It’s nine o’clock and I’m not wearing any pants and I can’t remember taking off my pants though of course I did because clearly I’m not wearing pants now, or else maybe she took them off, which is entirely possible since she’s not wearing pants either. It’s nine o’clock and we’ve run out of alcohol, a bottle of rum from the corner store because that’s her favorite, after we left the underground coffee shop where we’d met earlier for coffee because she said, “This isn’t a coffee-drinking kind of conversation. More of a rum-drinking kind of conversation,” she said and I said, “That sounds like a shame,” and she said, “It is.”

Now that I’m in my underwear I’ll go ahead and tell you about the first time we met, a beautiful woman with beautiful teeth lying in the grass in an island in the sun with a crossword puzzle under her chin and a pen behind her ear and she asked me if I knew the past participle of lies and I said lain and she said, “Are you sure that’s not wrong? Because I thought it was laid,” but I think now that was all pretense since she’s lying on the bed in her underwear and no pen and she looks up at me and says, “We’re through.”

I think there are a thousand people just like me and a thousand ways to say goodbye to them and at least one of them involves not wearing any pants, but I wouldn’t recommend it.