if he has a hollow leg, sort of poked at his meal, eventually eating about half of it as I wolfed down my enchiladas. “What’s wrong?” I asked, but he suddenly looked a lot better and sat up straighter. “Nothing! I have to go to the bathroom.” He got up and left. Weird.

When he came back he was acting totally normal again so I decided to let it drop. “Guys are so strange sometimes,” I thought. We paid the waiter and left, walking hand in hand back to the car, chit-chatting about silly things and love. We stopped here and there so I could bestow a few of the thousands of kisses I seem to have to plant on his face every day. Finally, we made it to the car and got in.

“Okay, I’m going to take you somewhere,” Steve said.

Feeling up for the adventure, I readily agreed. What else could be in store for this birthday? Were we going on a moonlight picnic? To a surprise party? I couldn’t wait to find out.

Thirty minutes and as many miles later, we pulled into the parking lot of an upscale hotel. Steve pulled some bags out of the back of the car but wouldn’t let me see what was in them. I was dying, and wondering why we weren’t going to the front – but then he pulled the card-key to the side door out of his pocket and in we went. Apparently he had already paid for the room! Then he opened the room door and – there it was. The honeymoon suite, complete with Jacuzzi in the bedroom. Holy crap! I let out another childish shriek and jumped on the super-duper king-size bed in delight.

“I have one more surprise for you,” Steve suddenly said, grabbing my hands and leading me to a chair. “Close your eyes.”

I closed my eyes and held out my hands for another gift, but all I felt were his hands on mine. “Okay, open them,” he almost whispered.

And there he was. At eye level. On one knee. A million things rushed through my head and my heart instantaneously as he stammered out his phrase. I caught the twinkle of gold and diamond out of the corner of my eye.

“I love you so much, Chana. Will you marry me?”

I don’t think he got it all out before I grabbed hold of his neck and started blabbering, “Of course, of course, of course yes I will of course!”

The ring would barely stay on my finger, he put it on the wrong hand, and I don’t think he really ever even heard my answer to the question, but nothing could have been more perfect. Two bottles of wine, four candles, and a nice hot steaming Jacuzzi bath later, we lay talking about the silliest things. And it was wonderful, to lie there with the person I love and be able to talk about those things. He confessed that he had been hiding the ring in the closet and would jump up when I went to the bathroom so he could check on it and kiss it over and over again. He had it custom designed for me using his own drawings of two hearts as a band joined together in the middle by a half-carat diamond.

So now I’ve been five days engaged and I just couldn’t take holding it in any longer. I’m going to my parents’ house tomorrow to tell them, and I can’t imagine what kind of reaction this news will get. Happiness, because my parents know what kind of man Steve is and that he loves me and makes me happier than I’ve ever been. And sadness, because I’m their baby girl – and we all know how that goes.

So now you know. I’m dizzy with excitement and love! It will be a long engagement, at least a year, but I know beyond a doubt that this is the right thing.

Nothing has ever felt righter.

Chana

Hey Clarissa,

I’m writing you this letter because: a.) everyone likes to get mail; and b.) it’s 2 A.M. and I don’t have any blank tapes to make you a “gettin’-over-a-broken-heart” tape. I’ve never been much good at losing anyone for almost any reason (I’m still trying to get over the cancellation of “My So-Called Life”). I don’t know how anybody gets over anyone, really. I remember after our friend Tara was murdered and Michael came to live with us – Kim and I would be sitting at the kitchen table having dinner and Michael would come home from work and we’d say, Hey, Michael, how’s it going? and he’d say, fine, and then we’d hear his feet dragging across the wooden treads as he went upstairs to his room and then WHOOMP! There would be this most awful noise which sounded like a big bag of wet laundry being dropped from the top of the Empire State Building, but it was just Michael throwing himself to the floor. By the time we’d get to the bottom of the staircase we could already hear him sobbing. You know, you’d be racing up the stairs with this sick feeling in your gut because there was nothing you could say that would be of any use or comfort.

All around it was a bad year that made no sense. At Tara’s service I heard Kim talking with Linda and crying and telling her how she couldn’t stand the thought of ever losing me, and then, five weeks later, I’m holding the phone receiver to my ear and she’s telling me she’s not coming home that night; she won’t be coming home at all anymore. Then it was my turn to take the long trip up the stairs and that short trip to the floor.

