As told by Bruce Gamble, 43:
“ I had one dream about her when I was a younger man, in my early 20’s. Just one. We fell recklessly, fully in love. I had no idea who she was. I mean, she wasn’t a celebrity or an assembly of people I knew, but was wholly unique, unblemished by any “architecture” on my part. And when I saw her dancing at the party it was the moment I had been waiting for my entire life. She was my destiny.
When I looked into her eyes I could see for miles and miles, everything there was to know about her was within them. It was so real. All the sensations, all the excitement, vitality and anticipation of falling in love were flooding me, both of us. It was not a simulation of love, it was an intense experience of love. Everything was just beginning, the whole rush of a glowing future waiting before us, and then “dream logic” appeared and she had to leave, but I wasn’t upset. I knew we would see one another again. I knew I would have her to look forward to, and that all of what I experienced in that, what? 90 seconds of dreaming, was true.
And so I have carried this woman, the idea of her, in my heart for 20 years now. I have been waiting for her, but she never returned, in either the dream world or this one that we now stand upon, and then a week ago I dreamt that she called me on the phone. Her voice older now, she said, “In another life, my love.” And that was all.
My most recent invention is a dating service called Hater Mater, where people are paired based on the things they dislike rather than the things that they like.
This is the preliminary questionnaire I have written for people using the App:
1. On a scale of 0-10, how much do you hate the sky?
2. Please choose the stupidest fucking sign in the zodiac.
3. Order these celebrities in the sequence in which you would most want to see them surreally injured in a crossbow incident:
Amy Schumer
The Ikea Monkey
Ethan Hawke
The entire cast from Orange is the New Black
Eric Trump
Adam Driver and Terry Richardson
4. On a scale of 0-10, how much do you hate the ocean?
5. Which Margaret Atwood novel gives you the worst stabbing stomach pain?
6. What do you hate more, squirrels or birds? (Please elaborate)
7. Do your parents hate you more than you hate them, or do you hate them more than they hate you?
8. Is you best friend kind of an asshole?
9. Do you find chopsticks to be infuriating and stupid and pretentious?
10. Do you often find yourself fantasizing about making over-rated Canadian author Margaret Atwood cry?
11. Which part of this passage from a celebrated Margaret Atwood novel do you despise the most?
“Who are you? And I mean really. Who are you?”
My gut tells me that if I tell her right now, in this moment, it will not be well-received. “A friend,” I say, my gaze lowering to her lush mouth and lifting. “And the man who wants to kiss you. Really kiss you. Can I kiss you, Myla?”
“You’re asking?”
“Yes. I’m asking. After all you’ve been through-”
“He hasn’t destroyed me. He hasn’t beaten me and I don’t like that you think he has.”
“I don’t think he’s beaten you.”
“He hasn’t,” she insists. “I’m not giving him that power and damn it, you better not either by treating me like I’m broken and fragile. So kiss me if you’re going to kiss me or let me go, if you don’t want-”
I cup the back of her head, and slant my mouth over hers, my tongue sliding against hers, stroking, caressing, and the taste of her, one part hunger I welcome, but the other part, the torment, I intend to drive away. I deepen the kiss, my hand pressing beneath her tank top, finding warm, soft skin. My fingers splay over her rib cage, while my mind reminds me that no matter how big she talks, she wants this escape for a reason. She has been abused, used, hurt. “
12. “Everybody loves a parade,” true or false?
13. Is Real Estate for fools?
14. When you hear the word “Mindfulness” do you want to build an attack drone or buy a magic killing sword?
15. What do you hate more, having to use a sink or writing with a pen?
16. Which superhero would you most like to beat-up in a fight?
17. Do you hate it when people say, “Good Morning!”
18. Are relationships insanely unrealistic and entirely impossible?
19. On a scale of 1 to 100, how much do you hate non-Spanish speaking people who pronounce Nicaragua as ‘Knee-ah-rah-hah?”
20. If you heard that Margaret Atwood opened a restaurant and that all the sandwiches were named after her poems, would you immediately vomit?
