Don’t wait in the last light and the warmth of the winter sun
Don’t get caught out with the temperature going down
[Grave's Disease] by [Matt Pond PA]
I hadn't thought anything would come of it. Committing myself to romance with an unemployed creative was a farcical, eye-rolling impracticality. It played out like a wildly imaginative scenario from an apocalyptic feature film, complete with gripping plot twists and million dollar pyrotechnics. It was a pleasant distraction from reality. There is no logic in my surrendering a fragile heart, still the shade of new-skin pink, to a Scandinavian stranger. To Daniel.
But Daniel would have had little chance to win my love if I hadn't just enjoyed a little game of romance with Jake.
Like all the other [girls and boys] in the Age of Technology, I met Jake on one of those dating Web sites touting an algorithm coded by Cupid himself. Our romance was like any old-fashioned digital courtship, beginning with polite email exchanges and Googling of the other person's computerized persona. A round of more complicated negotiations follow, ultimately, hopefully, leading to hours of offline dry-humping — preferably on the floor and leaving rug burns to admire the next day.
I am sitting on the padded Indian rug of the main room in my Danish home, the shoe-box artifacts spread out around me, looking at the marks in my calendar. I've just counted the 29 intoxicatingly delicious days between my first date with Jake and the night he finally fucked me, which is identified with a red heart around the day's number in red felt-tipped pen. I remember that when he coaxed my dormant libido back into bloom my heart beamed in rosy confidence from having chosen someone worthy of my affection. It is always cause for celebration to find yourself floating on a curious cloud of safe serenity in the arms of someone who knows [how your heart is wired]. No matter the length of time you have them inside you. And Jake — the life of the party, empathetic, kind — reminded me of my Pops, who was perpetually on my mind at the time.
I had just finished the morbidly difficult year-and-a-half-long process of liquidating Pops' estate. I was allowed to keep only the negligible: his sign-painting brushes, the [hand-carved door harp] I bought for him at [Saturday Market] one Christmas Eve, his top-heavy wooden desk, the family photographs. Anything of real value was turned into cash, which was then turned over to creditors. And as I computed the final net balance on my father's life, I couldn't stop thinking of his last year. He alternately hid his sorrow and lashed out, growling like a fatally wounded animal. He was trying to keep his life's light from being extinguished, while I was busy with my own struggle to build up some signs of light inside myself.
Now Pops' estate was settled, and I was emerging from hibernation into my first relationship in years, with Jake who is all about being the good boyfriend, the good father, and the good friend. He is, in fact, the kind of friend who patiently consoles the heartbroken for hours when their impossible [full color love affair] falls into the Devil's bloody hands. He will insist on driving the lashing and foolishly drunk home, and then stick around to make sure no one drowns in their vomit. Jake did those things for me, and he continues even now to be a truly wonderful friend. But years ago, during the starving final weeks of our sexual relationship, I would have been very happy to skin his fuzzy ass alive.
I had had limited experience in dating a man who was good to me, of course, but in the last few weeks before Jake broke up with me my introspective mind had marched in and tasked itself with calculating the data in its thoroughly systematic and altogether tedious way. I noticed that we had passed the stage in a relationship where a couple decides if there is love or not. Silently the [signs] screamed that something was fading, and that something else was growing. And gradually it became clear to me that my good relationship with my good boyfriend was futile: Jake just wasn't that into me. And to further the insult, he didn't even realize it.
I didn't want to leave my sweetheart-sex, even though romantic love was not materializing, and so I waited for him to figure it out on his own. Meanwhile, my thundering heartbeat whipped my metabolism into a frenzied dance. During the six months that Jake and I were together, thirty-five pounds disappeared from my frame — twenty-five pounds in the final three months. My breasts deflated into flabby pancakes. Jake also became sick frequently, afflicted with a [sore throat], a debilitating headache, a cold, as if the pressure of our unbalance brought on chronic infections.
Jake was again sickly and pale on the day of our break-up, this time with a fairly serious ear infection. The temperature of our relationship had dropped dangerously low, and it seemed to have given him a deadly chill. Bottles of useless medication crowded his bedside table, and his waxy green skin sweated for warmth. I sat there next to him, rigid and impatient in breath, feeling insulted and vindicated as he slowly choked out his words. It took his mouth forever to finally release the truth. I left him shivering with a curt acknowledgment, and went home as detritus. I was withered. For the nominal thrill of having an "in a relationship" status broadcasted across my social networks, I had let my body decay.
The time had arrived for Daniel's simple role: to replace the stimulation that Jake had provided for me in a smaller safer dose; to wean me off of my adrenaline highs; to help fatten the hollows in my shriveled self. He came with a high recommendation from my friend and co-worker, Lily. Together we worked in and old-ish, short-ish, uninteresting downtown Portland building that hummed in a constant bustle of administrative law activity and florescent lighting. Lily answered the phones and manned the files, and I videotaped wills and edited depositions.
Lily and I bonded over our wasted creative talents in the stale weekday air, and sometimes we'd chat over lunch. That's when I first began to notice her terribly incurable strain of altruism. I found this boundless acceptance of all people into her life akin to being forced to watch a fatal car crash in slow-motion. My life experiences so far had taught me that a resolve such as hers, to love everyone unconditionally, to keep lit an unwavering flame of faith in humanity, was just asking for trouble.