I remember one time, when everything was at its bleakest and Kim was dating that guy and my life was like some leaking boat that I was trying to keep afloat by carrying it on my back and Kim was living on Mott Street and it was a beautiful cherry-blossom spring night and I should have been with someone sweet and fabulous getting ice cream from the bodega. But I wasn’t. I was standing on the sidewalk five stories beneath Kim’s window calling out her name. Kim didn’t seem very happy sticking her head out the window; I guess that guy suddenly wasn’t too happy either – so that made three of us. This was four months into the most painful thing in my life, and I wanted it to end, but didn’t know how to do that except by walking away from it. But I didn’t want to walk away from what I wanted.

Anyway, Kim came down, pissed-off and sad, telling me to go home, and I was telling her how intent I was on telling her dude how unhappy I was with him, and how I didn’t think he was treating her with care and respect – not that I necessarily was, but I was trying. Back then I thought a lot about the day we got married, and standing before everyone in the backyard exchanging our wedding vows. How many vows does anyone really make in their lifetime? For better or worse, those were the only ones I’ve ever made in my mine. It’s strange to think that these words you uttered are actually holy, and to feel like they mean all the world to you. I mean, I was coming apart, but I had made this vow, to her and to me, and it had something to do with keeping us together – or, at the very least, not letting her be used by some gutless fop. So I’m in tears, standing on Mott Street, calling up to her, and this isn’t the fabulous hip new life Kim was hoping for. Up five flights of stairs Kim is telling me how I need to go home and I’m saying how I need to face that guy. When we met at her door she was still saying how I couldn’t talk to him and that it wouldn’t accomplish anything. But I didn’t want to accomplish anything – I just wanted for a few minutes to be his bird of karma come home to roost.

Kim went inside for a couple of minutes and then came out and reiterated how much her guy did not care to speak with me at the present time. So for the next hour she and I sat in the hall on the staircase and talked like two people who liked and cared for each other. It was strange: in one way it was like when a fever finally breaks; but in another way it was just as awful as anything else to sit with this human person I was married to and to hear her voice and my voice and, through the steel apartment door, him playing some sensitive, pretty songs on his guitar. In my head all I could see was the whiteness of his hands.

Eventually it was time to go, so I left and she went inside to go to sleep. And then it’s two in the morning and I’m back on the sidewalk and Kim is sticking her head out the window calling down to me. She signals me to wait and ducks back in and then a few seconds later leans back out and throws down a paper bag. Inside the bag is this sweet, retro, French cardboard-drum container of “Baby Bee” baby powder.

One minute she was mad at me, the next she is showering presents down upon me. It wasn’t a natural thing to stand in the night and see her pretty face and to see her drop the bag and also to know what was on the other side of those windows. Sometimes in my head I’m standing there and the bag sails down and I catch it. Sometimes in my head I’m standing there and it hits the sidewalk at my feet and shatters and explodes.

I wish I could think of some funny story to tell you right now. Some little sitcom episode about getting dumped by someone and doing something pathetic yet hilarious, and how at the end of the half-hour everything was all better again, and next week there’s an even prettier guest star. But I can’t think of one, so maybe you should stop reading right here before you get to the part where I tell you about how I ran into Kim a couple of weeks ago.

I was riding my bike up Lafayette near Prince Street. Kim was in the crosswalk with a friend of hers and she called out my name, so I stopped, and when we hugged hello she burst into tears – like if you took a good solid swing at a pinata full of tears. I mean, it’s been four or five years, and we talk pretty frequently and see each other occasionally, and all those bridges back have long since burned – but life can be so hard. After she cried, she laughed that way people laugh after they’ve cried and we had a nice few minutes in the sun on the street on a Saturday morning. The girl she was with has this big friendly face like a birthday balloon. Anyway, we said goodbye and I started pedaling back up Lafayette. It was just so sad to turn around and see her walking away and to picture her being trailed behind by some funny little kid we never had.

Sometimes it feels like relationships are these movies I somehow manage to sneak into, but two-thirds of the way into the show the usher comes around with his flashlight and I get busted and tossed out. The worst part is that before the management heaves me through the fire exit, they empty my pockets of every last penny I have. And maybe here is the only good part of any of this: and that is, dear Clarissa, the realization that whether I pay up front or on the way out, or even if I have to ante up both entering and exiting the theater lobby; even with the tax and surcharge and sticky floor and lousy seats; whatever the price, I keep doing it, you know, because I really would like to see one of these things all the way through to one of those happy endings I’ve heard so much about.

Okay, now are you feeling better?

What about now?

