“Well?” Nora demands. “You still haven’t answered me.”

I’m trying to remember what we were talking about. Oh. Dom. Right.

I shrug. “You know I don’t date.”

“No, what I know is you’re still hung up on this random fuckboy you met on vacation six years ago. It’s nuts, Ever. Even with everything that happened. It’s time to move on. I feel like I need to stage an intervention or something.”

She is only half joking as she stands up and makes her way to our kitchen, soon returning with our healthy, nutritious dinner, a.k.a. Snyder’s pretzels and two cans of Diet Coke. She passes me a can and slops beside me. I don’t know many things about life, but I do know that nothing tastes better than extra-salty pretzels and an ice-cold can of Diet Coke.

“It’s not that simple.” I break a pretzel in two, sucking on the salt until it becomes soft. “You can’t just forget.”

“Sure you can, if you try.”

But I have. For six years.

The more I tried to forget, the deeper the Seed of Joe had been planted into my heart, hitting roots. Growing, flourishing, conquering more and more space. It spread out to my limbs, to my lungs, to my brain.

The more days, and months, and years that passed, the more Joe grew into a mammoth, mythological figure in my head. Powerful and immortal. He had no beginning, middle, or end. He was nothing, and yet everything. He was the reason for the biggest tragedy in my life, the one that led me here, and yet I knew, deep down, I couldn’t really blame him for what happened.

And the sad part is that I still haven’t given up on finding him. To this day, I wander into bookstores, flipping through softcovers, looking for his name. But Joe is such a generic name. I curse myself every day for not asking for his last name.

“Till when, Ever? How long do you intend on pining for a guy you will never see again?” Nora asks seriously. She isn’t touching the pretzels anymore. Instead, she leans forward, desperate to catch my gaze. I know she isn’t just talking about my love life. She is talking about hers too. She wants me to find someone so she won’t feel so bad about moving out when she does. Her departure looms over our heads like a green, slobbery monster that wants to tear me limb from limb.

I put the soft pretzel on the coffee table after sucking the salt off it, then pop another one into my mouth. Then I take a sip of my Coke. “Sorry, I reject the narrative that you need a knight in shining armor to save you from yourself. You act like I have to jump on every guy who looks my way. Maybe if I found someone who is more my style—”

“Why is Loki’s sugar daddy not your style?” Nora asks, cutting into my speech. She is not letting it go.