Okay, how positive was I that Byron wasn't going to end up with Mary? VERY. I was so sure he was going to end up with Tanya, and as much as I like her, I like Mary even more. Byron, I'm not so terribly crazy about - but what can ya do? That was a seriously romantic proposal, though. They weren't kidding when they said it was the most! romantic! Bachelor! proposal! ever! The commercials showing the Bachelorette made me laugh. Because I like Jenn Schefft, I think she's a great girl and really sweet, but I also think she's (AND THIS IS JUST MY OPINION) a bit bland. I also don't think she's as drop-dead gorgeous as they're trying to make me believe. As much as Trish annoyed me during the last Bachelor, she certainly added a little zing to the show, and I think she'd be really interesting to watch.

The heart of a nine-year-old understands longing. It knows how to hold another identity, wrap it tenderly in butcher paper -- as carnal and pure as the red flush of guilt on the analyst's couch.

Kathy Curry was my first.

She entered my life long before I named girlfriends by trait. She wasn't Rubber Woman, The Wiz, Blush Girl, or Helmet Head. She certainly wasn't The Lapper.

Even two years after Kathy disappeared to an all-girl boarding school, when Darcy Daniels had jumped into my lap, I couldn't get to the root of Kathy's essence, her intent, or a nickname.

Darcy could flip me off with a glance. It was her mating call -- her trump card. Kathy was ineffable, unreachable, unfathomable.

"You should really play the violin," she once said. And I did. I couldn't say no to cartoon purity. I couldn't refuse clean, even lines. It didn't even cross my mind.

I had no devotion to the instrument. Couldn't have cared less about the music -- and the suffering dispensed from an incessant 30-minute egg timer ticking everyday after school.

Ultimately, Kathy gave me a wonderful excuse to ruin any perfectly good relationship. To this day, I can conjure up a perfect image of her to help sour anything remotely healthy. With her in mind I can feign my own wounds or claim to be in love with someone else.

I never had to fall in love with her. Never had to touch her even. I just chased her Ivory Soap scent around the sandbox. That last day in Ms. Gross' 1st grade class I built a gilded cage of sand and honey and chased her memory around in my head.

Devout in my own melodrama, I can belly up in a field of mustard and watch the clouds drift by.

When you become obsessively involved with the lie of perfection, fraudulent nostalgia, and maudlin reminiscences, you never again have to put up with the bellow of a fluctuating bowel or mindless drivel. You don't have to listen to a chortling laugh. You don't have to wake up to the stench of bad breath and soiled sheets.

Kathy bestowed the greatest gift of all -- the power to kill things as cleanly and naively as they were created. If I could thank her I would. But she faded that year like mist from a crashing ocean wave.

Years later, I saw her in a Ralph's parking lot in Southern California. She was in the back seat of an '82 Chevy Nova giving a blowjob to some dude and wiping her cum off her moouth.

As I walked by, her head tilted slightly to follow my movement and the corners of her eyes tightened to pierce through the bright summer sun. I think her hand started to rise. I can't be sure because if I wanted to interpret her motion I'd have to have stopped -- and there was no way I was stopping.

And that's the last I saw of her, her memory and image sealed airtight behind tinted windows.