I’ve been thinking of my mother lately. As if she knew, she sent me a parcel packed with baklava and a three-page letter begging me to visit or call. As I read her smooth, steady Catholic school cursive letters, I am certain I won’t be the mother she has always been.

First of all, I’m not in love.

I couldn’t talk about love. I don’t know how love looks or smells. I’m talking about the flurry of endless kisses and hours of foreplay I’ve read about in women’s magazines that passionate couples share between fragrant silk sheets in the bedrooms of their palatial homes overlooking a lake or an ocean or a landscaped backyard always filled with sunlight. Where I live people have polite, dutiful, routine sex. In either case, they aren’t like me, which is exactly why they need me.

I’ve read in books written to change the lives of the sexually indifferent that the services I freely provide are highly sought after in those posh uptown high-rise apartments I’ve seen lit up at night like Christmas tree lights draped along the branches of giant redwoods. Perhaps in their world of plush suede and understated earth tones I am a novelty, an experience that married women tell their friends about in whispering circles swishing the violet wine in their glasses careful to blush upon the disclosure of such adventures.

Wives and fiancés don’t worry about their husband’s keen interest in the curve of my hips as he caresses both nor would they concern themselves with his fascination in the hollowness of my cheek or the emptiness in my eyes. Wives don’t worry because I am only one and there might be too many others for husbands to keep track of them. Women enjoy me as well, pondering the glazed affect meeting her watchful countenance before sinking their lips into the soft stretch of skin bristling with anxious nerves at the very top of my neck just beneath my ear lobe.

They don’t want me aware of them touching me. They’re comfortable only when I am a sensual vessel filled only with pointed responses to their exploring fingertips. We don’t speak and the room always remains dark. They leave before the sun rises and my name seems to conveniently drift from their memories when they are compelled by some practical reason to address me. I am like pornography or sex toys; I am the excess in their intimacy.

Tonight I poured two white lines on a mirror I had salvaged from an old compact, took my favorite white straw with red stripes snatched from the counter of a McDonalds not far from the Sears Tower, which I had cut to about two inches in length, and gathered the powder lines clean and straight with the edge of an index card. I didn’t use a razor blade anymore because I don’t like them. As the powder touched the rawness inside of me and climbed into my blood, I watched myself fading in the small reflection of the mirror. The wave of pandemonium swept through my body. I reeled. The sight of myself blurred and rippled.

There was Baklava still wrapped up in a brown paper package inside of my refrigerator next to a bottle of tomato juice and a half eaten wedge of Colby-Jack cheese. Before the coke swept me away, I saw the wedge of cheese jagged where I had torn a soft chunk from it. My laugh sounded like quick sighs. Someone might look in my refrigerator and think a child had used her tiny fingers to peel chunks away because the knife drawer was locked. Then, the pandemonium made its home in me.

When I was a girl, my mother would snatch up my wrist and shake her pointed finger at me when she caught me using knives—even butter knives. She never told me why. My mother didn’t make mistakes, though. She had a reason. She always had her reasons. They were always for me, she said. No one else.

I spun out onto the dance floor. I embody the wind. The boys around me are yellowed autumn leaves clinging to an oak tree. They are helplessly carried off by me. Here, along these faux marble tiles and calculated smiles, I am a boy’s fantasy. I’m the scourge of better women.

I don’t choose my boys until I can see that they would fight for me.

I touch the starched linen shirt covering one man’s chest. Meanwhile, I’m rolling my inner thigh along the denim thigh of another. Both have soon forgotten their obligations. They go to an oval bar for drinks. I tell them I’ll rest for a moment.

They believe me.

I find two others.