My coworker's father has a lemon tree. I asked him to bring lemons to work tomorrow so that I could make lemonade since they're 33 cents down at Ralph's and I don't wanna pay that kind of money for the weed of the citrus family. He asked me to call him at midnight to remind him. The midnight call turned into no promises of lemons tomorrow, dragging on instead into a sleepy conversation about nothing in particular, though he asked me: So what's your deal? Are you a player?

What is my deal?

I can and can't be trusted. I am respectful to good boys, devious to bad ones. I fear chains more than anything, and will meet any threat to my independence like a woman fighting for her life. I am the future mother of someone's children, the future ex-wife of perhaps another, and the imaginary conduit of cheap motel room fantasies with multiple faceless strangers I have yet to meet. I'm an internet prophet with a heart of gold, whose witnessing of a room full of people having sex turned my stomach to the point I didn't want to be touched for a year. My politics are liberally suspect and I have a secret life that may or may not exist, depending on what time of day you ask me. And I eat. Red. Meat.

Would you trust me if I were you? Can you really be so sure? I saw a man in my dreams once and he was made out of so many prisms, the light was trapped inside of him in incongruent, jagged little pockets. I wanted to offer him a cigarette but was terrified the smoke would aggravate his internal situation. I still wonder what I would have seen if I had offered him one. Does anyone really know what's inside of them, inside each and every one of those little pockets that contains entire universes complete with logical orders and desires and personalities? Perhaps there is a demon trapped in every one of them, but when you put together two or more demons finding out that they're no longer the sole powers in charge anymore, suddenly no one wants a democracy.

If you want to look under the surface of things, I can promise that you can breathe underwater. But you should never believe everything you see. Because when you see that light appear at the end of a murky tunnel, you'll have to answer yourself one question:

Is that light a combination of every shade of a spectrum? Or is it just an illusion completely devoid of anything?


[this message brought to you completely sober and topless]