]]>Dressed in some flavour of active wear, they looked like they were heading off to play Ultimate or maybe run the steps at Casa Loma, something sporty. She was very pretty, while he looked like your average 20 year-old guy still trying to figure out who he might be. Both of them were smiling, but his grin was goofy, almost excited, like he simply could not believe his good fortune at being out with this girl. After about half an hour they came walking back, but this time she was holding a little bouquet of wildflowers that had clearly been picked from a yard just up the street. Their smiles were different now, everything shining. This sunny, spring afternoon will travel with the boy for the rest of his days, a perfect moment when something beautiful started to come alive– a point of light he will always return to.
Dear Dragon:
There is this guy in Cell Block D who looks amazing in orange and I really want him to be my bitch, but MS-13 have claimed him. I really don’t have the muscle behind me to take him, and I can’t buy him, either, but I really think we might be in love, any suggestions?
Cellmate 2563514
You are an angel for love, man! A dark angel, made of fire and blood and lust, like all your ancestors before you! Your body is only a vessel and it means nothing, and so you must give your body to the MS-13 so that you may give your soul to your bitch. The MS-13 will take you as their flesh-lover, and in return they will give you your paramour. If this fails, orchestrate their murders and eliminate the gang so that you can have Looks-Amazing-In-Orange all to yourself!
Dear Dragon:
I’m doing life for a triple homicide and feeling really lonely. Sometimes I worry that I missed my opportunity and that maybe love has passed me by. I’m a little bit shy, except when I’m angry or on Meth, and I have trouble socializing with the other inmates. Can you offer me any advice on how to find love before it’s too late?
Cellmate 7836102
Well, the gym is an awfully good place to showcase your earthly body and mingle with all the other guys. I’ve seen a lot of romances blossom, some very immediately and very intensely, in the gym yard, and it’s a beautiful, violent and loving thing to witness, man. If working out isn’t your bag, though, I’d suggest meeting people through Movie Night or Bible Study, and if that doesn’t work, perhaps you should orchestrate the murder of several inmates in order to highlight your virility and mystical powers over the conformist world around you.
Dear Dragon:
My cellmate keeps raping me. I’ve wanted to break up with him for months now, but then he always does something sweet, like spit on my lawyer or cut himself because he loves me. This, of course, just pulls me right back in and then he just continues raping me again. What can I do?
Cellmate 6680348
You need to express your feelings to him, Cellmate 6680348! You have to let him know that it hurts your heart and damages your self-esteem when he rapes you. It might just be that he has always been a rapist and doesn’t know that in some cases it isn’t the best way to express love, but if he doesn’t respect you on this it’s time for a conscious uncoupling and you must orchestrate his bloody murder.
I sat at the bar, listening to your message once again, and still smiling, spun on my stool like a liberated child. Before me on a little stage a beautiful woman with severe and mysterious bangs performed music that was alien and precious and entirely lovely. In a nearby booth there was a young couple– arm in arm, their heads pressed together. They swayed to the music. Oh, oh, what a beautiful autumn night, really, what a lovely night, and this couple, you could see that they weren’t expecting to find this tiny miracle unfolding before them, this music playing just for them. They were just out for a quick drink, maybe a bite, but now they were in the middle of a poem, everything they encountered a happy accident, the soundtrack to their romance.
I had to leave a little bit early and the musician was still performing. As I passed by her I turned and smiled, giving her the thumbs up and mouthing the word, “awesome.” She smiled and nodded, and I like to think her eyes sparked with a little bit of surprise and gratitude, and then I hit the street, a little bit of rain falling, and I was then, as I am now, thinking of you.
]]>Madeline:
Somebody far in the distance is strumming a guitar. Just beneath the hum of the fan, I can hear it drifting in through the open window. It enters so softly, as if a daydream of romance that’s now free of its moorings and lost in the streets.
