"And how are we supposed to lure this mythic creature?"

"Easy," she utters wryly. "We set a trap." I'm beginning to realize the girl has no sense of humor.

"Bait?"

"You."

"Me?"

"You and me. We're a team, right?"

To discover you're just a caricature in someone else's plot has gotta be painful to some egos. Not mine though--at least not yet. I remember reading in my high school Humanities class that we're all actors on a stage and immediately taking it for granted that I was off-off-Broadway, which affords one certain liberties. It's not about how to make the audience cackle or cry so much as it is about suppressing any desire to hit it big so that somebody else can play you, fucking up your lines and generally mucking up your life. If your life is destined to be fucked or mucked you may as well do it yourself. That's liberty, Macbeth be damned.

I want this girl. No matter how illogical or odious her mind is, it's a beautiful one. I'll stop at nothing, I think to myself. At that moment I feel a pinch that causes me to clutch at my chest. She peers at me suspiciously. "You said you're my friend. That makes us a team, right?" Later that night as I ready myself for bed, I notice the tiniest bead of red on my white shirt. Stripping, I scan my chest in the mirror, finding a bit of dried blood just beneath my breast, minuscule, as if I'd gotten a paper cut there.

This plan of hers has me wigged. For days I avoid her, knowing that the man she thinks is Cupid is just a man. She explained her rationale to me, but it only set me thinking about myself and how all the lovers I've had have been like balloons. I'm the delighted child with a fistful of string. But one by one something happens to them all. Whoops, one slipped out of the hand and another is sagging, having lost too much air, and BAM!, that one's just exploded. Like a firearm. You lose a few and that makes the last one all the more valuable. You clutch at it, maybe even try to tie it around your wrist. You get focused on that one last balloon to the exclusion of everything else. Not even cotton candy or the promise of a bigger, better balloon can make you let go. Yet next thing you know the string entwined within the confines of your tight fist is just that--a bit of string with absolutely nothing on the end of it.

Well, I'm not letting any of that stuff get me down. I'm an adult now. I've got choices, and I know what comes next. Even if I have no choice in the "who," if it's always gotta come up empty, maybe I can at least decide the how, where, and when. It's not like after that last merry-go-round of love I said to myself, "Next chick I fall for is gonna be crazy." No, I never wanted that. What's wrong with casual fun, romance, and a little affection? As I dine on last night's leftovers, I realize my infatuation with her is like a pizza with all the wrong toppings, delivered several hours after the speedy guarantee. When you're starved what are you most likely to do: send it back and continue eating dry cereal out the box or convince yourself it's exactly what you ordered and tastes divine?