Dennis

Dear Sam,

A long time ago, when I was having problems with Matthew, I said to you, “I wish I lived a thousand years ago when people stayed together through famine and war. Then I’d never have to deal with idiot boys who want to end things as soon as there’s the slightest strife.”

You said, “A thousand years ago people’s life spans were thirty years, and when you caught a cold you’d be dead in a week, so be happy you live today.”

Well, I took you seriously, and eventually I figured out the slightest strife wasn’t really so slight, and the relationship ended soon after. But as hard as I tried to adapt to modern times I never stopped feeling like I’d been born in the wrong era.

I’d go out and meet a guy at a party, and we’d hit it off, and the next day I’d send him a three-page letter about the incredible depth of my affection. Or, after one pretty good date, I’d try to think of the perfect gift, spend hours hunting it down, and deliver it personally to his door. I kept hoping one of the guys would turn out to be wrong-era too, and not only appreciate my obsolete romantic spirit, but fall in love with me because of it. Instead they all freaked out and blew me off – maybe because they could tell my desire to be a time traveler was stronger than my desire to be with them.

So now there’s this new guy, Ethan Allen, who I definitely desire to be with, and it turns out he lives in another town. And suddenly by necessity I have been catapulted into this Victorian letter-heavy life. We’ve been having this long-distance affair, with emails and phone calls, and only two face-to-face meetings in a month and a half, and as agonizing as it occasionally is, mostly I am loving it. What’s funny is that he doesn’t even live LIVE there, he’s there for the summer and is coming back soon, and he’s only two hours from the city, but in my mind he’s on the battlefront and I am pregnant with our unborn child, writing impassioned missives and counting down the days till I see him next.

How it happened was this: The first time I met him I was taken, and though I didn’t cheat I wanted to. He asked for my phone number but I gave him my email instead, and for the next few weeks our only contact was electronic. I would go on in this faux chaste way about every aspect of my life except my relationship and he would refrain from all the questions he wished he could ask. But there was a tone underneath of longing and lust, and I think he knew it wouldn’t be long before my situation had changed.

My very first night as a free agent I called him up and told him so. I mentioned that I was lying on the bed and when you mention that you’re lying on the bed you’d better be prepared for what happens next. One thing led to another and before I knew it we were P.S.ing. (I call it P.S.ing because Matthew used to call all dirty things by their initials and phone sex is definitely a dirty thing.)

The P.S. started out textbook delicious but about a half hour in I found myself confronted with a terrible case of urination anxiety. I had really bad U.A., P.S.-inhibiting U.A., and knew I had it, but what could I say? You can’t pee in front of a guy before you even go on date one. I kept talking and rubbing and hoping I’d just pee when I came and it wouldn’t matter, I’d clean the sheets, but nothing was doing.

Just as I was beginning to despair I heard this running water noise on his end of the line. “What’s that?” I said.

“I’m peeing,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all!” I screamed. “Now I can too!”

He laughed and I ran into the bathroom and went and then I got back into bed. I told him I wanted him to come first and he did. And then I knew I was going to, but I was nervous. So I said, “I’m going to put the phone down for a bit and you won’t hear anything for a while, but then I’ll pick it up again and you will.”

“All right,” he said.

I set the receiver on the pillow and kept going, and four or five minutes later I picked it up to tell him. “I’m coming!” I shouted. He didn’t say anything, which I found surprising, and then I realized I’d picked up the phone wrong. The mouth was in my ear and the ear was in my mouth. I flipped it around and said, “Hello? Hello?”

“Yes?”

“I SAID I’M COMING!” I repeated joyously, and he moaned along with me, and that was our Very First Time.

Since then there’s been more P.S., and lots of e-pistles, which got progressively steamier as everything progressed, and agonizingly long, late-night phone talks. Sometimes he calls to tell me what the moon looks like out his window and I look out and try to see it from mine, which isn’t very easy since I live in a street-level apartment. Other times I’ll ask him to describe the layout of his cabin and he’ll ask me if I’m wearing a fancy bra or an un-glam Minimizer. Although he often laments that we’re so far away from one another, there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to trade in what we have. If we were both here and caught up in the drama of urban life, we’d never have the luxury of long phone conversations and we’d never want to spend the time sending detailed, mulled-over messages – but because he’s away we can.

As much as I love the P.S. and epistles, though, the best part of the distance is the drama of the visits. The first time I went was a few weeks ago. We were both busy and I arranged to come up on the train and stay just one night, arrive in the early evening and leave mid-morning the next day.

