She wants you to put her in the backseats where the groceries go. She wants you to treat her like nothing playing on Netflix. Remember how a father dies every time a basketball deflates in America. She wants you to forget that. Remember when you were eleven and you would kneel and pray like no one had taught you, get into bed and pump-act the nothing in your bed sheets. Well. This is New York City in the summer and there is New York City everywhere now. There is literally a man with a dead father filling every vacant position in every crowded basketball game of the city and you’re worried about a little violence. Make me sick. Seriously, make me sick. This is your bank teller. She opens you bank accounts, puts your money in them, buys canned tuna, eats canned tuna and goes to bed. Have you heard how many jokes she can tell? Have you seen she’s reading Heidegger behind her counter? You’ve never read Heidegger, not even a little. And you’ve never been asked so nicely to do something you’re so not supposed to. She’s asking you to screw her with the mindset that you are not supposed to and you’re still choosing to order cherry syrup into any number of common sodas. There are words you should never say when your are young and there are things you should never do when you’re alive. But if she’s asking, you better be giving. Better be making her dinner if she’s that drunk. Nothing better than going to bed without praying. You tried in the shower. You tried in the bed. You tried in the bathroom of your local. For her it’s nothing without the punching. For us it’s the basketball Dad gave us for our first birthday. A ball as tall as the hoop. When she asked us for the punching we were speechless, looking at the teacher, quantifying detention. Remember in kindergarten, 5 little years after we were born and our girlfriend taught us to french and touch her between the legs. I want us to remember that in the bad way, the bad way proof that most secret societies sound cool and do terrible shit. At the bar where we met her, there were three things: only boys, sports in the rafters and instructions on the wall. The boys and their hands up. The sports American and seasonless. The instructions the same shape as our father. Remember the day before we left for college, shooting hoops with Dad. Remember when he put his hands down and said if we ever joined a frat, we could never be his daughter again. Can you imagine if we had joined a frat. Can you imagine being a 5-year-old girl seeing a giraffe for the first time, putting your hands up and saying WOW. I read somewhere that France stopped for 3 weeks the first time a giraffe entered the country. I want to build a small house around my daughter seeing a giraffe for the first time.
