[Originally drafted in 2016 as a part of a dating manifesto.]

On All Hallows Eve 2015, a mythical brownie, which I may have imagined, conveyed to me the link to a woman’s blog site. A full cosmic stop along the Information Superhighway. With a wave of its wand, the fantastical being suggested, based on the scroll, we might fit a romantic match. Considering this particular source, an apparition in a black hat with fiery eyes, I followed transfixed. I was instantly enchanted before I even read anything the woman wrote.

In her headshot, the girl was an enigma. The fact that her essays turned out to be really good was a cause of enthralling captivation for a thirty-six-year-old divorcee sitting in Chicago bars, drinking Manhattans and swiping on dating apps. Creativity and the craft of honing a work was something that stood out to me. Let alone the ability to intertwine this with razor wit and comic elements. Based on her writing, we had the same sense of humor. I found her stories hysterical. Her sense of poise and self-confidence was utterly electrifying. 

Similar viewpoints and a kindred upbringing conjured a warm blanketed essence of commonality. Especially after so many Tinder and Bumble near-misses. It flowed over me as I read for days, the words of a stranger.

I was quite drawn to the notion of her.

Within a week I had read everything on her website. Decidedly she was probably too good for me, yet still calculating the harm that could be done, the odds forced me to put ink to paper in true gangster poet fashion. Spitting bars, I was motivated enough by her to forgo the fear in a chance of rejection. I knew my connection to whom the reference came from was enough goodwill to get me through the door.

Highlighting nuances in a cold call. Worst case; she doesn’t reply.

I knew she was from Detroit, so I tried to be funny in dropping every antiquated Detroit reference I had. Freestyling over milk crates filled with beat breaks, waxing prose about DeLorean Motor Company, Kirk Gibson, 8 Mile, Robocop, Robocop 2, Robocop 3. I told her how succinct and hilarious I considered her writing to be. I told her how beautiful I thought she was.

I waited a few days for a response, and as the hours ticked by, I assumed it wasn’t coming. Surely, she had this level of fan mail on a regular basis.

I was walking down Augusta on a Saturday morning toward CC Ferns to get a coffee when her email reply materialized in my pocket with a vibration. Scrolling quickly through and realizing that she took my letter in the best way possible was a rush. I stopped by a newspaper box in front of Spinning J and leaning against a signpost I read the letter in detail. She matched every joke I sent with a one-up quip of her own. Nas level puns and a Kendrick Lamar cadence. In a battle of the written word, she had honed efficiencies in the English language I couldn’t compete with. A class in flow and stimulating reverence.

My thoughts were the best she’d ever received, she said. We corresponded for a few days via email, then switched to texting. Soon after, we graduated to phone conversations – as well as texting twenty-four hours per day, seven days-per week.

So snowballed my inner preoccupancy with romance. So grew the museum of my imagination.

A fanciful fascination with an impression that I could lock in step with another person like the very neurotransmitters that were beginning to single-handedly usher this along. Passion and curiosity mixed with chemicals becoming quicky imbalanced. There was absolutely no logical reason to assume this would potentially end well. A Gambler’s Dilemma.

The roulette parlour game went twirling on for one month under charming neon, buzzing in alure. Due to geography and schedule, we weren’t able to meet in person for that amount of time. Four weeks of pedal to the metal on both sides. When would the crescendo spike occur? Where would the trajectory break at a peak? Both parties unknowing. Both parties being really stupid.

She sent me pictures of herself daily. I liked that she was a little hardscrabble. Detroit grit. I liked the photos of her in her mint Tigers cap. I didn’t even mind the fact that she used a selfie stick.⁽¹⁾

For one full month of completely abandoning logic, annihilating mathematics, and throwing caution off the balcony of my Humboldt Park three flat, we discussed everything from how our wedding would be to what we would name our children. As I edit this essay now, at age forty-four, admittedly I’m feeling terrified for my past-self in the fool’s errand of a zoomed-out topography.