The day I left was so sweltering I had to take two showers not to smell. I put a dab of White Musk behind each ear, and around my neck I hung a white and blue puka shell necklace I’d been wearing all summer. I shaved my pubes to make a really neat triangle and went down the street to the Korean woman who waxes my mustache, and when I got home I dressed in this 1940s flowery high-waisted dress I bought at the Village Scandal. It fits me perfectly and reminded me of what women used to wear on trains back in the day when everyone dressed up to ride the trains.

I packed my bag full of overnight clothes and a tank top to sleep in, a tank top that makes me feel like a centerfold in the very best way, and my book because he wanted to read it, and four condoms. I didn’t want to be overoptimistic but I figured it was best to be prepared.

When I got on the train I sat by the window and for the first hour I just read and spaced out and looked at the greenery. Before I knew it we were twenty minutes from his town and all of a sudden I got choked up and sweaty. I kept seeing myself bounding down the platform toward him and my heart and throat got tight. I felt like it had been years since we’d seen each other, instead of weeks, and I wanted to fast forward to the moment of our hello. But even as I wanted to fast forward to it I also wanted to postpone it as long as I could so I could be staring out the window, filled with expectation, for the whole long rest of my life.

The conductor announced my stop and then he walked down the aisle and took the seat tag from the luggage rack above me. I pressed my face to the glass to look for the platform, and straightened the creases in my skirt. The train started to slow and I reached up for my bag and moved to the door. All the other people getting off at my stop were middle-aged hippies, and I wondered who was waiting for them, how often they took this same train, whether I’d see their faces again the next time.

As we pulled into the station I looked out the window and saw him through the window, looking away, down the platform, expecting me to come off from somewhere else. He seemed anxious, which made me relieved. I didn’t want him to be cool and collected. I wanted him to be as nervous as I was.

My door opened and the conductor hopped off and put a yellow stool under the bottom step. A man got out in front of me and then I did. Ethan was right smack in front of me, leaning against a pillar, and I bounded down the stairs as fast as I could and barreled into his arms.

“Hi,” he said, and I kissed him hard and sweet, and we stood there for a long time embracing and sighing. All the people who’d gotten off with me were greeting their lovers too, and I felt like we were all in cahoots, playing this mysterious, tantalizing game of travel love.

When we got to Ethan’s minivan he opened the door for me and mauled me for a while in the seat and then he went around to his side. I leaned over to open the lock like Kyra Sedgwick does for Campbell Scott in Singles, but it was automatic and already up so I didn’t have to. He noticed that I’d made the effort, though, and said, “You tried to open my door. That’s a very good sign.”

“I know it is,” I said.

He turned on the engine and as soon as we got on the road he pulled my knee close to his. He pushed up the skirt a little so the knee was out, and he squeezed it softly. I don’t have great knees, they’re bulbous and slightly bruised, but the flower pattern looked good against the tan of my skin. He held onto that knee almost every second of the half-hour drive to his place, and much later when I got back home I could still feel the imprint of his hand.

Amy

Al,

Thank you for the birthday card. I received it several days ago, but kept it sealed until yesterday, my birthday proper, and opened it at the end of that horrible day. Your card made me stop crying.

My friends threw me a party two nights ago, a midnight cookout in the courtyard of my house. It was hot as shit outside despite the late hour, per usual for Florida. It was a total sausage party: no women, just dudes.

Damon got me a nice glass marijuana pipe. Aaron gave me an expensive bottle of rum. My sister bought me a quarter of brown, Mexican dirt weed. Jack gave me a joint. Crispen gave me a joint. Cameron gave me a joint. Sean bought me a six-pack of gourmet, imported beer and Lance gave me a hit of Ecstasy. Do you see the pattern here? Me too. So, instead of enjoying the party, I spent it feeling very silly about my image at the age of twenty-six. Do none of my friends (besides you) notice that I read and paint and listen to music?

But my dismay over the telling gifts didn’t come close to the despair that marked my birthday itself. The morning after my party, Angela called and said she wanted to take me to lunch. Her offer was a show of civility, a rarity in the three weeks since we broke up. So I couldn’t decline, even though I was pissed that she skipped my birthday party the night before to hang out with that eighteen-year-old boy whom she’s been fucking for five weeks now (you do the math).

If I had declined her offer, it would have been my first birthday we had spent apart in five years. I knew the day would end in a fight (as it has the past five years), but I guess that not spending my birthday with her was an act of letting go that I wasn’t yet ready for.

