- /
+I never get to see Zach but I do today and I make it count. I grab him in the hall and make him late for class. I poke him. "Hear you've got a new lady friend, way to go, dude." He punches me in the arm. "Dang. Why's everybody gotta talk about my business? Who told you? No, wait, this is better. Guess what. My baby sister took her first twelve steps last night! Like, in a row! And she's only eleven months, isn't that good? That's pretty good, right? And she can say Mama and Dada and Ak. That's me, I'm Ak. Great, huh!" and he laughs and laughs and punches me again and runs off to class.
As I'm leaving work Heather asks me to stay a minute to "touch base." I wonder if she is going to fuss at me for my visible bra straps, or maybe she knows I've been stealing pudding cups. Maybe "touch base" is bitchy repressed mean lesbian code for "masturbate with me."
"How do you feel about tall dark and Albanian?" My answer is, of course, "yay." As it turns out, Heather wants to give me a man. Everything she's saying sounds good - she leans in, smiling, to tell me she's been seeing a man she met at a club, 20, speaks hardly any English, but, she says, "he doesn't need to." He has a friend named "Lobby" (Labi? that's foul) who needs a date and he's very handsome and - and I stop listening, the same way I would stop listening if - shit, I don't know, some metaphor with a piranha in it. Anyway, not only do I tell her no, but I weave (with shameful lack of effort) a story about a man I've just started seeing, someone I used to work with, and we always got along so well, and this relationship is new but I feel it's founded on friendship and I don't want to jeopardize something that could turn out to be really amazing.
After work I realize I haven't eaten, because I am a moron. Grocery store. I pick the ugliest pie, with broken crust and pie guts oozing out, because I know no one else will buy it. For a minute I have the bad thought that this is how I pick my men, but that's not true, and I relax. Sometimes I think bad things just because they make good stories.
I sit in my car in the park enjoying the branches against the sky and the giant maroon improbable perfect rooster in the tree next to me. I eat pie. Suddenly I know, and it makes me happy, these are highly sensual moments I am building, I have no fork and no napkins and it is all up to my fingers and tongue. Lately I have had zero sexual instincts - months of not caring, except the occasional flicker for Gillian Anderson or David Duchovny or both - maybe it is the lack of someone to share sensualityness with, maybe I am just protecting myself. I don't know what it is. But I know, licking pie off my fingers in the park, that if someone were with me, I would be feeding him sweet apples, and he would be enjoying it.