I bragged to all my innocent bystander friends about how inspired I was by her.⁽²⁾ A fever dream where every kid in the classroom around me seems to know the answer, but my head is stuck in a cloud. A kid in recess period, that impassioned with the wit of a true ideologue, acknowledgment would have surely caused tension. They gave me enough credit to know that I knew it could be really bad. God bless those men and women for allowing me to have my party.

The Detroit Girl told me she worked in some sort of church role or kitchen or youth group or…something. Whatever it was it seemed noble but could not have provided financial stability in any capacity. Maybe her family was wealthy? If you lived in the City of Detroit in 2015 you were necessarily either pretty well-off or the complete opposite. Without confirmation of a family trust fund, it was a red flag on multiple levels. It was tidbit I had to drown in the sink of secrecy I’d rather not explore at this time.

We set a date for the full weekend, at the mark of a post-Thanksgiving November 2015. I drove up to Detroit to “finally” meet her. I did notice that her address was not actually in Detroit even though she said she lived in Detroit. Look. Why, at this point, would I allow annoying facts to get in the way of a good love story? I hopped in my Nissan Versa hatchback and headed over the Skyway through the dishwater grey panorama toward Michigan.

A caveat for the first night: I would agree to stay in a hotel. In my head I felt she was deciding to play it safe just in case I was a serial killer. It didn’t jive with the spirit of our relationship thus far in terms of tossing care to the breeze, but again, I wasn’t going to let small nuances sway me from meeting her. Not at that point anyway.

What I came to find was that as a thirty-two-year-old woman, she still lived with her parents in the home she grew up in, in a suburb of Detroit.⁽³⁾ The narrative twisted in a shift for me. The church job made more sense. The transparent cube might have altered but I still felt the vibes channeling though. I could deal with these ideas given a pristine scenario in a few other ways. I’d have to stay optimistic.

In essence I suppose she had planned to not divulge this information out of embarrassment. She wanted to at least wait until we met in person and by that point, I’d solidify our fate by clinging to her regardless of any bad news she may break. My temporary insanity of saccharin madness still shining at least long enough for her to procreate. It was a fair play in this evolutionary game of Love and No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em.

On my drive up, playing “All Eyes on You” by Meek Mill on repeat,⁽⁴⁾ I thought a lot. The culmination of things was coming to a head. I was excited yet I couldn’t seem to understand (or up to that point even question) why she hadn’t dated anyone seriously for a really long time. Not-dating is perfectly okay. But she penned her essays in signature, stating perplexing confusion about why she was still single. Let us now fling this additional reg flag on the burn pile, set it ablaze, and pretend it never existed. I cruised on.

I checked into my hotel with hopes as high as the gun metal sky. Ambitions among the tainted pollution clouds and chemical plant silos of brushed chrome. Soot dancing over the horizon.

For she was going to meet me in the hotel foyer.

My heart was in rapid fire, and exhilaration mounted. I dropped off my bag, gave myself a final look, and I walked out of the hotel room to meet her with a sugar rush like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I remember it like it was yesterday. My eyes darted all around for her – the angelic being I created in my mind, fashioned from the ground up to be idealistic.

And I saw her.

As soon as I did, all the while keeping eye contact and wearing a smile, my head plunged from the stratosphere down to actuality in a firm plop over the Motor City pavement. It then registered why she liked me so much.

I want to seek a footing here between being polite and illustrating just how much the image of her in my head varied from reality. Perhaps I will merely leave the extremity to the reader’s imagination. The cold fact was that in real life I specifically just wasn’t attracted to her. Like, at all.

You may consider an idea of “perfection” as an impossibility, but also, you may be correct. Even in the realm of my brain’s circus, I truly wasn’t expecting perfection. Physically I was merely expecting someone other than whom I met. Philosophically it should not have mattered who she appeared to be. The joke is that there is no equilibrium in the wild. This is a warped psychological narrative I can’t express in terms graspable to someone who hasn’t experienced it. Especially after so many selfies. But due to the shocking pivot in my soul I can say this:

Within the three-minute window of finally meeting her, clumsily hugging her, and both of us getting into my car, I had a few different thoughts on options racing over my mind:

A. I can bail right now.

I would hurt her feelings, but nobody on earth would have to know. She wouldn’t even have to tell anyone. She could keep her pride. We could block each other’s numbers, and she could tell her friends and family that I was a sixty-year-old obese, diabetic man with amputated legs in a motorized wheelchair with a colostomy bag. She could tell everyone I never showed up.