But I am now, fuckin-A! Listen to this:

I ate Lance’s birthday Ecstasy before she picked me up, thinking it would improve the situation. The couple times I’ve done X have not been lovey-dovey hyper-idealism at all. It’s never made me love the people of Earth any more than usual; it simply makes me feel less guilty for not loving them. Everything is lucid and my idealism dissipates. So, I figured, taking Ecstasy before lunch with Angela meant that I’d calmly smile my way through the inevitable fighting and see clearly and unsentimentally that we do not belong together. And I need that.

I could already feel the chemicals rumbling in my twitching extremities when she hugged me at my front door. I noticed that she smelled differently. I assumed it was the smell of young boy, but chose to ignore it and wait for the X to choke out my anxieties.

I didn’t tell her I’d eaten drugs but I did ask her to drive. I didn’t want to swerve off the road and kill us both if I saw God or something.

My body tensed up terribly as the chemicals overtook it, but that always happens at first. No matter how good I feel later on in any drug experience, I’m always engorged with nervous energy in the beginning, like I’m not accomplishing something that really needs to get done.

Angela’s madness began when she asked me where I wanted to go to eat and I told her I didn’t really care. Many of our fights revolved around my inability to suppress my opinions, so it always infuriates her when I say I don’t have an opinion. And since she flounders in the face of decision-making, she grew more and more angered by my apathy as we wandered for miles in her Nissan through residential neighborhoods where there obviously weren’t any restaurants. She rolled along really slowly, as if a restaurant might suddenly appear out of nowhere. In the meantime she asked me again and again, more and more aggressively each time, where I wanted to eat.

I closed my eyes and faced out the window, and in the blackness I pictured the calming effects of the drugs racing against her growing anger, like two noisy, silver trains on parallel tracks. I rooted for the drug train, but, surprisingly, the anxiety train was winning: I felt worse and worse as the X welled up in me.

I suggested that she drive downtown, where there were restaurants, and I’m sure it seemed to her that I was just being dramatic by staring out the window and not looking at her when I talked. But whenever I opened my eyes, the scenery stuttered like a defective VCR tape, and so I hid my eyes from her in case they were doing drug-induced back-flips.

By the time we got downtown, I knew the Ecstasy was bad: I was sweating, my face was flushed, my soul felt rotten. The veins in my arms looked darker than normal and I wondered if there wasn’t dirt in my blood. My stomach was cramped, the world was skipping, I couldn’t see; and when she yelled at me for being too quiet, I was too miserable to hide it anymore.

“Listen, man,” I said as I turned around, “I know you’re gonna be even more mad, but I took some Ecstasy that Lance gave me for my birthday and I don’t know what the fuck is going on, it must be dirty or something, cause I’m freaking out.”

The word “dirty” reverberated in me as she yelled and pointed in my face, her other hand on the steering wheel. “This is YOUR fault and I’m NOT going to stop. You fucking deserve this, you stupid druggie!”

She’d taken enough acid to know what kinds of dark shores your mind can run aground on when you’re tripping and she was ready to take me there, happily, despite my pleading. Her relentless yelling made me feel like a cartoon character being pounded into the ground like a railroad spike by a giant hammer.

“Please please PLEASE, don’t yell at me, I’m suffering enough. I feel like I want to die already without you yelling at me!”

I was holding onto the car’s door handle the way prostitutes do: ready to roll out at any second if their john gets weird or violent.

Angela was merciless, man. My view was totally pixilated and I was SO disoriented that I must have told her I was sorry a hundred times. She got louder and uglier, until I was begging for her mercy. I told her, “It is all my fault. Everything. Just please stop. I’m so sorry, trust me, I’m sorry. You’re making me want to die. Just please stop. Save it for later, after I come down from this. I will stand still and quiet for three days straight and let you yell in my face like a drill sergeant if you promise not to make this any worse right now.”

“Really?” she stopped and asked, smiling, it seemed, with morbid curiosity. “You will?”

“Yes,” I told her.

“You will let me yell at you as much as I want for three days and you won’t fight back at all?” she asked, still smiling, calming considerably.

“Yes.” I assured her, ready to do anything to make her stop.

“I don’t believe you! I don’t trust you!” she yelled, and continued to rail.

At a stoplight, just as I was sure I was about to cry dirty, black tears, I looked over and saw a policeman a hundred yards away on horseback, watching us wig out in the car. I made eye contact with his horse and wished I’d opted for a birthday pony ride rather than an Ecstasy trip. I thought I saw the cop stretching his arms out to me as if offering to hold me and comfort me. I was drawn to him and my hand moved independent of me, like that movie, “Evil Dead,” and suddenly the car door was open and I was stepping out and walking toward the cop, planning to ask him for a ride home on his horse.

