I ruminate still.

It is the risk, I suppose, when you choose to bypass the traditional steps of modern courtship and go straight for the fun part. On the one hand, when neither party is interested in anything more than what you have made very clear is your sole impetus for connecting with someone, it seems an invasion of privacy  — to not say a waste of time — to make an effort to get to know anything truly salient about the other person. But the reverse side of the coin, of course, is that you cannot then predict what sort of situation you might find yourself in; discovering, a posteriori (Latin for post-fuck), things you might wish you had known beforehand.

I think it is fair to say my healthy self-confidence is neither excessive nor misplaced. In the same way that a person is wise to recognize their weaknesses, a person is also wise to acknowledge their strengths. Certainly no one has any patience in our twenty-first century society for false modesty. (Or modesty, period.) We are taught to advertise what we do well, and keep quiet about the rest. And this serves us well, until someone’s chilling words cut through the hordes of people to find you across the heaving subway car, where they slip like ice cubes down the back of your shirt, reminding you that although modesty is dead, subjectivity, apparently, is not.

That she could claim — and I struggle even to write this — that she could claim to have found our interlude unsatisfactory is baffling. Especially seeing as how I am the one who ended up having to sneak the parrot back into her neighbor’s apartment, so replete was she that she could not move one muscle. You must trust me when I tell you: there are some things women cannot fake. I will leave it at that. (Though I refer you to my adventures at the hospital in Upstate New York if you are still in doubt.)

Funny she should have been painting our night as less enjoyable than it was. I’m sorry: I cannot drop it.  Perhaps after all it isn’t me she was talking about to her friend. There was definitely an easiness between her and Dickie (the neighbor’s parrot) which would suggest this was not their first time, nor might it have been their last. I will have to console myself with this possibility.

Jean-Pierre Robillard New York, NY