I can tell my friends she didn’t show up.

B. I’ve already told all my friends and family about this person. Maybe I’ll marry her and stick it out for the rest of my life in order to not feel like an ass-clown. Kids, a mortgage, and side-by-side burial plots with a keen life cornerstone based in stubbornness.

C. I’ll go ahead with the full weekend and see if she grows on me.

I mean at that point in the game, I loved her. As far as that emotion goes, I’m not even sure how else to qualify it. This is why it’s a phenomenon to me. We hadn’t vocally told each other we were in love, but we both knew. We fell in love over the telephone and the computer screen. Zeros and Ones and the anthroposophy of evolving spirituality.

I became euphorically attached to a character who ultimately was a fictional entity. My emotions were completely bonded to someone who did not exist. Or was it the opposite? Had I had garnered feelings for someone, and then I just ended up being superficial? Either way it was silly. I felt so completely ridiculous, and the entire last month felt like a dupe job, though I don’t think it was her intent. Which made it even more of a mindfuck.

In a cranium-boggling fashion, the woman I was conversing with daily and so looking forward to meeting, was in my car, yet she felt like a completely alternate person. She was acting shy and actually covering her face with her hair. Whoa.⁽⁵⁾ Where was the confidence I had been so inspired by? Even her voice sounded different for some illogical reason.

I honestly remember still allowing my eye to glance the parking lot for real version of this girl. Somehow not giving up mentally, but lending this sad anticlimax one more depressing chance I suppose. While she glittered, blushed and glowed, I knew instantly it was a completely awful Gordian Knot we’d gotten tied up in.

Looking back, I should have just hung out with her that first night and vanished the next morning into a solo expedition of Detroit culture, food, and beer. Out of an impossible situation drenched in potential awkwardness, I didn’t have the guts to physically run away. I don’t know anyone who was a big enough sociopath to have just been upfront that very second. But I could have at least split the difference. ⁽⁶⁾

Shivering now, even as I write this…I went with Option C. 

I went the entire weekend, Friday through Sunday, basically acting like I did over the phone, hoping it would gel. Sinking in quicksand of my own internal monologue, the grains trickling though the hourglass until my escape. I met her entire family with a grin and a handshake. I flirted with her in the hopes her vibe would grow on me. I didn’t know what else to do since I felt obligated and tied to this weekend plan. I became Artax, stuck in the Swamp of Sadness.

True love waits in haunted attics.

True love waits on lollipops and crisps.

I met one of her male friends who acted very protective of her. It would have felt unpleasant enough if I was interested. But this scale of discomfort was compounded since I knew his safeguard was well intentioned, coupled with his sense of suspicion being completely accurate. It’s like, “yeah, dude. I don’t blame you.”

I’d have to hurt her and there was nothing he could do besides talk mad shit after the following day.

In theory the first night was fun. Friday night we went to Corktown. Astro Coffee and dinner at Slows Barbeque, where she continued to hide her face behind her hair for some unknown purpose. For a few minutes I thought to myself that maybe we could just become good friends. But I knew that the reason I was sitting across from her in the first place was because we both had established, we wanted way more than that. You know, typical reasonable things like planning a life together before ever meeting.

She took me to a massive used bookstore. Another missed opportunity for me to completely vanish from existence. Fantasizing a secret exodus through the self-help section and down the back fire escape. Jumping off the platform into eternity, holding hands with the ghost of the version of this person who I could return to my inner sanctum with.

Could I go back to the rush from the previous month somehow? I knew I couldn’t live in that high. My apotheosis of her was over. The crown and culmination were both pinpointed in the very second that ticked before our eyes locked in that hotel lobby.

I struggle to recall what else we did on Saturday but this sort of shows that I was a panicked mess just looking to clock out as soon as I could. We were together twelve hours that day, and I can’t even remember what we did. I know we went to a brewery in an old church, and we visited the Ford Mansion, me, all the while somehow maintaining a false excitement. Wavelengths no longer connecting but red shifts and blue shifts firing off in every other nightmarish direction.

