a year ago tonight

I met her a year ago tonight. I haven’t heard from her since October. I am friends with most everyone she is a fan of. The association doesn’t matter, turns out, when you have a bad personality. They could never make Entourage about women. She hates my personality. I refresh her Twitter ‘likes’ tab twice every day. Last time I saw her we were at a party talking to two other people I had made out with, two boys, and I made a joke about that fact to all of them as we stood shoulder to shoulder in a dorm hallway. Her skin turned grey. She didn’t even smirk. Her face didn’t move at all. She got quiet and stayed like that for about twenty minutes. No one laughed, actually. One of the guys said it was disgusting, and he still fucks with me, so I know for certain that it was terrible. When she started speaking again she said that she felt like a voyeur there, and she said that everybody I knew was a caricature performing the references they know instead of behaving like real people, but then she quoted a character from a book we both loved and said she felt just like him, so she was guilty of it too but I didn’t say that. I just thought it, and laughed at her joke. Then she said something about “simulacra” and “signifiers” and I laughed again even though I didn’t fully get it and I didn’t want to ask her to explain because I always had to ask her to explain things and she’d get curt and thin-lipped and I just wanted her to get back to enjoying my company already so she could remember all the nice times we’d had before I moved away and before I realized that boys wanted to fuck me. She hated my writing. She liked one of my stories, she watched a video of me performing it when we first started seeing each other and she looked at me like she was proud and like I was smart. Then she read everything else and she’d get really quiet and wouldn’t touch me or say anything and I’d tell her I thought it was shitty just as much as she did even if I actually liked it and felt good about it. She unfollowed me on Twitter because she said she’d prefer to hear about herself “in the long-form only” but I don’t think she’d like anything I could say about her, whether it be long or short. I tell myself that I love her at least twice a week, I say it aloud when I am alone. I only think that I love her because she doesn’t speak to me, because she hates me, because I will never know her again. In December I went on a date with another girl and we kissed outside of the bar and I kept my eyes open the whole time and pretended that I burned myself with the cigarette I was holding so I could have an excuse to pull away and call a Lyft home. After that I didn’t leave my bed for 48 hours, like I don’t even think I stood up to pee or shit or anything. I felt that I was cheating, even though at that point it had been two months of me sending texts like “hope you’re good” and “are you alive?” to no answer, and even going so far as to reach out to her sweet little faggot best friend asking her whereabouts, and he also never responded, probably because he turned the phone around to her with my message on the screen and she said “do not fucking reply to that bitch, I hate her” and everyone in the room probably laughed and it’s likely that that is the most she’s considered me in months. If she died nobody would tell me. I still have this little book of poetry that she gave me when we first met. I haven’t read a single page, because I hate poetry and I think most poetry is worse than however awful she thought my writing to be. I’m sure the book is good because she has good taste, mostly. She was always so quiet and stone-faced, but I knew she was thinking something so mean and so true. One time around August, exactly a month and a half before the last time I saw her in person and heard her voice, she called me and said I was the perfect girl for her and that she’d like to show up on my doorstep in Brooklyn hopelessly addicted to heroin so I could take care of her. I wanted that to be true, and to happen, so badly. Even though she will never speak to me again for reasons I cannot pinpoint outside of the possibility that she realized she very simply hates my guts all of a sudden, I hope that happens still. I want to buy her clean needles and fucking Narcan her back to life with shit I bought from the Suboxone vending machine on the corner of my block by the Queens-bound side of the train station, and I want her to wrap her cold thin scabby arms around my neck and kiss my forehead and thank me and promise me that she’ll never go quiet again, that she’ll never tell me she fucked a girl who looked like Hunter Schafer again, that she’ll never let her gay best friend ignore me EVER AGAIN! It is midnight now. Today a year ago we couldn’t find each other for our first date and her phone died and we wandered around in opposite directions shouting each other’s names into the wind in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when we found each other after twenty minutes and hugged ‘hello’ it felt like being rescued after a fucking plane crash. I knew something bad was going to happen to me. I knew from the second I first saw her that I’d see her again and again and again and I also knew that when it would end, which it always does, I would never feel the same, and that she would probably go on feeling totally normal. I’m sure right now she feels normal. I’m sure she will wake up around noon thinking “today is Sunday”. And again, like always, she’d be right.