I have always been someone who is willing to wander through the desert for forty years for a good reason. Like a cause. Or reunion with a buried part of myself.

He did not seem like a good cause, when I met him.

The man who could not stop talking about how awesome he was and the girl whose awesome has been ripped right out of her. We had nothing to say to each other. He started to tell me things and thought better of it I guess, or thought I wasn’t listening. When really I was staring out to sea trying to become an actual mermaid, trying to cut ties with any part of me below my waist, trying to make myself into someone who could leave him.

I left him, in the end. He left me but he insists it was the other way around. The answer depends on who you ask, I guess. Like so many things.

He looked at me and saw a pretty nubile Columbia grad who was set to light the world on fire the way he was. Maybe. He looked at me the way I always figured I would be looked at on the day I became her. I thought the point of my journey was to become her. Imagine my consternation when I wake, and am myself, in this body.

He thinks his body betrayed him. He thinks I am on the side of his body. He thinks we two are coconspirators. He thinks I acted like a girl in hopeless desire so he would fall apart or look foolish. I suppose I do want him to fall apart and look foolish, by his standards. Lust makes fools of us all. We all fall apart during sex, and are all put back together.