But somehow I realized through my delirium that if I ran to him for salvation, I would have to admit that I took drugs and he would arrest me. Angela screamed at me to get back in the car, so, with the policeman and his horse both watching me, I got back in, lapsed into a puddle of tears and asked her to drive me home. Lunchless.

I stared back out the window at the skipping scenery made more abstract when refracted through my tears and I fell deeper and deeper into sooty despair as she continued to yell at me all the way home.

We pulled up out front of my house and I opened the car door before the car stopped moving and she actually sped up when I stepped out. I ran toward the house and she backed the car up and stopped, screaming at the back of my head, “Get back here and shut the fucking car door!”

I slammed my front door and locked it, ran inside and lay in bed and smoked one of the birthday joints and calmed down. But I didn’t stop crying until I remembered my unopened birthday card from you lying in the kitchen by the bottle of rum Aaron bought me.

I really really appreciate it, man. Thanks.

Seriously.

Your Friend,

Michael

Hey Sarah,

Yes, I’m okay. I know I haven’t written in forever…there’s been so much crap going on! After I met Steve, which I’ve already told you all about, things at home, which were hardly bearable in the first place, became completely unbearable. The stress of having to take care of every little detail of Clint’s life grew enormously huge. The disgust I felt at seeing the disarray of the drug-house I lived in turned my stomach every time I walked in the door. The constant boom of techno music from the turntables in the living room, the drama that the other roommates forced me to live through…all of this stuff was pushing me to the edge. I knew I had to get out, but I had no idea where I was going to go.

Then my sister came to visit with all four of her kids for the weekend. She took one look at the apartment and was like, “No WAY are we staying here. Let’s go get a hotel.” So I told Clint that we were getting a hotel for the weekend and left. By Sunday, after talking with my sister about it and clearing up some of the stuff that had been rattling around in my head, I knew that the best thing for me would be to move out. So my nephew and I went to the apartment and started packing all my stuff up. I put it all in a U-Haul storage facility nearby and drove to Denton, the town my school is in, to stay at a friend’s house.

For the next two weeks I couch-surfed between two friends’ places. I was so freaked out about not having a place to live that I was having constant anxiety and panic attacks. I couldn’t concentrate and I totally blew my finals. I was taking prescription sleeping pills every night and even missed one of my finals because I had a really bad panic attack in a coffee shop and someone had to drive me to the emergency room.

Anyway, Steve, the guy from the tattoo parlor, was telling me the whole time that he wanted to help me out, and he did every once in a while by giving me gas money to come visit him in Dallas and stuff. But he was living with his parents because of a bad roommate/girlfriend situation from before, and waiting on his mom to set him up with an apartment, since his rental history is shot (like mine). Then he called to tell me that he had an apartment. He told me I could get all my stuff out of storage and put it there, and while I was moving it all in he said I was free to stay there if I wanted. Of course I said yes, considering I had nowhere else to go.

Now, we most certainly had not had sex by this point. We did an even more interesting thing. We decided that we wouldn’t have sex for a while, even though I had moved in. I don’t think either of us felt that we really KNEW one another, you know? We had a discussion and both of us acknowledged the fact that we had NEVER really known anyone the first time we had slept with them…and that was one of the most compelling reasons to go through with this little experiment.

It was agonizing. I’ve hardly ever had a sexual dream in my entire life, and there I was having them night after night. But I stuck to my guns, and so did Steve. He didn’t have quite as hard a time as I did, though. He had been doing Valium for the past three months, and it had completely eradicated his sex drive. When I moved in he quit the pills, but he had at least a week of pretty crappy withdrawal. He wasn’t mean or anything, but it made him somewhat moody in his own weird way. Steve, as he puts it, “crawls into a cave” when he has things on his mind. He wasn’t very affectionate and basically just kind of lay around, drank a few beers, and went to sleep every night after work. It hurt, but you don’t mess around with people’s coping strategies.

After about a week and a half we wound up having sex. Because Steve was still in his cave emotionally, it wasn’t exactly fireworks. Although neither of us said anything, we both noticed it and neither of us made a move to repeat the action again for at least three or four days. By this time, though, we were learning more about each other, and Steve had actually begun to make a few affectionate comments and caresses. I was sort of distressed by this at first, because I had become used to him as this iceberg-like character. But I was excited by it nonetheless, and it made me like him all the more.

