Conditional

Mid-introduction, I noticed her in that way you notice someone who you hope will be in a classic work of fiction you'll read someday. Perhaps it's already on my bookshelf as much as it is in the stars. I stood upon my best game and rolled tennis balls dipped in paint down the edge of it, and I explained to her the color genome of love and I told her why the tennis balls would never run dry. She is unaffected, she says, "I will not fall in love unless I know you are suffering." While unexpected, this demand feels familiar. She continues, "Since I have already experienced and deconstructed the structure of courtship to the point of oblivion, all I ask and all that's left that I can accept are disjointed incidences of personal anguish. Physical or emotional, real or perceived. Pain."

I accepted this mission and with unsure reason began seeking the unavoidable consequences of completely understandable mistakes. Having no idea how or when it will end, I built a resume of agony that defied description, and in response to my attempt at defying description, description prepared for battle, and the more I defied description, the closer it became until we clashed. I learned that losing a battle against description is the most concrete and inevitable personal defeat possible, and as soon as I conceded victory to description, the contents of my true self were revealed and made easily accessible in a PDF document that I hold no editing rights over. I realized that no further suffering was necessary, and I made my way back to her. She was already standing there, with a weak version of exaltation at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes grew bloated at the sight of me and deflated as she read my PDF document. "So by now you must have acquired considerable disdain for me." I could not lie to her. She said, "Take out that disdain on the rest of the world. When you are done, I will be waiting for you." Before I left she gave me her PDF document.

I wanted this mission even less than the previous one, but it came to me involuntarily. My heart and mind were a minefield of spite and grudges... I was a sprinkler system of barbed comments that nobody wanted to get to know, but I forced them to. I studied the habits of every single person in the world, and discovered one sentence that would insult every single one of them into a temporary comatose state. I approached them and said, "You are not me!", then presented them with my two PDF documents. Once they read both documents, they froze in time. Once my work was complete, she appeared to me and everybody moved again. The first time we made love, all the arbitrary systems of human measurement ceased to be. In the movie "Say Anything", Lloyd Dobler asks Diane if she needed someone or if she needed him. This is the only way to be sure.