I want to own you and take you far away where we can embarrass each other in public, I like you, you are impossible, you are insane, this is crazy, be my husband, I want anything, we will die before anyone realizes we’re joking, did I just say ‘we’ I meant ‘me me me.’
I’m busy tonight, how about tomorrow, I only really like you for your body anyway, it is so fucked up, hilarious, I want you under my covers with me far away thinking about you, I love you, let’s talk to each other using only allegories, let’s shake hands, please shake my hand, let’s be married and hate each other, let’s move away just to make our friends sad. I want us to be sad forever together and be miserably celibate out of an inability to speak to each other in ways that don’t turn us both off.
~ ~ ~
I want to text message my mom something cute like I met a boy, which is why I’m wearing makeup today.
I am feeling like myself, which feels like I can say anything I want. It feels like I’m not even watching myself on a television screen just above your head. And I’m talking in a way that sounds like I think no one else is around to hear me.
Watch this. I can make fun of myself in a way that makes you feel bad about yourself and I can do this and make you think I’m insecure at the same time and you will think it’s totally charming.
Let me guess. You want to get a drink with me sometime. Just kidding. I don’t have a boyfriend. I just wanted to see if you’d believe me.
If I rest the weight of my upper body on this rail you will think I am either sick of talking to you or trying to show you my boobs. And that is exactly the kind of tension we need to move this relationship forward.
By move this relationship forward I mean give me your phone number and I will probably not call you.
By probably I mean drunkenly.
And by phone number I mean expensive jewelry.
I don’t think you’d like me on many other days. I know I am sarcastic and accommodating, but I am also small and quiet and won’t like you very much or very often.
I’m not mad. I just can’t find my cell phone to pretend I have a call.
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
I bought some pills, morning after pills, to plant in my purse so that one day they might spill out and someone might see them and believe, however briefly, that I was having sex or even had a boyfriend.
~ ~ ~
What Are You Wearing!
There were three boys: Damien, Nick, and Raphael.
Tanya said, “Let me see here.” And then, “Who has the nicest hair?”
Raphael raised a hand. It was clear that he did have the nicest hair.
Tanya said, “Who is the most attractive in general?”
Raphael said, “Me, again.”
No one considered disputing this, either.
Nick said, “Ask something about being funny.”
Damien said, “Or about emotional availability.”
Tanya said, “Are any of you single?”
Raphael said, “I’m not sure what you mean.”
Nick said, “I’m only one person, yes.”
Damien said, “Could you repeat that?”
Tanya said, “Um.” And then, “Yeah.”
When she was fourteen, Tanya cut her hair into a boy’s bob, and her grandma stopped loving her until it grew past her ears. They called her into the principal’s office the day it happened, to tell her that her grandma could finally love her again, and that she could go home early. On the way home she saw a mountain lion sleeping with dried weeds tangled in his whiskers.
Tanya turned around and said, “What color are my eyes?”
Damien said, “Green.”
Raphael said, “Grey.”
Nick said, “What difference does it make?”
Fable
Maya was a startlingly beautiful girl, and for this reason had trouble making female friends. Often, out of desperation, Maya phoned her mother, Catherine, to gush about her current love interests.
“Just make sure you get tested regularly,” Catherine would say, for though she was deeply disturbed by her daughter’s sexual candidness, she understood the root of Maya’s social inadequacies, and wanted her to feel as normal as possible.
Angela was one of those girls who knew the shoe size of every guy on the lacrosse team, including Coach Feseden, who wore embarrassingly unfashionable Keds and purposely ordered the cheerleader’s skirts one size too small. Angela teased and manipulated Maya with hyper girl talk between classes.
“Coach Feseden is sooo cute, don’t you think, Maya?”
Maya, wanting terribly to be invited to Angela’s Sweet Sixteen party, agreed, and soon developed a crush on Coach Feseden.
For a long time, no one knew where Coach Feseden took Maya. Catherine went on prime-time television begging America for help in finding her. After a few months, everyone assumed he had left the country and that there was nothing they could do. Catherine suffered and, being the only active psychiatrist in the Tristate area, refused her services to everyone, even the psychologically neediest.
People self-medicated. They lost their jobs. Suicide rates skyrocketed. Organic products were rotting on the shelves because everyone was too depressed to care about their health anymore. They begged Catherine to analyze their psyches, to prescribe just one little teeny insignificant bottle of Seroquel®, but she wouldn’t.
“If I must suffer then everyone must suffer,” she said, and made funny faces at a nearby baby.
Deer Grazing
You’re standing in front of a painting of two deer grazing. You’re at home. This painting belongs to you. You see yourself in the deer. You see yourself as one of two. You notice that one of the deer seems to be trying to impress the other deer by grazing in a very sexual manner. You think that this must be the deer that represents your boyfriend; he would totally try to have sex during a meal. “Hahaha,” you think to yourself. The other deer isn’t eating, her chin is just resting on the ground. You would think she was eating unless you looked really carefully, like you are now. And actually, you realize, upon noticing how wide and vacant her eyes are, how shiny and glazed they are; she’s stuffed. A hidden pin holds up her tail. Her fur has clearly been airbrushed, the natural color long faded away. She’s been dead for a long time and no one seems to notice. You remember you need to buy makeup.
Please consider this a cry for help.
Your Only Memory of Him
Your shirt was off and he was smelling the area between your breasts. As he moves his head, the area gets larger and larger until your breasts are at least a mile away from each other and he has fallen asleep between them.
At least no one thinks I’m having fun.
~ ~ ~
I will wrangle your turd for two small payments of $59.99
and and I will throw in two free lemon zesters.
~ ~ ~
Things I Know About Men
Nobody teaches men ‘the sooner the better’ in terms of when to ask you to take off your top. Everybody thinks they’ll just learn that on their own, I guess. Men also drive cars sometimes.