Erica the Goth Girl

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”—Horace Walpole

“Hey, I’m at that cute little cocktail bar we used to go to if you wanna meet up.”

I politely declined. You see, she had dumped me by text a little over a year earlier and I had my pride to think of. I shrugged it off after being kicked to the curb because this studiously disaffected goth girl was becoming a burden and was often bewitched by strange behavior. 

Erica had the habit of getting drunk and then causing scenes for no apparent reason. One time she screamed in the middle of a busy street that she “wanted to die.” Another time she showed up at the restaurant where I worked and harassed me in the kitchen. I was fired a few days later. She had unsuccessfully threaded the needle from “colorful” to “bat shit crazy,” and I often wondered about the men in her past. I wanted to love her, but the sticky situations were proving too problematic and absurd for the efficacy of that dream. I was simply lost in the static. 

The final straw was when I received a call at 2 in the morning because she “couldn’t find my door.” I told her to put me on the phone with the door man only to find out that she was in a completely different building about 10 blocks away. Of course, I had to go fetch her.

Just a few days earlier we were house sitting for the weekend in her parents' McMansion, happily frolicking among the gouache paintings when I decided to scour through their impressive wine collection. I wanted to be respectful so I chose a cheaper offering–-a Louis Jadot Beaujolais–-common swill compared to the rest of the lot. 

“I knew you were going to choose that,” she said.

“Why is that?”

“Because I’m an empath…I never told you?”

Our song: