I’ll be the blonde-haired pony and you be the three-toed sloth on LSD. You be “altered.” You be “tripping balls.” You sit there, slowly drawing booger-like animals on a pad of paper with your three fingers. I will pause before you and perform my horse dance in which I clip and clop, lower onto my front knees, and then shake my mane back and forth while snorting out my nose.

You be transfixed in the way of sloths. You be worshipful and friendly-faced, staring at my blonde hair and trying to explain to pony me how it makes you want to go swimming, despite the sloth’s innate disgust for chlorinated water. You tell me about softness and waves and how even solids can sometimes run like water. You tell me how you can taste your feelings and how it’s peculiar so many of them taste like grape.

I will raise back to my full stature and wish you had a saddle. I will wish you were a cowboy sloth who wanted to ride with me over the golf course where I will leave pies of steaming horse crap on the putting greens so as to perturb the wealthy. I will wish you were ten years older than you are so you could be a full grown sloth who already knows how to wear nice pants. I will wish you knew about stables and bets made with real money and had studied in depth the psychology of ponies so as to develop a successful career in betting on pony races and/or pony beauty pageants and/or loving me, but you instead will hallucinate happily while staring at the grass, which I begin to eat.

Soon, you will stare at the sky while listening to electronica and/or sounds of the jungle via your sloth iPod, but then tire of this and decide on swimming. I will give you a ride to the indoor swimming pool and there, by the kidney-shaped waters, we will both recall this as the site of our second date, back when we were both human. We will pause and remember the feel of hairless skin and soft lips so unlike those of sloths and ponies. We will remember the sensations of naked and weightless and silent, how time stopped underneath and we floated in a new knowing reinforced by the touch of our fingertips.

“Remember when we had opposable thumbs?” you will ask in the sighs and yawns of sloth speak and I will understand because one time I used to date this other sloth and had learned his language.

In response to this query, I will leap into the deep end and sink to the bottom in a beautiful pony tableau. Imagine my muscled legs prancing in slow motion and my hair floating up from my long neck, and pearls of bubbles which escape my sizable nostrils and this underwater slow slow dance.

“Whoa,” you will say in sloth tripping balls speak. “Whooooooa.”

One time I admitted to you that pretty much the only reason I was pro-God when I was little human girl was because I wanted to be able to play on top of the fluffy white summer clouds after I was dead, and this is what I’ll remember as I am underwater slow-mo galloping, how I was once a pragmatic little girl with aspirations toward play in perfect conditions.

Once I surface, you will be back floating in the shallow end and I will ask you how you feel and because you are a sloth on LSD you will be able to comprehend my pony speak. You will write your answer in your waterlogged notebook and it will take one whole hour, during which I wait as patiently as I can, practicing my pony breast stroke.

After, you will hold up the piece of paper for me to see, and it will say WEIRB.

I will wish it had said something like IN LOBVE or HOW A KITTY FEELS IN YOUR ARMBS and will express my disappointment by eating your sign with my big horsey teeth. I will whinny and shake my hair and run away into the suburbs, leaving you behind as you slow raise your sloth arm in protest.

In the suburbs, I will offer dirty children playing with sticks spirited pony rides to the nearest mall, where I will drop them on the curb even though they don’t want to get their ears pierced. They want a pony, which is something you already have but do not appreciate to the fullest degree you should. I will be gone for a while, out on the interstate, where I race old women in dented Miadas and, despite my disappointment, win.