There’s a difference between being lonely and being alone. I’ve been lonely my whole life. It’s probably time I learn how to be alone, so I start myself on a sharp and slippery ***** with the knowledge that my brakes have always been faulty and see what it’s like to be alone.

How did we end up here?

You pick him up by the speed limit sign (ironic) and you take him home. No makeup, wearing sweatpants and no bra. He ***** you like maybe he’d be something worth keeping, but there’s still blood in your underwear and on your twelve year old boy sheets and on the back of your tongue.

But if your body is a temple, how you can you deny it the sacrifice he gave? There were choirs inside you, tolling church bells, the all consuming ecstasy of a Southern Baptist.

It’s never like that again with him again. It all sours like milk because you were naive enough to ask out loud, “Can we stay like this forever?”

Only if forever is 3 weeks before your body is a temple with all the doors slammed shut.

Then you end up on the ottoman with your legs spread, two hands tight on your waist and two hands tight on your head. You’re drunk.

This could have been worse, you think. But it definitely could have been better. You don’t feel used or taken advantage of, but it’s not till later that you realize you’re still chasing that first time in your twin bed and that’s not how you’re going to find it.

You throw up in your car. You throw up in your twin bed. But you’re still going to maintain that it could have been worse.

You end up laying awake in his bed, hot and sweaty and stuck to his skin. The *** was good, but too intimate. It’s happening to someone else, someone you’re pretending to be. The kind of girl that spends the night.

When really you’re the kind of girl that drives home and grabs a McDonald’s breakfast and promptly blocks him on her phone. A professional escape artist, denying what could have probably been true temple worship if you’d ever had the courage to look him in the eye.

And finally you make the decision that you’re probably better off alone than doing this when you’re in a stranger’s mother’s shower (a mother you will never meet unless you count swallowing half of her DNA) and you know you’re using people to fill a hole that wasn’t there before you decided you didn’t want to be alone.

The *** is fine, perfunctory, a performance, and his **** is bad and you drive home feeling no better or worse about yourself than before, but if you’re going to keep doing this, smashing your body against another human being for twenty minutes to an hour, you’re going to have to choose better ‘cause he was just sad. Sadder and more lonely than you and you’re not in this to do favors for lonely people, you’re in this to find a new and different way to self-destruct.

You know now that “those” girls are a myth. Because if they were real, you’d be one of them. “Those” girls exist because other girls created them to feel better about the choices they’d made to make sure they don’t have to drive home alone.

I’ll drive home alone, get drunk alone, *******. Alone. Because I’m lying to myself about being lonely.