It's been said newly minted lovers might as well be ghosts on this earth, etherial creatures who lose, or abandon, ties to their friends and family. Phone calls will always end in a short sounding message machine, emails will go unreturned and even unexpected run-ins will end with a distracted hand running through hair and a "I gotta go, I told her I'd meet her". Andrew Quinto had somehow gotten a passport to love's null-earth, but, he was there alone and therefore belonged to no-one. He was a good student, his teachers said, responsive to discussion and quick with an incesive comment, but, he never talked to his fellow students and always seemed irritated when he was assigned to faciliate a study group. His friends saw him often and they would describe him as charming, cynical and perhaps a little judgemental, but, never really participating past the surface of the conversation, always just skating across it's mottled surface. He almost always had a new joke or story to tell about a girl he had met and fucked, but, he never remembered names so it was always "the girl". "Andrew has a new girl", they would say. "What's her name?" A shrug and a laugh always followed and this has had become ritual, because their was never a good answer.

The true of it, however, was that Andrew Quinto was desperately in love, but, not with any one person. This woman was an amalgamum of every girl that had ever yielded herself up to him, in beds, cars, indoor tennis courts. He loved them all and never let them go, even when he stopped calling and actively avoided the neighborhoods they lived in, riding his bike a few blocks south of the block they lived on. They would cling onto him long after he had simply added them to the huge, grotesque sculpture of his love and when they would, months or years later, try to contact him, their names and faces provoked nothing but a faint feeling of accomplished work, as when an archtiect looks at a building he designed in his early career that, while technically competent, lacked a certain flair or creativity he had recently discovered. Still, love flowed through every pore of his heart and so he had a permanent residence on the shores of this distant place, a wooden bungalow swollen with sea water and memory.

Andrew sat lanconically at the end of the pool, the sun slowly roasting his fish-white skin. He had been recently adopted by a friend of his mother's, an older woman named Sam who was married to a british jew who often gave him sidelong glances of curiousity and asceribc but friendly remarks. Andrew lit a cigarette and put it between his lips, his other hand holding the top half of a Big Chief notepad. Matt looked over. "Seems like we have a budding Rimbaud over here, huh, Sam?". She looked over and smiled warmly, her brown-and-grey curls framed by the white sun. "I don't know, I'd say he looks more like Hemmingway". This interchange temporarily made Sam lift his mind from love's grasp and he blushed lightly, taking a quick drag on his cigarette. "I prefer to think of myself as a male J.K. Rowlings". As he said this, the smoke blew out of his mouth in a huge blast, escaping from his mouth with the speed of embarassment. "Ah, the writer's escape" Matt said with genuine affection and they all laughed and the two children, Ethan and Maude, looked over at the two parents and the not-parent-but-adult figure and screwed their faces up in youthful imitations of wry irritation.


TBC