When I returned to my old job at the restaurant where I’d worked on and off for over four years, she was working there. With her curly hair and her pudgy cheeks and her impossible-to-spell last name. She was a gay rights activist “as her real job,” which gave me hope. We began hanging out immediately. Fervently. We talked like there was no time to get it all in, and as it turned out there wasn’t. She was moving to Washington, D.C. And she was straight. And she had a boyfriend.

Don’t think this depleted my desire. No, no, it only carbonized it. I was bubbling over with desire for her. The last night before she left town she spent with me. We stood on the street outside my house, beside her car, for hours. I gave her a collage. I said I’d come visit. I wrote her long, long letters in the interim. I stopped going out and making out with other girls, and I listened obsessively to that Magnetic Fields song. It’s just cause that’s where my baby lives, that’s all.

So I booked a ticket. A ten-day visit. It was embarrassing, in retrospect; we barely knew each other. And what did I think I was going to pull? On the plane I confided to my seat companion that I was going to “see about a girl.” He commended me, even though he was middle-aged, straight, Midwestern. He was so nice, optimistic even.

The first night was full of intense spooning. I felt, well, hot and hopeful. Every day we rode the train from Silver Spring, where she lived, into D.C. to visit museums. We spent two days at the Holocaust museum. There was no more spooning. Her roommates were somewhat obnoxious. Then one day I woke up at noon and shuffled into the living room to find everyone glued to the television. “Your mom called,” they said. “And we’re being attacked.”

I rubbed my eyes, trying to laugh at their joke, until I saw the smoking towers. “Why didn’t anyone wake me up? Jesus.” I flew home three days later. I was the only person in the whole rear of a giant plane. I wasn’t scared of being hijacked, but I thought a lot about death. About the Holocaust. About why I always fall for straight girls.