I know. You are here because you want to know what happened that night in the East Village bar when Kurt-not-Kurt (as in, Cobain—a dead-ringer lookalike, for those among you late to this little party) stuck his hand up my skirt and I dumped my date to leave the bar with him.

What do you think happened?

I will not narrate the a w e s o m e (because it was) sex that ensued—there are other places on the Internet for things like that, with much better pictures than I can supply (this was pre-cellphone, so there are no tapes or photographs of which I am aware).

I’m pretty sure I mentioned that Kurt-not-Kurt’s name was actually John, and I may have let drop that he was a first-grade teacher, or a first-grade art teacher, or a study-hall monitor, or something connected to the Brooklyn public school system (I’d had a lot to drink, and my focus was not exactly on conversation). I’m pretty sure, though, that I did not mention he was married. They were having problems (clearly, because of the several times I wound up in his really-really messy Brooklyn apartment, she was out of town for all of ‘em), so I got the windfall.

The non-judge-y among you are probably saying to yourselves, right on, the Kurt Cobain lookalike thing is justification aplenty, because, like, how many times in one girl’s life is a dead-ringer for the Sex God of Grunge going to just stick his hand up her skirt in a bar? (I know, #metoo, but I liked it. It’s different when we like it).

The more moralizing and judge-y among you are probably not forgiving me for the he-was-married thing. Maybe it will make you feel better to know I lost in the end, that I got treated like shit, etc., etc., and we’ll get to that part, I promise. This is, after all, the Bad-Bad-Love blog, where we throw love spaghetti against the wall in the service and for the good of my novel[s] in embryonic state. But first we have to do a few weeks of backstory dump, which is a total no-no for novels but I have never seen it written anywhere that you can’t do it on a blog.

So. John/Kurt-not-Kurt was not my first married dude. Or my first objet-de-lust in a committed relationship that I was absolutely certain I could bust wide open and claim the spoils for myself. Or maybe I knew all along I couldn’t (because I never actually managed to make the crack and make it stick), and that was the point. Getting what you want can be a curse.

You see, I think we all want this:

No estés lejos de mí un solo día, porque

Cómo,

Porque, no sé decirlo, es largo el día,

Y te estaré esperando como en las estaciones

Cuando en alguna parte se durmieron los trenes…

–Pablo Neruda

Which, in English, goes something like “Don’t go far, don’t go away from me even for one day, because, well, because, I don’t really know how to say it, but a day is a really long time, and I’ll be just standing there waiting for you, like someplace in a train station, where all the trains are stopped, asleep…”

You must, must, must listen to those words sung in the gorgeous, heartbreaking mezzo-soprano of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, these songs adapted by her husband—they met in almost middle-age—Peter Lieberson, to music he composed, which she sang, as best as my deficient math skills can make out, when she already knew she was dying. Of cancer.

Love that knows its days are numbered can afford to take the brakes off.

So, yes, I think we all want to feel that. And only a few of us will ever be able to, and for those few, the high will likely be a very short one. Something to chase for the rest of one’s born days.

When we reach for impossible love—or its very acceptable substitute, lust—I think we are searching for that thing Neruda doesn’t quite know how to put into words (and if he doesn’t, then the rest of us are surely effed before we even try). Even as we know we will probably never find it, or at least that we will never get to keep it, and one way my brain helps me hedge my heart’s bets is by choosing people I know, in both head and heart, I will never get to have. At least not for breakfast every day, and that is probably—at least for me—a good thing. Because if I had breakfast every day with the love of my life, two questions arise:

1. How long would he continue to be the love of my life? (hint: not long)
2. What would I write about?

But, you see, it took me several decades to understand this about myself. It is only now that I get what I was doing when I look back on my twenty-nine-year-old self (an age when most responsible people are already married with a couple of kids; NB: I have never claimed to be a responsible person) and observe. She, sipping from her fifth glass of champagne as she wandered through the Alhambra at night, the palace lit by candles, ornate as a wedding cake—she was there because she’d been lackey to the person organizing the landmark exhibition of Islamic art in Spain, but she was there, so who cared why. She knew he’d been following her all the way from the Patio of the Myrtles, with its dancing reflections in the pond of the palace dancing for itself, and so she finally let him catch up. Allowed an unconventionally handsome blond guy with a tan and an English accent and a gap-toothed smile, a camera slung around his neck, to approach and strike up a conversation.

And we will find out where that went next week, because your friend the Redneck Scheherezade here has to go make her rabbits some dinner.