There are signs all around me suggesting that I should live somewhere less accessible. All of this exposure to the elements of metropolitan life can cripple a person into comfort, into being part of a collective couch potato syndrome. Everything is so easy and still we all complain.

Things get destroyed that way.

I suppose it's just as well. The concept of comfort is a paradox in any case. I'm uncomfortable tonight, shivering, skin soaked in last night's shameful, heated encounter. It is noble to think that minutes that have passed are gone forever, lost beyond recovery…noble thought, indeed, but not real. How can it be that time already past stays there when I have seen and heard it hiding beneath satin sheets of recollection, scented in despair so their aroma can remind me that I am still standing, barely awake enough to relive torture, pain, sadness without measure?

With each troubled, slow-motioned blink, a revelation comes, a dream…love kills, love shatters, lust replaces crushed bone with iron steel bars, burns skin, melts like cellophane. It is a slow burning wick, this, my absurd, desperate need for attention, for affection, for some sort of acceptance. I dress the urges with beautiful leveling corsets and filthy words. The men I carry in my pocket seem to like that sort of thing. My sex is my leverage, but, in the end, all I am is a pail full of garbage.

"I killed a man once. He was old. He was obsessed with me."

My mother, she is not one for quaint subtlety. I ask her what she means and she lays back on the couch, changing channels as if she has just told me to set the table. When she dies, I will look through her belongings for an answer and find a black disguise, a cloak of polyester memories complete with matching gloves and a bloody baseball bat. I will banish it to a faraway landfill and force it back into the recesses of time. But it will remain here, hovering above me, not letting me go, much like her spirit. She knows this will get complicated unless she explains herself. She doesn’t.

The clock on the dashboard reads 6:52. I have driven for an hour and fifteen minutes, the rain outside now a prominent sprinkle, sun peeking through any one window, I can’t quite place which one. I am stuck in traffic, left in the middle of metropolitan chaos to smell the lingering presence of the man who hours ago pulled me into him, a slave to his flesh. He is still in my car, he remains in my womb, trickles of traces of him staining cloth seats--a burning wick never wears undergarments. I have become easily accessible, almost a suicidal rage, this need to destroy myself with touch, align the planets at gunpoint so that my future is always uncertain, that is what it means to be self-destructive. That is what it means to be comforted.

"He never had a chance, if you ask me".

I close my eyes and imagine myself a gasoline container, tipped over and around a home, beating moment by moment, a heart filled with love and matches, a chanting killer. I am burning a family, I am setting fire to a home of lies, there have been many like it but there is only one of this. Her voice trails off in the distance as she says over and over that he had it coming to him. She says it’s in her nature, she can’t help but to be protective of her young. They have no idea that she is crazy, but, then again, crazy is as crazy does and she never really does much of anything. At least not in front of them.

There are restaurants out in deserted highways somewhere out there where neon signs glow twenty-four hours a day, alluring sight to hitch hikers and adventurers. The Indiana Jones-types are the only ones that interest me. I wonder which one of those restaurants is home for my father. I imagine that he wears that hat with pride. He lives for anonymity. I think I channel him when I spread myself before dishonest, unfruitful, selfish men night after night. There is nothing more meaningful…anonymity is safe. Anonymity is comfort. I long for that every day that I am alive.

Bumpers kiss and thirty minutes later, I am home. Someone has taken my parking space.

It pours outside and my windshield wipers can hardly keep up with the deluge. I look at the clock: 5:47 in the morning. It amazes me sometimes how awake I can be after not closing my eyes for 37 hours.

Lovers kill spirits more than enemies. I never forget that, it never leaves me. It stays with me for many years, that thought. My mother is responsible.

I only know my father through pictures and headlines. He is well-read, my mother says, but I reply with a condescending, "Who isn't?". In my world, everybody reads, and they read well, and often, and miraculously enough, about things that mean something. I've never cared for people that don't read. Ignorance may be bliss, but it isn't an enviable trait.

It's three hours previous, and my body curves to the outline of a larger-than-life stranger; he dials, frantic, my head upon his chest as I lie across his lap, mesh of minimal clothing translate thoughts only expressed through understated letters.

"Meet me tonight at my place? I’ll leave the light on for you".

So Shakespearean, I thought to myself, drinking in his words like poison, falling for the trap. Only they were not his ill intentions. Was I leading him down a cursed path? I still have a hard time understanding that.

Here he is, playing the notes on my piano like a rock star. I’m not a gentle touch kind of girl. I enjoy the violence of love. My eyes look up at him as my face leans into his chest, I am paralyzed across his nakedness, my aching whimpers, and he enjoys my every sound. I hear a woman’s voice in my head, she whispers—

"There is no man…there is no man…"—

yet she seldom finishes the sentence. My longing muffles the hushed singing of the siren and I get lost in the dialing, he pushes my button with urgency, he calls and holds my hair back, watches me like sunrise. I am coming for him again and again. He reaches for my mouth and pulls me back. I turn into a leaf.

Violence, rage, degradation – love is a choice made by crazy people because all of those things define what love truly is .Twenty-eight years of bad relationships, past lives not excluded, therapists and monsters, yet I still want to be made love to like an undeserving beast.

Downpour envelops my blind spot and I think that it doesn’t matter.

My mother clings to me like desperation. Memories of arguments and solidarity, the remnants of my grandmother’s beliefs…that is who speaks to me now.

"There is no man…there is no man…".

My mother thinks my father lives somewhere in California, but I don’t believe her. He’s somewhere in the death valley that I am afraid to know. Tonight he sits between pinched nerves and common neurosis, thinking like the criminally insane; he’s held hostage in a padded room of soft mirrors so that he cannot kill himself and as much as I would like to be a hero and save him, I admit only to myself that I don’t want to.

I admit only to myself, and now, to this Shakespearean sadomasochist, that I am a cracked vessel, ready to be broken completely.

There is only time, made slower by the rain as I drive home, I look at my rundown mascara in the rear view mirror.

I don’t look back. My lover kills my spirit like my enemy. This is the only truth I know.