Apparently I was doing something right: every day he seemed to be more open with me and touch me a little more. The passion came, and boy did the sex get good! Steve told me one day that he likes me more and more every day, that all the guys he works with love me, that I’m the nicest person he’s ever met and the best girlfriend he’s ever had. He tells me every day that he thinks I’m beautiful, and that his mom desperately wants to meet me because she’s never seen him so happy.

One day, as we sat watching TV, he shyly traced little patterns on my knee and asked, “You know how I feel about you, don’t you?”

I didn’t exactly, but I didn’t want to put him on the spot when he was probably doing all he could just to get that far at this point.

“Yeah,” I said, and kissed his forehead.

“Okay,” he said with a sigh of relief and a hug.

We’re moving in the right direction.

Yesterday was his birthday. Thirty-two! (He had lied to me in the beginning about his age, thinking that I wouldn’t go out with him if I knew he was twelve years older than me.) I know he hates the fact that he’s getting older and didn’t really want to “celebrate” the event, so I simply got him a card and wrote on it how much I appreciate him and that he makes me such a happy girl. He read it when I gave it to him and thanked me. Later on, as I was doing my homework, I caught him reading it again. When I was done with my homework, he pulled me close and told me something sweet that I can’t remember now.

“You’re so sweet! How come you’re so nice to me?” I asked.

After mumbling something about there being no reason NOT to be nice to me, he looked at me and said, “I want someone to share my life with…and that’s you.”

How completely unexpected! I probably blushed until I was purple. “Do you mean that?” I asked. He nodded yes.

So we haven’t made it to the big “L” word yet, but it’s lurking. I had decided at one point that I wouldn’t say it first, but what if he made the same decision? I think the best strategy is not to make any sort of conscious decision about it, but just to wait until it pops out on its own. When it comes out of one of us without the person even thinking about it, then it will be truly felt and meant, and that’s the way it should be.

So that’s where we stand now. I haven’t talked to Clint in three weeks, and he’s been keeping an online diary which lets me know that he thinks this is hell, but I think it would be worse if I were to keep in contact with him. More about that next time.

Chana

Dear X,

I was watching Frasier and had just gone into the kitchen to get some crackers when the phone rang. The moment I heard Cassidy’s voice, I knew there had always been this small part of me that had been doing nothing in the past four years but sit by the phone, waiting for something out there to bring her back to me. Through all kinds of relationships, there had been late drunken nights where I had punched her name into every search engine on the net trying to turn up any stupid little trace of her I could get.

The last time I had seen Cassidy was about a year after we had broken up. I was sitting in a Second Cup when she walked through the door in a big Joni Mitchell hat. Right behind her was a big blond boy, also in a big hat. The friend I was having coffee with thought it was the most ridiculous thing she had ever seen, them walking in with their big floppy hats, but all I could think was that it could have been me. I could have been the schmuck in the matching hat trailing behind her.

Her new beau looked like her type, too. Whenever we ran into old boyfriends of hers on the street, inevitably, they were big boys in army shorts and Kodiak boots, the laces undone, and their Ray Ban sunglasses pulled up onto their heads keeping their floppy bangs out of their eyes. They were the kind of guys who loped around swigging from monstrous jugs of milk, jugs bigger than my upper torso.

Cassidy and I looked nothing alike. She was this sparkly-eyed child star all grown-up, and I was someone’s uncle Shecky as a young man. Cassidy had long blond hair, and I had friends who called her Miss Piggy. When she shook their hands they said it was like a little pig had gotten right up on its hind legs and offered them a hoof. Cassidy was a very eccentric dresser, wearing sparkly little gloves and skirts made of neck ties. She wore Superman T-shirts, big British combat boots, and colourful leotards like a little girl. There was something about her that made me feel like she was my sister, my baby-sitter, my daughter, and the bank teller I could never have all rolled up into one. But she was also so oddly beautiful to me and I remember nights where it felt like I could have stared at her face forever.

One time we were sitting in a bar, drinking gin and tonics and not saying much when a very drunk woman came over and said that we really looked interesting together.

“When people say stuff like that,” I said afterwards, “they make the world a less cold place to be.” And for the rest of the night I felt like we were Nico and Lou Reed.

We had met in an intro to Shakespeare class at McGill. After years of dead-end jobs, I had decided to go back to college and I was easily four years older than anyone in any of my classes. She sat beside me and we played hangman. She would choose quotes from Richard the Second, and I would use lines like “I feel like chicken tonight.” Cassidy later told me that she and her friends had nicknamed me “Fonzie.”

