2013 Dina/Dan

I have lost everything I love, Dan. What happened.

I am in a 17th floor hotel room and I am asked by a person I am in bed with to tell them a story and when I say that I am not very good at stories, they tell me that is what I do, I tell stories, so let's hear it and so I give them this story:

My older brother knocked up my best friend after high school but kind of just on the outskirts of in high school. Our younger sister loves to hotbox ganja. My best friend + my brother's baby contracted a disease where it did not live but yet she had to wait to be induced to get rid of it so she looked very pregnant when in fact the child was not alive. Our younger sister, not that she was insensitive, but more that she had this job at H&M and was very interested in being downtown and in her car and on her phone and smoke a lot of weed around my best friend. One day we were outside smoking a cigarette and this elderly couple came up and lectured my best friend about smoking while pregnant. I learned a good lesson about compassion and mercy that day. After they left, she said she wanted to kill them and the whole time she was listening she was imagining gutting them from jugular to asshole. Because the baby was dead. Why didn't we just tell them that? I don't remember. I remember that we walked into the house and my little sister and her little sister who also worked at H&M downtown were watching Faces of Death, the one were the very diplomat looking professional man goes up to a podium and kills himself with a gun. What the hell. Why would anyone watch that.

I tell this story to the person that I come to find out I am in love with. It is winter and it gets dark early and we are up so high we can see the entire city West, East, North, beautiful. They tell me it is not a good story, not the story they wanted to hear, don't I know any uplifting stories, why is everything so violent, so gloomy.

So I tell them a few fragments of other stories, run-ins with celebrities when I followed jambands across the country and sold drugs, comedians, musicians, not impressive but what they wanted to hear.

Dan, don't you see. The next day they left me. They next week the woman that I love left me. Dan, you have left me. What kind of story do you want to hear? Tell me first so I can get it right the first time.