“I eat with my heart,” he tells me. 

His teeth rip and pull and claim this pizza as his own. He has colonized pizza and raped the natives.

He’s folded the slice of pizza in half, so that if opened, the cheese from one side would cling needily to the other, exposing a raw underbelly of bloody tomato. He eats the whole thing in one bite, swallowing as he goes along, and stares at me.

He holds my gaze. He doesn’t let go. I think he might be a god, and not human at all.

When he finishes his slice, he picks up another and restarts the process. He chews. I don’t look away. If I’m scared, I reach over and take a sip of my orange juice.

A crinkle of his nose or a squint of his eye shows that he sees me. I raise my chin and lower my right eyebrow. I’ve changed my mind, he is human.

Sometimes, I laugh.

It’s simple here. I’m watching Shira eat his pizza. It’s not a breath of fresh air, or a warm opening in my chest. I can’t even claim I don’t want it to end. My diaphragm contracts four times. I must have been conscious, for how else would I remember. I wish every blink away so I can go back to having my eyes open.

When we’re lying on my bedroom floor. 

The rug leaves shallow imprints on my elbows. I like to run my fingers across them. He shows me his expired Costco card. His real name is Gilbert. He is human.

He had a gap between his teeth as a child growing up in Toronto, Canada. They moved to Texas when his parents divorced. He got braces. He barely opened his mouth for years. I feel as if someone has cut into my body and my innards are on display, in a great and terrible way.

He likes Vedic astrology, not tropical. His eyes widen when he sees my chart. He tells me I am powerful.

He changed his name to Shira because it means song. He says he is the song of death.

I don’t know what I’d change my name to if I changed my name. I don’t know how I’d pick. I’m myself, which is nothing. Shira understands. I must be human too.

I ask if he’s happy. He says he is always happy.

He wants pizza. When he smiles, I collapse. I call Khalil. He doesn’t pick up. I call Holly. She’s in Santa Barbara. Shira walks around the room.

“We have to order a delivery,” I tell him. My voice slips out of me, warm and breathy. 

He smiles. “It is what it is.”

Shira is the most potent form of everything I’ve ever craved. I’m almost there. It’s not a bad thing or anything. Shira says we have to be ready to let go. I’m not strong enough yet, or that’s what I tell myself. And I wonder about reality and cognition, and delusion, and reality and I would, I will, I might, but I’m not strong enough to let go. Leave it at that.

We order a pizza. I use the internet so he doesn’t have to.

He tells me how he does whatever he wants when he wants it. I tell him I have no idea what I want. This is my first lie.

He says his book is the New Bible. He tells me he was born to tell the world that the end is coming. I ask him what will happen at the end of the world.

“Alien vaporization.” His eyes twinkle.

I let him borrow my computer to edit his novel. It’s called Remnants of Infinity. There’s something marvelously funny about Shira using Google Docs. I always forget he is human.

I left a bunch of blank pages, he tells me.

To give the audience space to process.

No, I did it because I wanted to.

I ask if I can read it. He says yes. I correct a typo. I share the Google Doc with myself, in view mode. If I wanted to, I could have picked edit mode. I want to warn him, you can’t trust me.

The pizza has arrived. He wants to stay, so I leave him in my kitchen. 

Cosi texted me. I don’t open it.

I wonder if I could be the one going down to get the pizza forever. Someone has to get it.

The thoughts return when I’m waiting for the Uber Eats driver to find my street. I get cold. One time Cosi had told Shira she was cold. He said, “What’s cold?” I found it so hilarious I wrote it down.

The good part is over.

When I arrive back to my room, Becca is returning home and Shira is standing in the hall. I slip a little bit. I see him in her eyes. His nipples staring from underneath his toga. I want to tell her that he has shorts on underneath. I don’t. I just say, “Hey.” My voice no longer floats.

We go inside.

“I have pizza.” I make myself smile. He knows it’s fake. I hate myself.

When I giggle, I can hear myself with her ears. She is in our room with the door shut. It’s fine, I tell myself. This is normal.

Shira is halfway through a slice when a keycard enters our door. I hear a code pressed into the buttons. I hear the doorknob turn.

Lexi’s face reads revolted. It scares me.

“Something smells weird in here. Like olives.”

“There are olives on the pizza.”

“Yeah, it smells really weird.” 

“Maybe it’s the vegan cheese.”

“Yeah.” Lexi walks into her room and closes the door. And genuinely, in the moment, I didn’t realize she was talking about Shira.

Becca walks into Lexi’s room. Lexi and Becca call each other “biiitch,” like roommates from a 90s movie.

