M

While you’re fucking she tells you that at the club she was taking meth and this makes you feel accidentally involved in a date rape.

This is a girl I met through an online personal site, as if that would solve a problem. As if a woman chosen that way would prove to be more suited. As if I'm looking for more suited. As if there is any woman who except for through act of will you'd choose to be alone on an island with the rest of your life.The lies we tell ourselves when we're tired.

M is is the noise you create after a bad breakup when you are afraid to be alone with your brain.

She is part of what you do when you think you mean to really really retire, move into the next phase of life, crash land on that island.

She's your first attempt.

She looked much sexier in her picture than she did in real life but she was plenty sexy, a sort of club girl who worked in a vet clinic by day but put on the makeup mask and the hothot clothing at night, a thin girl with a heartbreak story that didn’t match her sex kitten photos, lips pouted to the camera, tongue out and tip bent up along the side of some female friend’s face.

(That's right, I'm looking for the love of my life, a final final love, and that is the picture on which I stop).

It's the middle of the week. She takes me to a place in which I feel too old, an underground club where the music is hard and the kids are jumping up and down. I feel overly tall, overly worked out, a sort of giant, out of place, this mythological land that makes perfect sense to the people that inhabit it.

This girl, her friends, all of them pretty, what am I doing here? What is she doing with me?There's vodka. The walls are black, the floor strange, like particle board, chewed up in places and spongey. This is a better hell, dark and somewhat dirty, but you might choose to be here, just not for long, not for an eternity.

She's in and out of the booth, dancing, her friends, all this sort of conversation, people talking anyway, and we drink and the floor gets blacker and I was ready from when I walked in to be away.

When she asks me to stay the night, I don't know why. Both of us are looking for something we probably shouldn't believe in. Both of us are probably going about it all wrong. She asks me to her bed maybe because she thinks that is how it starts, if it is to start at all. And when it comes down to it, I suppose she is right.

I've alreayd had my ephinany, though. It's not going to work. Not like this. I think I've learned my lessons well and am ready to settle, like anybody who walks out of a building that has burned. I know the value of what I might have again and so I mean to get it quickly and take care of it well, but I'm with this girl because of her picture, and that's not going to cut it.

My realization some time in the club, or mabye in the car on the way to or from it: I'm not going to find HER, whoever she is, if she even is, this way, or that way.

That fine line. On one side, you're a monk. On the other, you are 81vaginas. It's not that you ever cross it. It's just that it can be crossed.

She is sucking my x and I am pulling down the boxer shorts with the elastic band rolled several times to make them snug, and I am wondering vaguely who they belonged to. She's got little plastic packages full of lubricant she squeezes out into her x, telling me that some medication she is on makes her dry. That and the ceiling fan.

It's late. The next time I see her--I return for a jacket that I'll leave by accdient in the morning--we watch cartoons and she eats Capitan Crunch without milk and I feel like the stranger I am, sitting on her couch, wondering how much time has to pass before I can take my jacket and go this time for good.

Anyway, we fucked. I think there is some affection in it, and certainly some pleasure. There are moment, as with any fuck, when you sense that connection you're after. Her eyes fall into yours. Or she kisses you more delicately. My hand is flat on the front side of her hip, the tips of some fingers on her sunken belly, her life right beneath them, all the working mechanics of a full on human being, complete, if you look up--and I do, I always do--with soul and whatever that entails.

And I know what I'm doing. I know it for real. I'm trying to get the feeling of some girl that is gone off of me. The thought of her out of my mind. The way sometimes we try to clean things not with water, not with purity, but with other kinds of stain. You rub dirt over your bloody hands.

And nothing really gets your mind free. This would take a lobotomy, a pill, a bullet.

I'm looking for the love I never fully had, a cave in which to hibernate, a grave in which to rest, but I stop on the sexiest photo I can find. I fuck her more than anything to take possession of her particular appeal, as if after that it will always belong a little bit to me, the way a woman picks a flower so she can annex its beauty to her own.

She tells me she took meth at the club. I'm fucking her. Her ass is small and round and pale. There is a little operation scar on her belly. She told me about before we met. She's got this story of loss, some boy she couldn't see that she should have kept and now she is digging around in the dark for one like him.

In the morning, at the stop light close to my apartment, dawn really, after the night of fucking, I fall asleep sitting in my car, I don't know for how long. I just wake and the light is green and I wonder where I am, and who.