A Recipe For a Black Hole

We began sleeping together out of convenience.

Not because we were in love, not because I ever thought we’d fall in love, but because my roommates locked me inside the bathroom one night, and I never wanted to go back. His bed was large, and in the hot California sun, we only needed one sheet (although he had two) and my legs would fall asleep the second we stopped smoking cigarettes long enough to actually look at one another, like the day he wanted new clothes and I took him to my favorite outlet and I knew what he was doing, oh boy, I knew, like when he tried things on and asked what I thought and I kept thinking — he’s trying to make himself so that I can fall in love with him — as he put on v-neck T after v-neck T, and soon my places were “our places” — our favorite Thai restaurant was right next to our favorite donut shop, only feet away from our favorite café — and we were beginning to sleep closer, and closer and smoking more cigarettes and wondering about our future or the absence of, and the last night we mapped out our happiness with the dreams of a house and a bed and 8 million cats and the bookstore we would run, because who doesn’t want to run a bookstore — when he leaned up to me over the white mattress and told me he was coming back, he was coming back with me — and suddenly he had made himself so that I could fall in love with him and even though the love wasn’t yet between us, it was all around us — in the private bathroom and in the bed and surrounding us, coming out of our cigarettes and when I looked at him, it was like looking at the face of someone you’ve known for a thousand years and so I said OK, OK why not.