I am apparently good, damn good, in bed, but my self-love is wrinkled.

I never doubt myself in love with friends and brothers and dogs and the local homeless person, but when it comes to girls, I am just a fucking mess.

*

This happened recently and is still happening in my mind, because all I want to do is talk with her, hear her voice, kiss her, but when she breaks into the “Blessed be,” shit, which is a Wiccan blessing, that good things may happen to you, it makes me want to vomit. Not that I don’t want good things to happen, but the actual asshole who is reciting this phrase has not been terribly kind to me, doesn’t call me back, ignores my Dantesque poetry, writes me only a word or two between her getting fired from jobs and motherhood—enough to keep me obsessed and suicidal and contacting her on Facebook Messenger. Anyway, she wants to bless me, as if she is the saint and I’m the sinner and she’s all good with this phrase.

*

Let me begin by telling you that I got my hair cut this Saturday. Just the way she likes it. It’s dyed green and a mohawk. I even took lessons from the hairdresser on how to properly mohawk the mohawk. Do you think that I, a 56-year-old woman, who crashes her car window mirror avoiding bicycle riders who take up more room than my Volvo in Philadelphia, needs to take lessons on how to style a green mohawk, how to apply cream to my hair, and make it look like someone’s hair in a TV show based on the 1980s East Village, when, in reality, I was living in the East Village in the 1980s, and don’t need an interloper TV show telling me how to dress. Besides, we didn’t wear green mohawks then. We simply did coke till 7 in the morning, using our tax refunds, and hoped the guy supplying the coke didn’t make us give him a blow job.

*

The blessed girl, who blessed me via the Wiccan chambers of outdoor magic and good will, who doesn’t call me back, who doesn’t let me linger in her bed, was supposed to be babysitting some capitalist dude’s house this past Saturday, when I called her, during the time I was getting my green mohawk. There is a time when you get the green mohawk, when the mohawk dye dries, you have about ten minutes, and that is when I called her. NO answer. There’s never an answer. She never answers the goddamn phone, unless I’m picking her up at the train station, but that doesn’t happen anymore.

*

As she didn’t respond, and had some lame excuse like, “I’m feeding the lemurs, who are visiting our local zoo,” I said, “I’m done with this shit. You can’t even pick up the phone when I call you. Fuck you and your lemurs.”

She replied, “Look, I didn’t mean anything, really, I almost got fired from my job and guess what, my thinking was not about you.” And the lemurs would have starved if she hadn’t fed them.

My response: “I am unfriending you because I can’t take this rejection. I know we said we’d be friends,” I type, not able to put my green hair on the phone video camera, what a fucking waste of $100, “but you don’t respect me. I do all the leg work. I call you. I send Andy Warhol-derived images of Mona Lisa. You dispense one-word adjectives, which aren’t even that remarkable, like ‘beautiful’, or ‘that’s great’. I am exhausted being the person who makes all the moves in this supposed ‘friendship’. I am sick of exchanging my multifaceted and botanic thoughts for your five-cent piece of shit vocabulary from the Google thesaurus.”

*

Yes, we agreed, we’d be fucking friends. Of course, I’d rather be fucking than friends.

*

I have the self-esteem of a lemur—ring-tailed racoon beings with bulging eyes that are primates and traverse the beaches of Madagascar. How could a lemur ask out a girl who loves to shoot a gun and get stoned and follow bands around and practice Wiccan thoughts—how can a lemur who hangs in trees, who comprises 100 species in the wilderness, who can get as large as a gorilla, ever hope to sleep with a girl with soft mammaries and candles in our bedroom? Though she stopped lighting the candles.

“I’m a nocturnal beast, you know. Lemurs are nocturnal beasts, according to Wikipedia,” I said. But she’d rather go Wiccan than Wikipedia. Anyway, from that day forward there was barely a light in our bedroom. Some days she didn’t even sleep with me.

*

Finally, after the “Blessed be” statement, and I had done an AA meeting in a state mental institution, where she claims to have been locked up as a teenager, which might explain her inability to date a lemur, and where an Arab-American woman hit on me, and all my Muslim friends have since advised me to date her instead of the Wiccan who blew out the candles, I told her, “it’s not about you. It’s about me. I still have feelings for you.”

No answer.

So, I called her.

“I don’t feel like talking, in fact, I’m going to deactivate my account.”

“Don’t deactivate your account,” I told her, “you love Facebook. Look, honey,” I continued, “I’m the stalker in this relationship. Sometimes there’s a top, sometimes there’s a bottom, but regardless, and among lesbians, there is always one stalker writing poetry about the other girls her ex met on OKCupid, which I can surmise based on all the ‘new friends’ who LOVE your postings. Which causes said stalker, who might be a poet, to write unrequited love poems about her blonde competitors, who are 50 years younger. Mind you, these may be great poems, and get published in prestigious websites that normally reject said poet, but the poet will always wonder why, with her lemur comb teeth, yes lemurs have comb teeth, teeth that resemble a little comb but sharper, maybe not as sharp as crocodile teeth, why she can’t crawl into bed with her Grateful Dead lover, who prefers to ride horses.”

*

That was it. The Blessed be statement came again. It was the way she ended all her e-mails. It’s sort of like: fuck you, but I’m not going to fuck you but because I’m blessing you, via the witchcraft phrase, or the devil worship, which the born-again Christians (who I pray with when I’m on the verge of killing myself) perceive it to be—and it’s ok that I’m treating you in a depraved and senseless manner.

*

I am alone in this world, and even though I just purchased a James Joyce finger puppet, and would love to send her a photograph, hoping she gets energized like she did with my Tasmanian devil for President shirt, and said, “that’s awesome!”, there are no words, and she doesn’t feel like talking, and doesn’t really give a shit about my James Joyce finger puppet that I purchased on Amazon for $9.99 after Bloomsday.

*
Whenever I unfriend her or she unfriends me, we do this quite often—she unfriends my sister, who’s not really her friend—she then feels the need, the compulsion, to end the world that contains me.

This time I blocked her so she couldn’t contact me via Facebook Messenger though I can still message her but WTF? I’m the one who needs the AA meeting and blocking to quit stalking.

*
Stalkers are like green mohawks. They never go out of style. Sometimes they go to Rastafarian youth hostels and pawn their marijuana to the brothers of famous novelists. They are indefatigable geniuses whom all their friends call “loveable geniuses.” If we are so loveable, why don’t we stay loved for more than three months without losing our mind?
*

I have never doubted I am capable of loving people. I cherished my mother, who was not always courteous to me, with great confidence. But I did love my ex, I loved her gentleness, and sweetness, and hellos in the morning, and hellos in the evening, and even the smell of her arm next to me. Nothing witty could ever be as delicious. Blessed be.

Eleanor Levine's writing has appeared in more than 70 publications, including Fiction, Evergreen Review, The Toronto Quarterly, Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters, The Denver Quarterly, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others; forthcoming work in Thrice Publishing's 2019 Surrealist/Outsider Anthology, Good Works Review, South Dakota Review, and Heavy Feather Review. Her poetry collection, Waitress at the Red Moon Pizzeria, was published by Unsolicited Press (Portland, OR) in 2016. Her short story collection was accepted for publication by Guernica Editions (Canadian publisher).

Image: Error on Green, Paul Klee, 1939