That Saturday night I stayed on her parents’ couch. Look, I’d already been divorced, and I was tired of sleeping on couches. My hopes for something adult had been dashed the moment it clicked that she did not have her own place.

I didn’t kiss her. I knew the odds of me ever choosing to see her again were rapidly approaching zero, and I knew that kissing was a huge deal to her. Not sex, mind you. Kissing. And I knew going in.

To reiterate, in order to confirm that you did read that correctly; this wasn’t sex. This was kissing. She had a “no kissing” rule like a god damn sixth grader. You know what I did? I took that red flag and stuffed it directly into a Splatter Punk’s Molotov cocktail and lit it with a blow torch.

Shattered vessels of ether casting liquid fire, raining down to the Delta City gutters like heated death.

To make it infinitely worse, her mom and dad and sister were the nicest people ever. They asked me questions about myself and made sure I was comfortable. Do the gods have to make things as hard as possible? Are there gods? If there are, are they mean? Couldn’t her family have just been rude or distant or cold? Nope. They had to be the kindest people I’ve ever met.

I couldn’t fake another day of this. I was bordering on the idea that I was melting into a psychopath just leading on an entire family at this point. I needed to get the fuck out of there.

After I left her parents’ place, I remember pulling over my car to the side of the road. Just sitting back and unloading all the mental stress that had built up over the roller coaster of the last few days. Flashbacks of her mom attempting to brush the hair out of Detroit Girl’s face so she looked more presentable. Detroit girl coming out wearing ratty sweatpants. Her upstairs bedroom with unkempt bed in a highschool romance nightmare. Breathing in the oxygen that had been knocked out of me two days prior, I let the surrealness flow over me in a moment of detox.

The Post-Shock Cocktail, Roadside Recipe:

1. One-part heavy sadness in mourning the loss of someone I had quickly grown attached to.
2. One-part relief that I wouldn’t be going through a tough, long-distance relationship after all.
3. One-part comedic disbelief around the sheer lunacy of the scenario I had helped create.
4. One-part pure embarrassment in having to now face my friends as the prototypical, cliché and predictable idiot version of Ryan.
5. One-part heavy guilt in that now I’d have to break stuff off with Detroit Girl and hurt her.

But I had Sunday as a gap. I was free again. For the balance of that day, I had no social pressure whatsoever. I went to Ferndale to visit Found Sound, which would become my favorite record store. I got a cigar for the ride home from Michigan.

I was positive she “knew” by the fact I wasn’t texting her at all that day. I no longer had capacity to fake anything.

I ultimately decided on breaking it off with Detroit Girl a long email. Breaking “what” off you might ask? I don’t have a real answer other than chipping down the illustrious façade we had fabricated together.

The farmhouse fable of the buttercup fairy jamboree.

I told her I didn’t feel the same chemistry with her in real life that I had over the phone and through texting. She probably knew that I just wasn’t attracted to her, which made me even more sad.

She didn’t take it well. She got really angry because I didn’t call her to explain over the phone but that I opted for a letter. She was pissed I offered to stash her in the friend zone. I put it in my email that I’d be willing to talk on the phone if she wanted. Not that either of us would want to. I just thought it was important to get my thoughts out in a concise fashion. And no, I didn’t think I owed it to her to have to listen to her cry or yell like an angst-ridden teenager.

It had only been four weeks, we met once, and a majority of our relationship was written word. I know a lot of people who would have just ghosted and not said anything at all. I still can’t believe I’m apologizing for this in my own personal book of fairytales, nine years later. It’s kind of hilarious.

She ended her reply with “this will be the last time we ever speak”.

Clap-Back: (An Epilogue)

A few months later someone sent me a link to another essay The Detroit Girl wrote. It didn’t contain my name, but it was about me. It was entitled, “Guys to Leave Behind in 2016”. It referred to me as “Rapid Romeo” for reasons obvious. The pun felt just as rushed as the piece itself.

