a case against fate
four years ago i stepped on to the brown line and made eye contact with the most beautiful man i had ever seen. he smiled and i ducked my head. he had a girl with him. she was petite and pigtailed and wrapped in a carhartt but every time i looked he was looking too. i was on fire.
it’s three days later and i’m smoking a joint on my boyfriends couch with lauren. he hates me and i hate him and he hasn’t touched me in months and i don’t want him to. we will make each other miserable for six more months before he finally takes the bed and the cat and turns off my phone. i burn my acrylic lighting the joint and i tell lauren about this beautiful man i had seen on the train and how he made me feel crazy. Electric. i sounded like a lunatic. i was being a lunatic. i open my twitter to a follower notification and it’s him, i tell lauren. it’s him. No way, she says there is No Way It’s Him but i follow back almost immediately and within seconds he tweets at me: “i think i seen you on the train the other day”
i type out six responses. i go with the least chill one. i remember i tell him. how could i forget. we dm. we exchange numbers. we make plans to eat jibaritos together before he moves to LA forever in three weeks. he’s a dork rapper with a pokemon tattoo and i email him every day. he sends me letters and short stories in the mail and i send him the poems i see written on train windows. he sends me voice notes of the raps he writes for me and i send him pictures of my ass. he tells me they knock the wind out of him, he calls me his muse and for a time i don’t even care that i am too brilliant too powerful too Much to ever be demoted to a man’s muse. We do this every day for a year. he moves back to the midwest. He’s closer now and he promises to visit. he never does.
i’m hurt. i don’t understand. he says he wants me. that he dreams of playing in my heavy brown hair of kissing my soft belly of eating jibaritos across the table from me. i beg him to come. he refuses and we don’t speak for months.
it’s september and i’m at a rap show. i hear my name posed as a question across the back room of the burlington. i turn around. it’s him and all of a sudden i’m on fire again and we’re piling in the backseat of his friend’s car. i’m sitting in his lap and kanye is on the radio. the windows are down and i’m singing to good life. his hands are gripping my thighs and he’s whispering furiously in my ear like a crazy person. within minutes of unlocking my front door we’re in my bed and he tells me he’s dreamed of this for so long but he didn’t know that it would feel This Good Oh My God It Feels So Good. i burrow into his armpit. i’m going to build a home there i decide. i trace his tattoos with a long baby pink fingernail. i drum on his collarbones where two gold chains rest, nestled in his patchy chest hair. a forest a fire ran through. he twists a lock of my hair around his finger. he has to drive home tonight. his friends are sitting uncomfortably in the living room watching anime with my roommates and they want to go home tonight. i beg him to stay. he kisses me hard and promises three times that he’s going to visit. he never does. i never get another frenzied voice not about my cheekbones. when i see neruda scrawled on the back of a seat on the red line, i do not send him a picture.
when i listen to his music months later, i recognize entire lines from my poems. i hear the words i’ve whispered into the phone at 3 am echoed back to me. my cheeks burn. i want to call him. i want to scream. i want to write him 1000 words about the 1000 ways he hurt me. i never do.
it’s today. i’m scrolling instagram with one eye open. he got married this weekend. she’s tall. slender. beautiful. an artist, from what i can tell. i pray to god he never calls her his muse.
