Women and Children First

We've moved to a sleeker residence with a full-time doorman.

http://subwayphilosophy.wordpress.com/

We've Been Had

Adam has a bicycle. He has a studio off Main Street and a garden. Hardwood floors, exposed brick. Clean lines, plants. He doesn't have a cell phone, he doesn't have a television. He doesn't use the internet. He wants to bite my bottom lip. He wants to make love to me and then kill himself, because that would be worth it, to him. He doesn't like to see bands live, he doesnt like to even see pictures of them. He says he hates a fair deal of life's trivialities, but he doesn't actually seem to hate too much.

He is 26 and says that he has never really admired breasts, that ex-girlfriends have all been flat chested. This somehow seems like a fragile lie wrapped in linen.

He drinks too much, vodka over ice with an herb from his garden floating around on the bottom that makes it tastes like chocolate and mint. He leaves his lights off, save a bulb in the corner pointing downward. He is half Scottish half American Indian. He is quiet. He likes the quiet, he likes being naked. He likes locking eyes, and laughing though he laughs more with his eyes than his throat. He never completed college. He doesnt like cheerios, he vomited cheerios as a child. Adam says doesnt want to give his love to one person, and he wants to come down to the city and lie in bed holding me. Adam stays on Main Street and calls me.

I don't answer.

One Year Ago

We're half awake. It's 3:30 and we are spread on the bed, legs stretched, arms curled, folded apart in the snug covers. We will only be a we for so much longer, and then I shall be a me and he shall be a he. The room is cold, but the bed is warm.

The last four months together have turned us into alcoholics. We have never felt so full and so empty. We drink bottles of chilled Touraine and warm single malt. We can not afford cable, but we can afford to invest what little money we make on our beautiful menage-a-trois with liquor. On more than one occasion we took turns throwing up in the toilet. Water dripped on our heads from a leaky pipe in the apartment above us. We would return to the stiff mattress and one of us would cry while the other stroked hair across forehead and looked away.

All this makes it easier to leave me behind. This is the Fall. This is the slow and careful deconstruction of love.

And because I would never be stupid enough to try to get by on my writing.

When people ask me why I work in publishing, I say two reasons:

1: I enjoy making less money than all my friends.
2: I have decided to decorate my apartment in advanced copies I will never, ever have the time or will to read.

Rainy Day Woman - 23

Rainy Day Woman - 23

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Reply to: pers-539377614@craigslist.org
Date: 2008-01-14, 9:54PM EST


I'm not going to stone you,
but please stop reading if you're not a Bob Dylan fan.
Please stop reading if you're a vegetarian,
or even worse, a republican.

Stop reading if you don't consider grammar essential in letter writing,
or even worse, don't consider letter writing.

I hope most of you are gone now.

I'm short. I'm a redhead. I'm an atheist Jew.
I'm opinionated.
I'm ridiculous.

Good, now the rest of them are gone.

I read the New Yorker, or the Atlantic,
and always the New York Times.
I work in publishing.

I sometimes talk to strangers on the subway,
but only if they look interesting. I'm very pretty.

If an old man tries to buy me a drink at a bar I will decline,
and if he insists, I will order single malt scotch.
He usually leaves me alone after that.

(I love single malt scotch.
But I can't really afford it.
I have the taste of an old man sometimes.

It's funny because I'm cute.)

I think there should be a way to order a steak
between rare and medium rare,
because I think medium rare has become the new medium.

You must either laugh at my jokes or roll your eyes and smile.

You must be smart.
Not law school smart.
Not i-banker smart.
I mean sharp, confident, and able to discuss
Coetzee or Auster or even Vonnegut while also enjoying a good
"That's what she said" mixed in.

I'm sorry.
You must be tall(ish).

English must be your first language.
Did I mention I work in publishing?

You must email me something to get my attention,
and it must not be your penis.
Please god do not email me your penis.

This isn't going to work because everyone on Craigslist is
an ugly stupid desperate freak.
And not even the good sort of freak.

You must prove me wrong.

New Years Day

The new year is exhilarating or depressing for the exact same reason: What you've accomplished, and what you haven't.

Take the city,

and suddenly New York has ripped down its lights and its magic and the tourists left are the sad ones, the poor ones, the ones who speak English anyway, who are spending their sinking American dollars.

Christmas trees are broken, pine greens splintering into the garbage amongst the broken take-out containers and rotting food.

This is when New York becomes especially devoid of that happy holiday commercialism. Everything is 35% off, including our souls. We'd given our gifts and lit our candles, and then the New Year snuck upon us in our Aulde Lang Stupor.

Kiss me, it's another year. Hold me, we're still the same. And so on and so on. Curl up with me on New Years Day, stretch your coked up toes in your rolled up covers, cowering, shedding last year's skins.

Another Theory of Relativity

Which hormones flood a female's brain post-copulation? Maybe if I had been on this hormone therapy my mind would have stopped drifting back in time months ago.

An asshole once gave me wise advice: Never time travel.

In other words, a wise man once said to never look backwards -- this way you fall down the stars.

Time travel, indeed. Suppose I did it anyway. There are laws of time/space, and even more for time/love. A mathematician can devise the equation. A nuclear physicist can break love into waves. Rachmaninoff can compose his third piano concerto, too.

Which hormones flood a female's brain post-fornication? No one needs to time travel after very good sex. That's an insult to the sex. So what are these feelings, just hormones? Hormones and timing?
Let
H = hormones
T = timing
R = the ability to remove oneself from the past
L = longing for whoever held you to do it again, this time longer.