I think about the way the world will someday end for me, about the parallels and perpendiculars involved, how the lines of my apocalypse may somehow intersect with his. I think about the worst dream I ever had, the one where Bill de Blasio bought Coney Island and airlifted it to Buffalo, leaving pieces of Brooklyn’s only Happily Ever After scattered all across New York. The landfill left behind was littered with broken down amusement park equipment, empty airplanes from the kiddie rides at Luna Park. Billowing brown smog and charred sand. All muted colors except for the fire. I think about the last long text I sent him, the time it took me 1,400 words to tell the truth: FRIENDSHIP DOESN’T WORK WITH MEN I WANT TO LOVE ME. Men who tell me I am beautiful and brilliant, complex and exciting. They will fuck me with their fingers in the passenger side of their car. They will hold my hand the whole way home. They will text me mini love notes; they will compare me to Coney Island. They will clarify much later that they meant it all as friends, these men who always fall into a love with someone else. I am not necessary, I am not air, but in the moment I am enough. Complex and exciting, I recognize much later, are synonyms for Too Much.

 

We live so far apart I never see him again, so I tell myself that friends is fine for however long he’ll have me. He takes days to text me back sometimes, but I memorize the paragraphs he writes me, read into all the romance that isn’t there. I text him when I am up at 4am because I know he’ll respond. I screenshot the lengthy messages that make me feel worthy, every time he infers I am not difficult to love. I try not to think about all the ways that he once touched me.

 

Eleven months of escalation and it is fine so long as I imagine him as loveless and at home, eating Popeyes in his car and scrolling past my texts. It is not OK to want aloneness for a friend, but it is human for me to want it for him. He tells me there is power in the way I think and write and am, that I am talented and beautiful and smart. This tips the scales. Soon I am trapped at the top of the seesaw: I have convinced myself I love him, though all we ever do is text. I pivot to platonic, talk about my failures in dating and in fucking. He encourages me to keep at it. So it is that I have fooled him. So it is that I deflate. 

 

I live with the knowledge that men don’t want mess, so men will never want me. I feast on the scraps they throw me instead, a filthy stray stood starving nearby. But therapy is working. For once I find no nourishment in dirt. I tick off his citations then, all the times he recalibrated rejection to something softer. Distance was his lightbulb duh when poor timing didn’t work. “I live two hours away,” he told me when I begged him to love me before. “How could you ever think…” But I know about the girl this time, the one who lives right by me. 

 

I tell him I know he’s seeing someone. I am honest, but I am not brave. I soften the edges slightly; I leave the butter on the stove to melt. I tell him I am in love with concepts and POTENTIAL and imagined someones. I lie, I AM IN LOVE WITH EVERYONE. He calls me right before midnight and I say I have to end this. I tell him our friendship is valuable to me, but this is a half truth. It is everything. But it is over. He sees only destruction and agrees.

 

I think about Coney Island. I think about my dream. It is tough to kill something so alive, but there’s relief in mourning, too.