She doesn't want to be that woman. Who plays mixed tapes from a decade before for her newly found boyfriend playing video games in her apartment. But she is. That one. Laughing like a just run over hyena at the in-joke that no one would get but her and him. About cheese. She's a nightmare hippy tease.

Their connection to the intent lags. Blows.

She dials the number. Dumbstuck at not being able to access the world at any unforgivable moment. As any numb moment as this. The ringing. And.

"Hello," he says.
"Yes," she says. "My connection seems to be out."
He pauses. Mumbles something about being the national help desk for the problem. She doesn't care. She wants her life back. Of clicking send and receive until she drives herself into an insomnia of ever-wake-ever-sleep that doesn't matter only that it's the slow drive pulse that keeps her from driving herself to the dark edge of the screaming crimson river. Not looking for anything in particular.
"I can't do anything for you," he says.
"Fuck," she says.
"What?"
And she fumbles with the phone. Mostly frustrated by the fact that she can hear her new neighbors in their apartment screaming at one another in what can only be described as a kind of sex that she's only imagined.
"Nothing," she says. But he knows she doesn't mean it.
"Do you eat tofu?" She asks.
He says, "No."
They hang up the lines. And she takes a baking soda bath. To the tones of the red wine and the word sanctuary. She dreams about meeting him in Saint Louis and having heart-felt-conversations about the unreality of meaning and crossing the equator.
In the luke-warm bath she wishes she could call up maxwell's demon. Ask him if he would, could, possibly, make it all right with again.
She wishes, her slow eyes closing and opening again, that she could make this and everything become something much more closer. To real. As the moment her epidermis let itself out at the base of the tub with the cool bathwater.