Playing Fantasy In A Faraway Land.

I drink beer only when I am in that town, I have this irrational belief that beer loses half of its calories if there is an ocean in the vicinity. Plus I really like their beer, I haven't had beer like that anywhere in the whole world. I can't get enough of it. By the third time that I visited, they would unlock the bar the moment I walked in after running in the morning. Beer after running is shockingly good. I love those people, they always take care of me: the bartender brings me pot, the chef gives me leftovers to take home for dinner, the dogs are nice and I swear even the crows had started to warm up to me. I have tiny little pieces of home all over the world and that little beach-front establishment is home in so many ways.

Almost four years or was it three years, I am starting to lose track just like I said I never would, anyway some years ago, I was there for my annual pilgrimage. It had been an interesting year and a tiring one. I've worked since I was eighteen (earlier if you count bullshit work they make you do when you're a minor) but I had never worked a career before until that year. Many jobs but never the responsibility of taking it somewhere. I'd also always been in relationships but never like that. My relationships had been emotionally and physically intense but mostly magical in the sense that they were almost real. We saw each other in the day but when we did we pretended night had fallen. I'd also moved recently, maybe that year, maybe the one before that, because I wanted the career and the relationship. I wanted to become that scary woman who can do everything but always appears unapproachable; hardened but capable. I remember when I moved I had a very strange conversation with my boyfriend. To me it was strange. Then.

He called me when I was on vacation right before I moved. He said a broker called him looking for me and said that I needed to come over and sign the lease for the place I got. I left the country so I gave the broker his number in case he needed to contact me.

"Did you rent a flat?" He asked me.

"Obviously," I told him, "Tell him I'll be back in a week and I'll sign the lease."

"You're moving to my city and you got a flat?" He said in utter disbelief.

See, I really did not understand why he was angry. We had lived together once before briefly and it ended in him pulling a knife on me. Since then we had never even brought it up and I never wanted to do it again and I was sure that he didn't want to either. Also we had completely separate lives.

"Where would I have lived?" I asked him, "In the street?"

"I'll sign your fucking lease," he said very angrily, "But I will also break every bone in your body."

"Fine," I said having kind of understood why he was mad, "But I don't need you to sign my lease. I can sign my own lease."

We ended our conversation on that note. And that conversation, I remember it because it very aptly describes where we were in our relationship all year. We were stuck in the afternoon. I hate afternoons. They are the worst. I don't know where I'm going with my day and it's all so bright; everything slows down a little in the afternoon. I blame lunch. Lunch sucks. And that phase sucked. We didn't know where we stood. We were together, but separately. My life didn't have room for him and he made room in his life for me but I didn't fit. I have this folding floor cushion and there's a spot in my house that's perfect for it but it's five inches too big to fit; once every couple of months I trick myself into believing that it will have magically shrunk. It never does. It won't fit. And I didn't either.

I tried, I think I did, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Friends, family, brunches, just no. I didn't know what to do with him during the day. I was once a very simple creature, I worked during the day and I fucked at night. That's it. Two broad categories and that is all she wrote. I had it all figured out (points finger at herself and laughs). I didn't want more. I loved what I had but I also loved what we had. We had the night. The sky turned dark every time I saw him. I loved what we did at night; I loved how much I loved him when the world was asleep. We had no restraint, we gave no thought to consequences, there were always more ways in which he could hurt me. I wanted that but we were caught in the afternoon.

So I ran for the airport and went to the one place where afternoon is tolerable. Monsoon at the beach. Beer and storms and sordid romance. I'm so dramatic, and I wish I didn't enjoy it so much so I would stop. I can't just say I love you, I have to paint it onto some giant surface in a majorly inconvenient way. And there I was at the beach, in that little corner of home away from reality and I just wanted to not live my life for a few days. I wanted to drink beer in that rain and fuck someone who didn't want me to go shopping for a mattress with him. Either you do it or I'll do it, why must buying a mattress be a group activity?

I was sitting there under the giant umbrella which is great at keeping the sun away but pretty shitty at keeping the rain away. I was wet and my beer was wet and in a distance I could see a shirtless man covering his head with a bag and walking fast. He was shirtless but he was wearing a blue jacket thingy, you know this jackets that don't have sleeves and are totally useless but kinda cute, and a red cap. The cap was overkill. In a couple of minutes he reached where I was. He put his stuff under the umbrella and proceeded to have an adorable crisis while trying to dry all his stuff and his money. He went inside and get put his cash in front of a fan, and it kept flying away (well, duh) and it was so, so...funny.

Finally he seemed to have settled down and he came back outside. He had a beer in his hand and he seemed to have gotten over his little adorable diva moment. He came over and introduced himself and I want to share his name but it seems wrong so I will do the next best thing and call him Flounder. Flounder was very cute. He had a beer gut and he had wrinkles of a 44-year old but he had the face of a 14-year old. He was also a little ditzy and socially awkward but very admirably, I could see, that he was making a concerted effort to be more confident. He explained to me that he had just left his hotel room to go for a walk and then all of a sudden it started to rain furiously and the weather forecast it totally predicted sunshine so he didn't carry an umbrella. See I can't do him justice, you have to hear Flounder tell you this story. He's adorable.

