From "Sic Transit" (3)

I wrote D a poem, ending our friendship. I ended it with a line from a song by Jefferson Starship. The next time I saw her her eyes were wet and she smelled like a basement. She asked me to forgive her and then we'd have dinner. Of course I did. She reminded me of my sister who fell in the sewer.

But now I'm sitting here wondering if D was just a way to expiate an earlier misery? Like maybe my experience of C. In 1991 C and I were urchins yearing without aplomb, stretched out across the jukebox at the Step-Hi Lounge, our perceptions heightened by hormones and the devestating effects of misdirected pheromones. I asked him to drive me home because I was afraid to go there alone — "At this moment secret admirers are throwing bricks at my windows instead of stones." Or so I hoped. But there were neither secret admirers nor bricks, nor stones, just a V of geese across the slate-grey sky.

Our firsr date was a last-minute pilgrimage to Memphis; our last, watching ants on a doorjamb. He should have had a sign on him: "Caution: Operate with Detachment." I had to not love him a lot in order for him to love me a little. But I wasn't tough enough for that kind of love, the love that's like an implement of hard labor at the turn of the last century, now an ornament hung with other flea market finds in the kitchen of a civics professor. On my way to work the naked girl with money in her mouth on the cover of Penthouse (displayed outside the smoke shop by the bus stop) reminded me of everything I couldn't be. I was a skinny body in a lacklustre Midwestern windbreaker, constantly adjusting my surfaces in uncertain, imperfect ways. I wanted to be a durable Tallulah Bankhead beauty, dedicated to transgression. But there was no chance of that.

... to be continued