While roosting on the pot, really groaning and sweating a turd too big for my paltry ass hole, a turd with a bigger destiny, it came to me, and I shouted it out as I squunched down and forced out the last of the shit. “Unh—drama!” “What the fuck are you doing in there?” she asked from the living room where she had been patiently ignoring my suffering for some time now. “I’ve finally figured it out!” I cried. “I like drama and she doesn’t! That’s the main difference between her and me.” “Yeah okay whatever,” she said and if she had had a newspaper she would have gone back to reading it. “No, I’m serious! All these years, thinking there was something wrong with me, I couldn’t seem to live a normal life, I could never get settled—it’s because I never wanted to get settled! I really like things raw and sweaty and and and well, dramatic!” “Would you mind hurrying up in there? What if my fiance comes home?” “It’s Thursday. He never comes home before ten on a Thursday. I’ve got the shits.” “Well, your girlfriend will be wondering why you haven’t called.” “No she won’t.” “Oh god damn it, you are just impossible.” After that I shut up for a while and rested my chest against my thighs. I chuckled to myself a little, and finally felt like I was done squirting. Inches from my nose was the open bathroom door, and hanging on the knob was a necklace I had made for her. She said she wore it sometimes when she wanted to be reminded of what it felt like to really rock your hips back and get fucked up the ass. “We should really get the two of them together, you know?” she said, suddenly close. I looked up, face red from bending over, and there she was, leaning jauntily in the doorway. I wiped and got up, leaving my pants in a heap around my ankles. “Yeah okay whatever,” I said, grabbing her face, happy that I would never have to marry her. We fucked right there, in the yellow light of the bathroom, like a couple of aliens just learning how. Later I went home. There was a message on my machine. I was to go bowling the next day with my girlfriend and Erica and Jeff from the Coast Guard base where she worked. I rewound the tape, then went out on my deck and slapped a few mosquitos. I looked out over stars, trees, an old tire swing just sitting there in the silence. I had grown up in this house; my parents had sold it to me cheap when they moved to the city. Somewhere out there was a lake. Somewhere at the bottom of it was the decomposed remains, probably morphed into mud or plants or fish by now in the relentless undulation of nature, of all my homework from the seventh grade. On the last day of school I had gone out in the jon boat with my best friend, the last guy I was ever able to really sit and look at clouds with, to celebrate sweet summer freedom by scattering all our papers and watching the lake drink them up, turn them back into meaningless pulp. He then ate a can of mandarin oranges while I rowed. I sighed. I wanted more memories, not sleep and then work tomorrow. I went back inside, and some mosquitos came with me. They looked incongruous but somehow homey in the airconditioned lamplit interior, just bumping around, quiet, lost. I smacked them against the wall, leaving tiny blood smears. “Drama!” I yelled, pleased that I had finally accepted my lot.