I lived like a fuckboy in my own head. Can you forgive me?

     Oh, the things that masquerade as romantic in the haze of active alcoholism. Once, a homeless guy ordered a single Long Island Iced Tea with two straws. We split it like a milkshake, as if I were in a poodle skirt and he were cuffing his jeans. Swoon. Another time, at a Halloween party with a bowl of candy corn on my lap, a guy—always a guy—ate each piece color by color: white, yellow, orange. Then reversed it. He wanted to taste the colors.  And on some patio, between sips of $1 pints, a man explained the “complexity” of being a male feminist, which basically boiled down to believing abortion was okay. Oh god—there was even the guy who drew a family tree of the Saddle Creek Records bands on a napkin.

     In hindsight, none of it was romantic. At best it was nostalgic, but even that was aggressively generic. Build a fort. Pack a picnic. Take a walk. Play the guitar. Read her a poem. Show her your vinyl collection. Pluck a city-planted flower. Insert-girl-here. Rinse. Repeat.

     It’s the same kind of thinking that convinces someone to show up unannounced at a crush’s workplace—some hipster chimera trying to be a bar, a music venue, and a restaurant but failing at all three. In five years it’ll be closed, resurrected by the owner with a new gimmick: minigolf instead of arcade games, cowboys instead of aliens. Still “fresh” to local pseudo-artists clinging to poverty like it's a personality. It’s the difference between puking pizza and puking hamburgers: same taste, same smell, barely a variation.

     Keep those images in mind. Because I hadn’t wanted anything like that in a long time. I liked predictable. I basked in stable. I hadn’t thought about those shapeless, toxic gestures from active alcoholism in years—those little ploys that exploit whatever hole inside us is still chasing innocence. Manufactured intimacy performed by drunk, mediocre men and swallowed whole by romanticizing young women. The way an undergrad melts at a note slid across a sticky bar: Do you like me, yes or no? Circle one. How do we not see the manipulation in real time?
I didn't. And she wouldn't either.

     And yes—enter, stage right—her. A true ingénue. Naive, sweet, and gentle. Pretty and desirable.  Fawn-eyed innocent. The kind of girl who laughs with her whole ribcage and writes in the margins of books. Still holding tight to her childhood favorites, but aching to appear worldly. Outfits like a costume. She's slipping on a main character now.

     And suddenly I wanted to do fuckboy things. She was someone I could overpower with charm, someone on whom I could regurgitate all the gestures that once worked on me. Because she and I were so similar. You know, back when I was a young active alcoholic.
If I fell for it, she would too.

     I wanted to offer the faintly romantic gestures that mean nothing—little sticks and twigs pretending to be a bonfire. She stirred that in me. She made me want to be drunk again. Not for the buzz, but for the permission to be stupid. To act without thought or care. To be like a guy. Like a college guy. Swinging false confidence around like a dick. 

     I daydreamed truly unhealthy fantasies: her showing up at my door in tears—Fine, it’s just one night, sweetheart. Or me tagging along with her and her friends, something I’ve never done, imagining myself too cool, too above it all. Performing superiority, judging each one as some new variant of douchebag, and somehow feeling justified. Because I’m a girl. And sober. This is hamburgers-not-pizza puke. I’m not like those other guys.

     But I was. I was playing with her the way any drunk guy would—except I didn’t have alcohol or youth to blame. Just some cheap, calculating scene that could be applied to any other girl.

     The gestures were hollow, and so was the hunger behind them. I kept telling myself I could control it, that I was sober now, safe now. My God! I have a husband! A house! A career! I am better than this!

But the truth is uglier: sobriety didn’t change the instinct.

It only stripped away the illusion that harm requires intoxication.

The fuckboy wasn’t in the bottle.

It was in me the whole time.

And it just was waiting for a body soft enough to repeat itself on.
I still maintain, I could fuck her if I wanted to.