Altruism: I can hear the Danish starlings now in the trees outside my window, tittering in approval of my belief that a carefully disbursed sense of responsibility is necessary in determining the safest branch to sit on.
One day at work there was a casual conversation through the panel cracks in the shared cubicle wall between me and Lily:
Me: What I need is a distraction, my mind needs a shiny distraction. So I can eat and sleep again.
Lily: What you need is someone to play with for a little while.
Me: I'm not ready for another boyfriend. I'm not ready to date. Plus my boobs have deflated. Who wants to play with skin-folds for boobs?
Lily: No, not date. Someone to email, get emails from, maybe fool around with.
Me: I smell like despair.
Lily: Who smells over the Internet?? No, listen. Go send a message to my friend Daniel. You two have lots in common.
Me: Like what?
Lily: You're both really tall.
Me: Funny! You're so very funny. I don't know, I don't want anything serious. Who is he?
Lily: My very good friend on [deviantART]. Remember that painting I shipped to Denmark? The red tree?
I remembered that painting, a gorgeous, curly tree growing out of stone with winding roots like twisted, ancient vines. Lily is an artist when not tethered to her desk, and I remembered how, a year earlier, I had pressed my lips against the barky texture of its winding pigment roots just before it was sent off to a Danish stranger named Daniel. I remembered checking out Daniel's profile online at the time, and finding it a darkly manipulated piece of work.
Me: Shoot me a link?
I studied his profile photo again. His wavy, brown-black hair and fair skin reminded me of my own. Chiseled cheekbones were supported marvelously by deeply cut smile-lines, and framed by a trimmed beard with a hint of silver. His stats proclaimed that he was a 6'5" teacher, actor, and the divorced father of two flaxen-haired cherubs. His art featured incarnations of rebirth and gently sexualized pretty-young-things. He fancied himself a black humorist. I read some of his words: a couple of blog posts, two poems. I found a short story, written in Danish.
The commonality in all Daniel's creative work was a polished sadness, a wistful resignation, with an optimistic longing for the dead and gone. Even the light-hearted works were forever trapped in a hard veneer, a troubling regret sealed between the art and the art's message. Many of the profiles connected with his showed heavily posed, beautiful women with comments from him ending with variations of Love you, Daniel. These words looked like small, digital headboard notches.
After clicking around awhile, I called it: Daniel was beautiful Eros, a recently reformed bad boy crippled by a raging libido, a newly mortal man with immortal aspirations. It would be very easy not to take this hopelessly romantic Dane seriously. He seemed the perfect distraction for my mind while my body healed, and he was upfront in his philanthropic admiration. He was abrasively sensual. Harmless.
According to my hard-copy records, only 13 days elapsed between the changing of my profile-status back to single and the sending of this coy message to Daniel:
Lily said I should share words with you. Wanna?
M
The printed records show that 36 minutes later I received this cheeky reply:
Uhm, well, I'd say that depends on who you are. Can't be too careful in here you know. 
But a recommendation from Lily is as good as it gets.
I'll add you and see what happens.
D
A few weeks of periodic sexually-charged emails, innuendo-laden blog comments, and mutual online stalking commenced. I liked to wake up in the morning, log into my site tracker, and follow the path of Daniel's visits to my social profiles across the World Wide Web. His travels were represented by a lively red and white Danish flag. And every night as I slept more light rejuvenated my dying parts, the toxins dissipated, and my appetite returned ravenous.
Then there was the silly, revealing social network quiz that Daniel filled out and sent to me. It changed the course of everything.
Naughty, flirty Daniel. In seeing this again I imagine that the words made him puff out his chest and swagger his fingers. Here he is a caricature of himself, an exaggerated digital snapshot of his unaffected personality. What strikes me in this printout are the words "worthy" and "elevator".
I liked to poke the Danish dragon in the ego, so I wrote to tell him he was pretty, too.
He replied almost instantly:
Subject line: Getting out of hand
Jesus Christ, MEN AREN*T PRETTY....
Handsome at best...
And I'm told I'm ruggedly handsome – just so you know it. A real man – real men aren't pretty – only queers are pretty – Please punish me for my rantings...
I obliged, of course:
"Pretty boys" are queers. Ruggedly handsome men like yourself ARE pretty, especially when naked and hog-tied for not letting me call them pretty. Catch-22 for you, really. Such a terrible burden to be so pretty! How do you manage?
Daniel immediately retorted:
Damn girl, hog tied and all...
I'm not sure you're not being ironic here...
How does anybody manage? I seclude myself, burying myself in work and become antisocial - borderline sociophobic – can't bear all the attention – I am an ARTISTE – never mind my looks – it's what's inside I wants to be loved for – I JUST wants to be so loved... for who I am...
"Sweets, that's my song too," I replied, caught up, laughing.
"So which elevator darling..." he wrote back.
I went to bed that night and diddled into the wee hours, imagining sweaty, fawning sex with this tall, dark-haired foreigner. I pictured us in a glass-enclosed elevator, my naked ass pressed into the corner of a rising, transparent box, Daniel kneeling between my legs and licking deeply with his long tongue, his moody black and blue eyes intensely watching my reaction.
The next morning there was a message from Daniel waiting for me.
Subject line: Excuse me for interrupting
There is a photograph of glass elevator embedded in the message. "How's this?" Daniel asked in this [elevator love letter].
Oh, it was on.
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The Miracle in July is the work of author Michelle Anderson.
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