The English Bulldog

1.0

Didn't everybody warn me that loving you would be dangerous? Didn't they say you're a bulldog without a muzzle? I told them all, listen, I like my boys the way I like my pasta: with some bite.

2.0

A lot of people ask me why I left my last boyfriend. My beautiful, square-jawed, intelligent, live-in boyfriend. It took me a year to find a good answer to that question. Do you know that I finally have it? And, hell, maybe you won't like it, but at least it's the god honest truth. 

1.0

But you — you came in like the love of my life. Swept up the whole room like a storm moving through oceans. We fight every week. (Sometimes every day?) And still I am drawn to you like a rat to the plague: loving you is the smartest, stupidest thing I have ever done.  

2.0

One morning I woke up and thought "is this it?" It wasn't: girls like me are destined for bigger, dirtier, grittier things. I ended the lease, packed up my shit, and the day we moved out was the last time I saw him. And I'll probably never see him again. And, Lord, I can live with that.

1.0

So I read my palms and trace our future: it's full of fire and blood and brimstone and the kind of sorcery that gets poets going. I thought I'd felt this before but you — yeah, you — you fill me with the desire to repeat: ourselves, our lives, our genes. You make me want to pass this feeling on. Follow my patterns: life always begins and ends with you.

An excerpt from the fictional short stories, Conversations About Paradise.