"Everyone keeps telling me I picked the worst season to come here," he said sitting down next to me.

He seemed genuinely upset by his decision making. Like his mommy would have spanked his cute little bottom for it.

"Come on," I told him, "The beer is great, right?"

He laughed and agreed with me. The beer really is great.

"So why'd you come in this terrible season?" I asked him.

"I just wanted to..." He started but then he stopped to fidget with the soggy matchbox on my table for a long minute, "Actually... My wife left me."

We sat in silence for a couple of minutes. I think he was surprised at the force with which he had just said those words. I was surprised to hear them too; some people, like me, we can say the most deeply personal things about ourselves and they sound completely ordinary, and some people, like him, you know they've said too much when they admit something like that.

"So why are you here?" He asked finally.

"It wasn't raining where I live," I told him.

Eventually we got back to talking about him and his wife. They met at the back of a bus when they were twenty and got married three years later. She was his first everything, he claimed, because when you grow up as a geeky kid with braces and no interest in sports, you also grow up around women who have no interest in you. That makes me sad. They'd been married twenty years when she decided to leave because they hadn't had sex in the last two.

"So why weren't you having sex?" I asked him, "Got tired of doing it with the same person?"

"No..no.." he said thoughtfully, toying with the matchbox and wondering if he should say more, "She thought..she thinks... I'm a pervert."

"And are you?" I asked him when I found my interest suddenly piqued.

"I must be," he said with an air of defeat, "Eventually though I'm the guy whose wife left because I kept asking her to call me daddy."

"Oh you poor thing," I said holding his small gentle hands, "I'll call you daddy."

I did not realize what I was saying when I said it. I accidentally offer to have sex with people a lot without realizing it. There is some deep rooted slut ideation that acts on impulse. Like a suicidal person standing on a cliff. Still I wanted to get out of my own life for a while; out of working and plotting all the time, out of that facade of normalcy, out of being the pain girl, the rape girl, the never-there girl. And at that moment that man who was spilling his guts out to me seemed like the perfect vacation.

Daddy, I called him. I had never said that before unless I was referring to the Korn song. He let me say it. I guess his ears were parched for those syllables. It should have felt weirder because being a little girl was somehow offensive to me in those years (once again: points finger at herself and laughs). It made me feel like I was being reduced from woman to child and I hated. I hated when men tried to take care of me and infantalized me in the process. It just felt like they couldn't handle a woman so they needed to turn her into a child. I was wrong, of course, but I was right about some of them.

Not him, though.

He was wonderful. He's the best thing I've ever taken to my little house from that spot of home at the beach (and I've taken a lot of things home from there).

I remember the first night he was there, I was reading 'Of Love and Other Demons' while he was in the shower. I was sitting on an old rocking chair and turning pages at a feverish pace (because it was my first time reading that book then) and he walked in wrapped in a towel and came and stood behind me. He took the book from me and put his other hands on my shoulder. He started reading and I sank into his hand. He wrapped his fingers around my throat, so gently yet effectively, he kept reading. Releasing. Choking. Reading.

We just kept pretending for a couple of days. We pretended that we were together. There together. Together in life. Daddy and his little girl on beach front property in a tiny town in a country where they didn't have to pay taxes. In a movie we would be hiding from the law, in reality we were hiding from life.

It was nice.

He cooked which was a nice change for me since I always have to cook. He cut my food for me. Made me eat my vegetables. I pretended I didn't like oysters because they were so slimy and he pretended to be the nice caring father who wouldn't make me eat something I disliked. I love oysters though, I love all slimy food, anything that stinks and looks weird will end up in my belly but it was nice to pretend.

It was nice to pretend to be the girl who liked it when he wanted to drink his beer from inside her. Honestly, I never want anyone's mouth down there, I hate that. But I let him pour all sorts of cold sticky beer all over me and drink it out of all my holes. Makes me a little sick to think about it but I remember holding onto his curly hair and pulling him deeper inside me. I remember pouring for him so he wouldn't get dehydrated while he drank me. I remember liking it when he brushed my hair and liking it even more when he ran the hairbrush over my cunt until I made a sticky mess of my own all over it. I remember holding him at night and telling him I loved him. I did, I guess, maybe, probably. It felt like it. We talked for hours and I sat in his lap; we bought groceries together and fucked in the rain. Felt like love.

Love with an expiration date.

Because the day I left to make my flight it was over. I love that. I like love that ends in pain. That's sick but I can't help it. I like that I have these perfect little pretend love stories with a clear ending. I like them. I liked the joy of being the transient in the town of romance but there's nothing I loved more than boarding the flight back to chaos. Carrying nothing with me but the pieces of my broken little heart in my hands, and the hammer I used to break it in my little blue bag.