1)   Sometimes men in high school just never quite know how to express their true feelings.

2)   Sometimes men graduate holding pent-up love for you and trudge through the first semester of college kicking themselves for never having the gumption to ask you on a date.

3)   Sometimes then at a high school basketball game that winter men hug you, which will unleash a torrent of psychosomatic desires and subsequent 2 a.m. emails about how “pure” and “honorable” you are.

4)   Sometimes for the next few weeks, men will leave multiple voice mails, 18 text messages, and around 35 e-mails just to let you know they care. Men may also mention that you may be the gatekeeper, he the keymaster, etc.

5)   Sometimes you will run away to the east coast and for a year you will not hear from men. This is because men is “getting assistance,” men’s parents will tell you over the phone.

6)   At some point, you’ll hear through the grapevine that men quit his job at the tractor implement plant to stay home and watch coverage of the Japanese Tsunami. After a year of safety, this will make you scared once again of men.

7)   Inevitably, with time on his hands, men will find your new employer’s website using mastery of Google searches that likely rivals the NSA intelligence service.

8)   At this point, men will have concocted a bizarre, fictional, pantheistic religion based around some spiritually-incarnate pyramid and your naked body.

9)   With men back on the prowl, the e-mails/phone calls/text messages back in full force, and you reduced to a shuddering ball of tears in your apartment out east, men like to make four-hour, close-cam movies about themselves that feature references to Coldplay and “God’s place in the universe for us.” Sometimes men won’t look directly into the camera. Sometimes men won’t have shaven for a long time. And sometimes men will have pale white skin reminiscent of Boo Radley.

10)  Sometimes men—after receiving multiple threatening letters from the county sheriff in regards to their harassment of you over the course of years—will begin dropping off these movies in unmarked packages in your parent’s driveway.

11)  Eventually men will hijack a local semi-trailer filled with pigs, drive for the Iowa border, and disappear.

And that is the last you’ll hear from men. Except sometimes years later you’ll swear you see men in the crowds at sporting events. But that could be other men. You never know.

– Dunstan McGill

Photo courtesy DeusXFlorida