Ami

Ami sits across the booth from me. She takes a large puff on her freshly lit cigarette, then exhales, sending the blue grey cigarette smoke curly-cueing in my direction. "You know. I don't even like boys. But you... you just do something to me. I'm not even sure what it is about you." she says as she takes a sip from what must be her seventh or eighth bottle of Bud Light. "Yeah? I don't know what to tell ya..." I say, while giving her a playful grin like you'd see a child do on a playground, designed to drive her crazy, as I tilt up my tenth or eleventh bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon to my lips.
"The coast is clear now!" Ami shreaks while staring off into the other room of the bar where her friend is bartending, a mere second before leaping over the table and pouncing on me while planting kisses on every line and fold of my face. See, Ami is a Brooklyn, NY native who's now calling Chicago her home. An Italian girl with a fascination of feminism and middle class society and theory, which she's currently studying in college. Ami is also involved in a serious five year relationship with another female. We're also co-workers. We're out tonight in hiding. Drinking the night away and pouncing on one another with kisses whenever the situation allows us to do so secretly. Dangerous move, as Ami's friend is a bartender at this particular bar and is quite curious of me: aka "The boy who's leg you've been humping on all night".
Ami and I went out one night after work to check out some punk-rock bands, something I'm very familiar with. Though Ami doesn't really know anybody at these shows and is somewhat of a social spaz she's getting along just fine with everybody and doesn't look a bit out of place. We're drinking beers, laughing, telling jokes, sharing occasional glances, and as we get steadily more drunk we begin staring into one another's eyes a bit too long. After the show ends we're both drunk and follow a few people out to another bar. We both decide that bars are boring though and buy a six pack to split behind the dumpster of a car parts store. It's where we're sitting when Ami announces that she wants to kiss me. I tell her that I won't stop her, but that I understand there may be some guilt there as she's the one in this situation with something to lose. She leans in and goes for it anyway. The kissing didn't stop until we got back to her place, where I couldn't spend much time as her girlfriend was due home in just a couple of hours.
Though I'm not sure you'd really ever say Ami and I were actually officially "seeing" each other we certainly did see plenty of each other, develop strange feelings for one another and hung out, kissing, rubbing, sucking, and hugging quite a bit over a three or four week period. Most of our meetings consisted of getting very heavily intoxicated in a bar, making out endlessly everywhere we were whether it be a bar, a cab, my bedroom, her couch, or her hideaway bed on her back porch. On our last meeting though, we fell asleep curled up with each other when her girlfriend walked in and spotted us. Being a somewhat reflective thinker though her partner just let us sleep and threw it ever so quietly in Ami's face the next morning over a whiskey on the rocks, making her feel terrible and very guilty, deservedly so.
Still, even after all this Ami would call me, email me, and send me random messages at work about getting together again to hang out. I realized after the close encounter where I could have had my manhood chopped off in my sleep though that we'd both be better off by calling it a day. I mean what were we thinking? We were both just products of bitterness, sadness and loneliness. She, crippled by a five year relationship she was no longer happy being in. Myself, crippled and overcome with such depression over the ending of an eight year relationship I was just forced out of. We were both using each other. Using each other because the touch and feel of another human being felt good, great even. We kept each other company. Kept each other from feeling loneliness and inevitably kept each other from facing the real problem. Ourselves. Instead of facing the problem head on we ran away from our problems with each other, drowned our miseries in drink, tried finding pleasure through physical attraction, trying with all our might to kill the pain that was in both our hearts.
We tried selfishly and we failed. A life's lesson indeed. I played with her heart and she played with her partner's heart, which may be the cruelest thing you can do to another human being. The human heart is flooded with emotions and tends to break rather easily. So why really toy with somebody else's heart when you know how much pain it may cause? Human nature? I don't have the answer to that question.
Still, there are some nights over coffee or drink where I'll peer off into the distance and wonder how Ami's doing or what Ami's doing. She has since quit the job she had working with me and it's been many months since we've seen each other or spoken. I realize we're better off not contacting each other, so I just let my mind wander and drift over the many possibilities of what she could be up to. I'd be a liar though if I said I didn't miss that smile and the way she'd stare at me with glassy eyes through the cigarette smoke in the bar.