“In a good way,” she said.

Cassidy started having me over to her house for study sessions where she’d make me fish sticks. I hadn’t had stuff like that since I was a kid. Pretty soon we started dating.

From the get-go, we never got along. Once as we were leaving a party at her friends, as we were walking down their winding staircase, Cassidy, being the playful drunk kitten she was, ran off ahead of me, and that was how we walked all the way back to her house, with her at least a block and a half ahead of me, and she never looked back once. I tried to be cool. I even lingered over a box of books someone had thrown away. I rooted through it for a while and withdrew a copy of Soul On Ice, but by the time I made it to her house I had wrung it to shreds. There was the time she so thoroughly insulted my artistic vision that I came very close to running her over as she got out of my car to walk through the McGill campus gates; but instead I sat there, revving the engine and honking the horn as though to say: “Look at me! I’m impotent with rage!”

But there was tenderness, too, like how she would greet me at her door in the middle of the night in her Little House on the Prairie flannel night gown and sleepily babble about the dream she had just woken out of involving Theodore Dreiser; how she told me, when we took showers together, that with my hair slicked back I looked like a 1950’s teen idol; how she said I had the perfect penis, and I said that was the kind of compliment that sticks with a person; how she would repeat over and over about how she and her Chinese roommate, living under the same roof together, were every freshman boy’s wet dream; how she said in her little-girl voice that from this time forward she was going to “keep her pie-hole shut”; how she told me that if she had to choose one person to spend the rest of her life with on a desert island, it would be me. There were picnics on Nun’s Island that started off with Camembert cheese and foreign beer and ended in horrible fights about things I can no longer remember. There were so many fights, fights with yelling in the park, fights in pup tents, fights that scared her roommates.

To be honest, much of her anger towards me was justified. I had just gotten over a three and a half year relationship, and was never willing to commit in the way that I should have. Every so often, as we lay in bed she would smilingly ask me if I wanted to “go around” with her. That was what they used to call going steady in her old high school.

“What’s the point of all that?” I said. “What’s so bad about taking things as they come?”

She explained to me that if I was her boyfriend, or even just her friend, she would bake me a cake on my birthday, but as her fuck-buddy, baking me a cake would just somehow be a really cheesy thing to do.

And now here was her voice again. I could hear her eyes, off to the side and uncertain, her leotarded legs twisted around each other like licorice.

One of the first things she said was that she was thinking of becoming a mortician in order to best deal with her death anxiety. I told her that a lot of morticians fuck corpses and she said that I was still the same old asshole. We argued for a while and then she told me that the only reason she had even called me in the first place was to tell me that she was engaged.

If she was looking for some kind of reaction, she certainly got it. My stomach suddenly felt like a sandwich bag filled with sea-monkeys leaking water all over the place. I sat down on the kitchen floor and stared up at the dirty dishes in my sink as she talked about her new life.

“I’m brilliantly happy,” she said.

She described her fiancé as some kind of saint, the kind of guy who spends whole afternoons talking to homeless people and really trying to solve their problems.

“Is he tall? ” I asked.

“He’s shorter than me,” she said.

As we talked, she kept interrupting to get her cats a treat.

“I’ve become a real cat person,” she said. “My cats are my life.”

Of course I was tempted to say a great many things on the subject of her cat-personhood, but I wasn’t going to take the bait.

“That’s great,” I said, and there had to have been a trace of something other in my voice—how could there not have been—but she wasn’t biting either.

She told me that for Y2K, she and Richard, her fiancé, had gone up to his parents’ place in the country with enough food and water to last them a few months, just in case something happened. I imagined her doing the shopping for them the way she did for our picnics, not skimping on anything, getting Dijon instead of regular brown mustard.

As stupid as it was, I sat there listening to her and wondering how she could have failed to fit me into her plan, how she could have been willing to leave me to die in the final reckoning.

Her cats were driving her crazy, being “very bad” so she had to go. I told her Richard was a very lucky man. I was tempted to add, “as long as you manage to keep your pie-hole shut,” but I refrained.

There are some mornings where I wake up and feel like every woman I’ve ever loved is right on my chest, just sitting there, drinking coffee and talking to each other. It’s like a part of you never entirely lets go. I wish I could say I’m going to get up now and toss away the nutty mix tapes Cassidy made me, but I never get around to buying much new music.

I’m going to leave a special request in my will, asking for Cassidy to be my mortician. Look at him, all smug, she’ll probably say.

Jonathan.