The blog entry written as a guide for church youth group girls devised an intoxicating heroine bestowing sadness as a hypnotic allure. Perhaps it was scribed on her bed while sipping Faygo root beer and listening to Taylor Swift. This of course would be upstairs in her parents’ house (again, not actually in Detroit), before she had to go do her chores.

It made me feel dumb, but the main reason it irritated me was that she had completely absolved herself from any of it. The point of that essay was that it was all my fault. I was a Poetic Hustler merely trying my hand at exploiting the Innocent Empress. Dream cars and Motor City Blues. The sad girl, not just as a victim but as a disrupter. The Virgin Suicides revisited.

The second blog entry about me came four months after that. Clearly, she had not yet left me behind, and taking a page from 2Pac she penned her “Hit ‘em Up”. The rage had been boiling in a cauldron that was now ready for the tar-and-feathering. The longer she thought about it, the more I became The Notorious B.I.G. in some sort of a set up.

She put me on blast over wax with ad hominem attacks. She went into detail about how I “broke up with her” via email, stating I was a joke of a man who had no backbone. She even copied and pasted excerpts from my letter in the post for people to read.

What’s beef? Beef is when ya moms ain’t safe up in the streets.

Beef is when I-see-you – guaranteed to be in I.C.U.

It was one of the most hurtful and humiliating things I’ve ever experienced up to that point. She snatched my Death Row chain in the midst of a beat down in the middle of the MGM Grand lobby. The very format we started our casino baccarat coup kinship with was fashioned to a prison style shanking. Some sort of effort on my part to let her down as easily as I could was spun around and exposed for the world to see. ⁽⁷⁾

Frankly the type of person who would do that… well, it made me realize even more that I had ducked a stray bullet.

She even made fun of me for complimenting her in my letter. I made it a hot line. She made it a hot song. It was self-indulgent, self-complimentary wordplay on her part. Hype and Flex. Not out of line with the sheer, phony sense of confidence I’d seen in her other posts.

It finally clicked for me that that was her thing. That was her mechanism. A sucka emcee. All the braggadocio required of an aspiring rapper fit to battle the Insane Clown Posse. I should have known the folk horror movie I was in. Edge of frame. Negative space. Blurred background. Selfie sticks.

The swag assault was a rhapsodic end to a waste of a month. Hearts were shattered and lessons were finally learned. Consider this…

my *mic drop*.

…

1. I should have taken the selfie stick into larger account.

2. This is after having rushed into a previous marriage by doing the exact same thing.

3.“Y’all runnin’ your mouth again, when you ain’t seena fuckin’ Mile Road south of Ten”

Okay, okay. So, people who live in suburbs of cities that are around half a million people, all say that they live in that city. St Louis, Milwaukee, Detroit, et cetera. I have come to find that she probably wasn’t technically misspeaking when she said she lived in Detroit, but only following local culture.

4. Before Meek Mill would beef with Drake over Drake’s punk ass using a ghost writer on the very album I was listening to. “A rapper with a ghost writer? What the fuck happened!?”

Way before the Kendrick Lamar beef with Drake.

5. As another concession I will say that people have the right to be nervous when meeting someone in person. It’s not a negative thing and it isn’t my intention to be specifically harsh in my writing. My only intention is to display my feelings and point of view from literal minute to minute during this ordeal. Going in, with the amount of pride she showed me, it was just a strange juxtaposition to see her acting shy and embarrassed in person.

6. There is something to be said for having zero actual accountability to someone. I state this after now having children. The joke is that I actually could have vanished into the City of Detroit, and it would have been perfectly fine. No one would have died. She wasn’t relying on me for sustenance. This essay, of course, is written from the vantage point of myself in a time when life’s stressors consisted more in terms of a cocktail bar not being open early enough in the day.

I did have an email retort saved as a draft for weeks. I never pulled the trigger. This essay is my power move clap back in the beef of The Detroit Girl, nine years later.

7. I did recently search for her blog site and the essays she wrote about me. As far as I can tell they are not online anymore.

[This has been an entry to the chaotic world of the Botch Jobs & Ball Drops series in the Beer Engine Literary Universe. There is no serially numbered system to this constellation. We are legion.]