Cosi moved to Colorado in August, and I missed her so much. She could never talk. She was so busy. Cosi is an introvert, so she gets drained by too much socialization. So, for our first month of school, we did not talk. I tried all the time. She wouldn’t pick up. I trusted her enough not to feel all that pathetic.

I had just gotten back from pizza with Khalil on my birthday, where I almost cried because I felt like a bad writer. My roommates threw me a surprise party.

When we got back, after the go-ahead to Khalil from Vic, they popped out and yelled surprise. They had tequila shots, and pink balloons, and pink streamers, and weed, and cupcakes, and a boy I liked. No one had ever done something so thoughtful for me before. I thanked them profusely.

“Did you invite Cosi?” I asked, joking.

I didn’t know anyone but Kirsten and Vic and Khalil and Kirsten and Vic had some joke I didn’t know, so I talked to Khalil.

I said, I’m going to go change.

I changed and washed my face over and over until my eyes were pink and not red. I wanted someone to check on me. But I was grateful for the party.

I went downstairs and I wasn’t sure where to stand. I willed myself not to cry.

Ashley gave me a hug. “Happy birthday! How are you?”

“Well,” I began, ready to be a little bit honest, but self-deprecating and funny about it.

I expected her to follow me into the bathroom. Vic came in a few minutes later.

“What’s wrong, baby?” She asked.

But in the end, the only person who made me feel better was Cosi. I called her. She picked up. We laugh so easily, I wonder if we’re little girls pretending to be grown up. I hung up once I felt okay, saying I didn’t want to miss the rest of my party. I smiled, for real, said I love you and meant it.

The rest of the party was insignificant.

Shira and I sit on the couches by the pool. I picked the location furthest away from where people are.

I’m in my long pink shimmery dress, my ankles are cold, and the armrest brands lines on my calves. I can’t stay in one place. I can’t breathe.

He keeps staring.

They’ve texted me. I know they’ve texted me. I loathe it and I itch for it and I loathe that I itch for it.

I try in vain not to think, but I can’t help but notice he’s different now. I organize it all into a story to tell my friends. They’re going to ask if he gave me an orgasm. I want him to, so I can tell them. I might want it for myself too, but I don’t allow myself to have wants. He doesn’t, anyway.

My phone jabs into my stomach. 

I can’t look at Shira any longer. I can’t. Something I want is to look away. Allow yourself to have wants, I remind myself. My stomach twists anyway.

When I look back up, his head is buried in his knees. He looks like he’s being tortured. I don’t know how to fix it.

But his head remains in his knees, so I pull out my phone. I want to throw up.

Becca and Lexi say he can only stay for one night. I text back, all simpering and sorry and sympathetic.

I’m guilty and ashamed and fearful and relieved and want to be dead.

We go back in when I don’t have the energy to run any longer. I don’t pretend to buzz with delirium all the way home. Shira knows.

There is air freshener on the table, and all the pillows were taken off the couch.

I give him sheets. He smiles at me kindly, and I wish it could make me happy. I fall asleep immediately.

When I wake up, I go back to sleep.

When Cosi first arrived in Boulder, something happened to her. She hadn’t even been to her apartment yet.

She saw a man on the street. He noticed her immediately. And looking at him felt like a vestigial organ she didn’t know she had, being used for the first time. She stumbled away, feverish and manic.

Cosi was looking for jobs around Boulder weeks later when she felt the compulsion to enter a coffee shop.

The man was there again.

Cosi doesn’t approach strangers. She’s the introvert, I’m the extrovert. But she approached Shira. He told her to meet him at the Star House, a meditation temple a hike away.

Another friend told her to go to the Star House, so eventually, she did. After passing through a forest, she found a path marked by lights, and at the end there was space.

Shira was there. Standing alone on a hill, with wind blowing through his hair. He turned sharply and looked right into her.

People came up to them after and told them they were a beautiful couple. Cosi said, thank you, we just met. Shira said nothing.

They went back to his house and slept together naked that night. Shira wanted her to hold him. He came in the middle of the night.

When she woke up, he was gone. She went into the backyard, which was a mountain garden. He found her there, and hand-fed her honey and peanut butter.

“I’m going to a dinner party tomorrow. Do you want to come?” She said yes.

Then, he drove her to class, in this beaten-down red convertible. When Cosi got home, she called me.

I thought it was such an exquisite, profound event. I was desperately jealous.

I told everyone, Cosi met a 28-year-old guy who looks like Jesus several times by fate and they meditated together for an hour without speaking at all and he had a tantric orgasm even though they didn’t kiss or have sex. People loved that story. And I did, feel guilty.

