The thing about being a lesbian in New York City is that on the third Thursday of any given month you’ll have to stand in a hot Brooklyn bar that is absolutely teeming with gay people. At least four to six of them, you have slept with. The night will be most successful if you’re on speaking terms with none of them, but this is not probable. Most often you’ll spend the evening with a beer in each hand. Once, you even leave in tears.

This is where I’ll switch to first person, because I’m trying to be honest with myself. This is my manifesto of accountability. That night, that third Thursday, the girl I’ve been seeing is at the bar. I’m surprised to see her there. We don’t run in the same crowds– she works in investment banking, lives in the West Village, parties in the East Village, says she doesn’t have queer friends. She is, it seems to me, one of those culturally-straight gay people. But there she is, with a group of people I know peripherally, the kind of acquaintances you introduce yourself to each time you meet. My friends meet the girl, she tells them she votes independent, it goes swimmingly.

I’m wearing a loose button down, loose jeans, dirty sneakers. It’s not how I would have dressed if I’d known I’d see her there. A flaw of mine– the tendency to mold myself into whatever kind of girl I believed would most appeal to my current love interest. With her, I’ve been playing a sort of bohemian, sly type. I talked about how I’d just quit my job, I wore lots of jewelry, smudged my eyeliner, said things like so, are you going to invite me back to your place? when whatever bar we’d been drinking in started to clear out. I suspected she had a simple mind, like a frat guy, which fascinated me, and that this type of act would pair well with her Lower Manhattan finance shtick.

I have a beer in each hand all night. They go quickly. I have tunnel vision. I am obsessive. I keep finding the girl, getting her attention with a hand around her bicep. I’m drunk; I berate her, I ask her who she’s here with, who she’s talking to, I tell her I like her, I ask if she likes me too.

We’ve been on four dates. Each time, we’ve spent the night together and she’s held me through the morning. I went to a basketball game with her and her coworker; she met the dog I was watching. Her political views are questionable at best, probably they are actually concerning, and certainly they should be a turn off. I find it doesn’t matter to me. In fact, I find it doesn’t matter at all what I want, only that she wants me, that she’s hot, that she’s taller than me, that she can lift me off of her couch and carry me to the bed.

I’ve been doing this for years. Love as escapism. Or maybe not love, but attention, sex. After that night, naturally, I don’t hear from the girl for days. I pace on the subway platform, I google solipsism, I drone on to my coworkers. I ask my friends questions, like is it really masochism if the sex was good? My friends like to tell me to stand up. They are always saying this. Girl, stand the fuck up. I laugh. I get drunk and hook my arms around their necks. I say you guys are so right. I say thank you. I make a game out of my idiocy; I lean into it. A friend touches my hand and tells me it’s getting old.

Have you ever forgotten that the world exists? I forget all the time. Sometimes I only feel okay when I’m hurtling down a tree-lined street on an electric bicycle. I’ll sit back, take my hands off the handlebars. The speedbumps are a test of balance and control. This is something that feels good, something I can master.

The girl eventually texts me. Obviously, she rejects me, tells me I freaked her out, that she’s really not looking for anything serious. I read the text as I lock the door to the cafe where I work part time and spend the next hour sweeping the floor in a sort of humiliated stupor. That evening, I stand with my brother under an awning while the sky heaves and splits with the weight of a late-spring downpour. We are smiling; he is holding a gingko leaf in his hand. Later, after the rain, I bike home. The streets are humid, fragrant, the trees with their new leaves fashioning a tunnel overhead. The evening is blue, the city hurries on, and I am always, always, so easily ruined.