I told her that I had hoped we'd maybe make out while watching the ducklings frolic in the pond.

It was all carefully orchestrated. That's what I tell myself when I sit in my apartment, crying into a beer and heating up fish sticks in the toaster.

I am but a puppet in someone's master plan.

So it's OK that I smeared an inch-thick layer of cream cheese frosting on my vegan carrot cake and ate until I had a belly-ache. And it's OK that I said Fuck You Asshole to the Vodafone-guy who refused to help me sign up for DSL in English.
I have one more wall to paint in the livingroom and I've called in sick to do it. I decided to have a crush on the girl at the café. Just because the weather was so lovely and I had been shopping and drinking and felt so alive I didn't know what to do with myself. Carbonation in my bloodstream. Shoes made out of marshmallows.

And then. Disaster. Failure. Rejection. Mega-rejection. We rode our bikes to Treptow Park. They have this really cool Russian monument there. A giant bronze guy stabbing a Swastika with a sword. Then, as we sat in a beer garden, she started lecturing me. Said I was so American. That I always should ask if someone speaks English, before I just order a beer in American or ask for directions in American.

Sure, I said. I should. But as soon as I do that person looks at me like I had insulted them. Because everyone speaks English here. Except for the Vodafone-guy.
Then she said that by asking her out on a date I was acting no better than a dude. I was making her an object. I was copying fucked-up heterosexual behaviors.


Maybe that's how you do in the States, she said, this gorgeous café latte-skinned girl with dreadlocks and a pierced septum. But that's not the way it's done here. The world is big, you know.

I told her that I had hoped we'd maybe make out while watching the ducklings frolic in the pond.

Then she got up and left me with the bill. Just like a fucking girl.

Now Volcanic ash is clouding the air. The temperature has dropped and the skies are gray, gray, gray.

But there's still a light that never goes out. I will eventually wipe my tears, blow my nose, band-aid my wounds.