How to Have an Ill Fated Romance
Joe Marchia

1. Meet him through the internet. Google him to see if his Myspace page is active. Stare at his Myspace picture and make conjectures based on the angle. Think: Emo. Find his SoundCloud. Imagine having sex to his remix of a Ween song.
   
   
2. Meet him in a public space. Make awkward conversation and have to pee more than usual. Make off handed comments about how much you pee. Now you have to pee again. Make eye contact and talk about a movie you both saw. Imagine thinking about this a year down the line and thinking: “Wow, remember when we made small talk?”
   
   
3. Immediately return to someone’s place. Don’t get naked right away. Pretend you will watch a movie. When you are five minutes in touch his junk. This will signal you are ready to pause the movie. Engage in oral sex. Impress him that you can perform oral sex while pretending neither of you are in love with other people.
   
   
4.   Communicate via text for about a week. Share things from the Internet until you’ve established a common ground of pop culture references. Develop an inside joke related to something someone says. Let the joke be a reference point to which you will refer when you are uncertain. 
   
   
5. Have vague “hang outs” at someone’s place. Project intimacy onto ordering take out food. Avoid anything too declarative and only talk in vague abstractions about each other (“you are chill” “you are a dumbass” “you are so tall!”)
   
   
6. Have longer stretches of time between hangouts. Read the subtexts of his twitter account. Open and close Grindr on the train. Develop an oscillating attitude towards him while maintaining indifference in your interactions. Pretend you are busy when you are just masturbating.
   
   
7. Meet his friend(s) in an informal situation. Get black out drunk and say vague things about him. Listen to emo music when you are alone.
   
   
8. Slowly drift apart over the next few months. 

About the author:
Joe Marchia is the author of a novel, This Is The Future. His recent work has appeared in Crab Fat Literary Magazine, Digital Papercut, The Screaming Sheep and elsewhere.