Dolores on the Dotted Line

The bartender sat a swan glass full of peach schnapps in front of me and called me Lolita, though he had never read the book before. He knew enough to know I was one, he said. He knew enough to know that I knew nothing at all. With 23 years, jet black hair and a few broken hearts to my name he said I knew nothing at all. He said not to call anything intense unless it had to do with sex because nothing else should ever be that intense, unless it was fucking.

I sat with my friends beside me and pushed dried up tears into the deserts in my tear ducts and let men buy us shot after shot, knowing that as drunk as my body got, my brain would never follow. I'm not even crying over you anymore is the hard part; I'm crying for my horizon and how long it will take the sun to set. I'm crying for a San Francisco apartment with exposed brick and piano keys. I'm crying for a seemingly endless fall and a chance at a warm December.

I'm crying over losing my Lolita and wanting her gone.

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deviation in the fates

"I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen."

-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

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