I walk into the living room when I realize I can’t sleep any longer. Shira is already awake, sitting on the couch, with the bedsheets in the corner. Something inside of him is gaping.

I get dressed.

Shira has a thing where he refuses to eat any food that isn’t from a restaurant, or from a grocery store but only while he’s physically at the grocery store. Also, it has to be organic and plant-based. Not vegan, as he told me multiple times. Plant-based. He refuses to drink water that isn’t double filtered. He has to refill the Brita seven times to fill his hydro flask.

“What do you think about trains?” I ask.

“I don’t think.”

I am so tired.

I try to study him to write about it later. His nose is short and pointed. He’s so thin I can see his skull. His curved fingernails penetrate an orange, plucked from a tree. I should soak in the virgin juices spurting. This should be poetic.

I read a book about a heroin addict. Shira says entertainment is just distraction.

I thought the weather would be nice so I wore a dress. It never seems to be as warm out as I think it will be. Shira is off wandering by a tree. I wouldn’t have told him I was cold anyway.

I spend the train ride staring out the window. I’ve given up on the no phone to impress Shira policy. I scroll through Instagram.

He dumps out his water.

“Hey, yo, Jesus, I’m hungry! You know, Jesus was black. Can I get some food, Jesus? Hey lemme get some food.”

People stare at him in Whole Foods. A man compliments his toga on the street. He doesn’t seem to notice.

Shira spends two hundred fifty dollars on a hotel, with a hundred fifty deposit. We find the room. I take a photo with my film camera. Film is better than a cell phone camera, I tell myself.

“You can sleep here,” he says. “I hate hotel beds.”

“I can’t. I have class tomorrow morning.”

I ask him at the pizza place how to get in touch with my own wants. I ask him on the street what the difference is between genuine wanting, wanting that is shaped by society, and wanting bad things like heroin. He tells me the answer is to breathe. My lungs feel shallow.

He tells me that he is going to destroy society.

I leave him outside the subway station. I take the escalator down. I tug my film camera out of my bag to take a picture of him. By the time it’s out, I can’t see him anymore.

When I get home, I wash his sheets and spray the couch with air freshener.

I don’t think Cosi wanted to go to the potluck, really, but I wanted to meet her friends. I wanted to meet Shira.

I met Axel there, who looked like a boy I once loved. It was exciting. When I made jokes he would laugh, and touch my leg.

We all went around the circle and introduced ourselves with an adjective that started with the first letter of our name. In school we had played these games, and picked the most nondescript adjective we could find. Here, it was different. Levitating Leif. Godly Gabriel. Alluring Akyra who threw his head back and howled without laughter. 

Everyone was dancing and playing drums, like a jungle tribe, or like children. Axel took a video. I took one too.

But they looked so free so I got up and danced.

When I looked back over, Axel had his hand on Cosi’s leg.

I left the room. A man named Sage guided me in meditation. 

I jumped in the snow and rolled around. Cosi was too cold to go in.

Godly Gabriel was teaching us about his work with precious gems when it happened. Shira was in the room, and he fixed his gaze on me, and that settled it.

I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t do anything. He tilted his chin upwards and I tilted my chin upwards. He narrowed his eyebrows. I felt it in my entire body. He pushed harder. My legs grew weak. I should have stopped him. I don’t know if I could have. Another thing I tell myself.

Everyone in the room was staring at us. Everyone felt it. Everyone knew. Cosi was there. Cosi knew.

He was an owl, and a mockingjay, and a deer, and a tiger, and all of the universe was inside of him and he was pushing it into me and I was letting him and it was filling me and he let go when I thought I was about to explode. 

I looked at her. And my eyes darted around like a cornered animal.

“Okay, uh.” I walked out of the room.

She called me the night I left Shira in Los Angeles.

“Hey!” I try.

“What happened?”

I tell Cosi I don’t know how she dealt with Shira for so many months, I was exhausted after 24 hours. I tell her everything he said. I make fun of him. He thinks that aliens are going to vaporize us. He won’t check his bank account. He calls himself the “harbinger” which he thinks means messenger of death, but it actually means messenger. He’s writing a book called Remnants of Infinity which is just blank pages. Did we talk? Yeah, for a while. He has decided not to have friends or human connection at all. He just needed a place to stay. I just did it for the story. Did he seem happy? He said he was.

“Hey--did the crazy Jesus man come?” Khalil stops his bike in front of me.

“Did he ever. I just left him in LA. I’ll tell you everything on Monday.”

“I have to go,” she says, and hangs up.

I go back to school, I develop my film. I wait a week to talk to Cosi. I tell the story. It feels almost real.