I look across the street into the illuminated parking garage and as if summoned, there’s a young and attractive couple in Rock n’ Roll clothes holding hands. I have to look through the dark into captured light, and the way the garage is lit makes it look like a theater and the couple is on stage, and they are so very happy they might actually be skipping. When they come upon the striped parking garage gate arm, they delighted even further, and bending back they both did the limbo beneath it, still holding hands, laughing and smiling at one another, unaware that anybody was watching.
Love,
Carter
]]>******************
I figured this out, too little, too late, but I figured it out. And so we stopped communicating, and it was in those spaces that I imagined her, and then she just appeared, as if conjured. Her grandmother’s ring on her left hand, the powder blue jacket that was bunched in the middle, her hair not quite the way she meant it to be for a Saturday night. She saw me sitting there in the corner of the bar and she did not know what to do. A current ran through her body and she panicked, I think. I called out her name and she looked at me like I was a ghost. I was a ghost. She wanted movement, she wanted to be running through a field or diving off a cliff, she wanted the plane to be landing in a new city, and the guy she was with, gesturing to the open table just a few over from where I was seated, he had no idea who I was or what my presence might mean for his unfolding evening.
]]>I have been a huge fan of yours ever since Winter’s Bone. You are my Ozark Mountains, and our substantial difference in age, looks and talent does not make the purity of my affection creepy. It makes it real, and you Jennifer Lawrence are real. We should be together.
Michael Murray
Dear Jennifer:
I dreamed that you and I were walking along a beach together, holding hands. I was worried that a small sand crab might bite one of your bare feet, but you weren’t. “Hush now, my little turtle, “ you said, the salt air breezing through your hair.
Michael Murray
Dear Jennifer:
I saw you in The Hunger Games and I have to say, “I’m hungry for you!” Haha! 
No, that would be creepy and I’m not creepy. Would you come to my birthday party? If the answer is yes, please where a white dress in your next televised appearance, but black if it’s no.
Michael Murray
Dear Jennifer:
I consider myself a feminist and believe in equal rights for women. I just want you to know that. I would fight for your rights.
Michael Murray
PS: Anne Hathaway is a bitch
Dear Jennifer:
I think it’s really cool that you served as an assistant nurse at the summer camp your mother ran while growing up. I tell you, if I was attending that camp, I would have been sick with stomach problems all the time! You should star in a movie about a nurse who falls in love with an older hernia patient and then has a forbidden and torrid affair with him. I have some drawings and notes if you’d like to see them.
Michael Murray
PS: Please send an autographed photograph.
Dear Jennifer:
The other day I had a dream that some breed of super rats were attacking me. I was valiantly fighting them off, but there were too many of them and all I could feel were their horrible teeth and claws slashing at me. And then you came into the room and everything smelled like pumpkins and the rats vanished. Holding hands, we ran together into a forest, the sound of waterfalls in the distance.
Michael Murray
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This is what is said:
Anna:
On Saturday, at about two in the morning, I stepped into a cab that was blaring opera.
It was completely unexpected and absolutely beautiful. The taxi was speeding through the mild, winter night with such light and joy contained within—we were a dazzling secret. Oh, I did not want to get out of that cab–the two of us, the driver and I, we could have gone until dawn as far as I was concerned. Keep the meter running, cabbie, let’s unroll the windows, let’s pour the music out into the streets and have the stars fall in.
I wish I had moved to Toronto with you, I wish I had loved you better.
RM
]]>“And so they walked by and this one shouted, ‘How r u doing?!’ What, are they crazy, do they think that’s the right way to talk to a girl? Is that all they know? “
The girl who never got attention from boys nodded her head in some sort of eager accommodation, grateful for this glimpse into the romantic sphere of college life, while the girl who was always disappointed seemed validated, her face now angrier.
And then a gust of wind blew a tumble of leaves over the dog and I, and when I looked up I saw a familiar homeless man pacing the street, negotiating the angles of a completely different world, and then a pretty girl with bouncing blonde hair ran past him, past us and the Sorority girls, bounding down the street toward her destiny.
