You get to the bottom, and you can feel it, feel the cold, rocky edge of it all scrape your face, and you realize that’s why it’s called rock bottom.  

“We have been made aware,” she writes. “It’s taken care of.” Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. Don’t end a sentence with a preposition.

Somewhere in the dusty lazy Susan of the mind an old Oasis song plays one decibel too loud.

And I want you to know / I got my mind made up now / But I need more time 

Suddenly you realize  that you talk to all your ex-girlfriends, even the ones that live overseas, even the ones that told you they hated you, always would hate you, hate your penchant for emotional forgery and your constant masochistic tendency to grow bored with the warmth of a beautiful, boring woman. You talk to them, and you say kind and genuine things about them. You compliment their new boyfriends, who all have long hair and sometimes have the same name as you.

She is electric / Can I be electric too?

You read the blotter report in the newspaper the other day. A friend of a friend had been arrested for a vaguely sexual offense in the next town over. It made you nauseous.

“I like it when you’re under the ocean and all you can feel is calm,” she writes. “Will you write about me?”

This weather is making everyone crazy. People’s brains are baking in the sun. Stand up, dammit. Stand up! One foot after the other. Reach up, dig your fingers in. You’re on the curb with the bread, your sunglasses are gone and you will have to learn everything all over again.

August is not august.