After he was captured and sentenced to hang, he wrote his confession in jail. When it came to the plans he made for the hotel, his memoirs read, “Oh, the future! The future lay before me like a ribbon.” I cut it out and kept it. I put that in the duffel bag, too.

After the robbery the closeness of other people repulsed me. Especially Krystal. All I wanted to do was to escape. Even slogging through my routine was a daily expedition into mindlessness, blankness, the diligent work of allowing time to elapse. Before that final night in the market, suicide of any kind had disgusted me. But each thing that reminded me of Geannie and Jim—the house, the goddamn Christmas village, the store that now stood locked and boarded up (who owned that now? Jim’s sister? I had no idea), Krystal’s red, watery eyes and thinning face—was a tiny cyanide capsule between my teeth, daring me to bite down.

Love was a sickness. It had poisoned me. People lie when they say misery or loneliness kills; it’s love. Love is the lethal agent. The more you have to live for, the more can be taken away.

And now, with Three’s Company, I had a secret inside me, a romantic, fantastical vision that kept me afloat, and I cherished it so much that my spiritual survival seemed at stake. If other people came to know it, the depth of it, my end was assured. I could be killed by a skeptical eyebrow. Murdered with one look. Then I’d have to kill my body. But if I kept it to myself, I could inoculate myself against the death-urge forever. Only my own private obsession would save me. That is why I needed to resist love’s hostile invasion at every turn. With love comes attention, then judgment, then annihilation.

Don’t think I didn’t know what was going on. I had a vague sense of my severe avoidance and its possible abnormality, but I chose to believe instead that the world was abnormal and I had only adapted to it. Like every person in denial, I believed my methods were acceptable simply because I acknowledged them. In my mind avoidance was rational, fine, even natural—animals run away from predators every day. Love, on the other hand, was transmitted through human contact, the embarrassing need to connect. A manufactured product. And, again and again, it had actively threatened me.

I had known it as a child. I had loved both of my parents foolishly, wholly. I’m ashamed of it even now. But I was a child! How else are children supposed to love. The moments my parents loved me back glow out at me. My mother, a quiet, clipped woman, teaching me to cook basic dishes when she had a couple of free hours between the three jobs she juggled after my father died, telling me in a hot kitchen that I had done well. Eating Ho Hos in front of the television every so often. “Our little treat,” she’d whisper, and wink at me, the equivalent of another type of mother’s luxurious cuddle. But it wasn’t just heartfelt moments. There were a thousand small things, daily things that blurred together that made me understand my mother loved me, even if she didn’t say it all the time, or didn’t hug me as much as fiction told me mothers should, or talk to me much at all. Even my father, villain that every drunken father is supposed to be in stories like these, remained saintly—the big burly lovey daddy he was in my memory, and his stretches of cold brush-offs and rages in other rooms belonged to another daddy, maybe one who would have mellowed out in old age. I had quite the imagination, and I was a fool back then—I read a lot of books. I believed in fiction. If something unpleasant happened, I could believe it was good. I had that power.