"What's your addiction?"

He looks around to make sure I'm talking to him, even though he knows perfectly well that the self-help section, not to mention the entire bookstore, is utterly desolate, seeing as it's eleven at night and people are far too busy indulging in their bad habits to seek any help in resolving them.

"What?"

Pause.

"Your addiction. Everyone's addicted to something. You smoke, you gamble, you drink, you cheat. You're addicted to sex, to money, to work. You shoplift. You abuse prescription drugs. You steal from the collection plate, the charity jars at checkout counters. You're addicted to pain. You commit grand theft."

His eyes are dark, a color somewhere between dark grey and captivating, the way a bit of sky should look after a funeral. He stares into me and for a frightening second I am sure he can read all of my secrets and feelings fluttering around on the underside of my eyelids.

"What about you?" he asks.

"I cheat," I answer. "In board games, in school sometimes, and mostly in relationships."

"I chew and smoke," he says. "I still smoke, heavily, even though both of my grandparents died of lung cancer."

"I make up things about my past to get sympathy from others," I respond. "I've found that once you have someone's sympathy, they will never turn you down for anything ever again. It's like they have to go out to dinner with you, because your twin brother was hit by a subway train."

Pause.

"I'm a virgin."

I raise an eyebrow.

The corners of his mouth turn up in a slight smile. "I'm also a pathological liar. I lost my virginity in the seventh grade." He turns back to the bookshelf and continues his search for the solution for his mystery problem.

"I fall in love far too easily," he says, after varying degrees of silence, and I know this is the truth. His voice is soft and acoustic, the way a song seems to be when you can identify with it so completely that you would swear it was written about you.

"Do you drink?" I ask.

"Too much, I'll admit." He laughs, a nervous little exhale. "You guessed it, didn't you? My addiction." Another nervous laugh, and then a pause. "I'm a sad, pathetic excuse of a man, dying alone with his cigarettes and gin." He looks up at me. "How did you guess it, then?"

I smile at him, and shrug. "I'm good at guessing the very things people spend their whole lives trying to hide." Taking a book from the shelf, I flip to the soft flesh of the inside cover and write my phone number in a left-handed scrawl.

A symphony in seven digits.

"This is the one you were looking for," I say, handing it to him. "The world is too beautiful to spend your lifetime soaking in  alcohol," I tell him, and smile, "but if you're going to anyway, you might as well let me join you."

The air outside is bitter and filled with the death of late autumn. The rain that falls is equally cold, an elegy, reluctant and heavy. I step into the decay of the city, and for a moment everything is silent except for the deafening sound of the rain as it hits the desolate streets. I have only walked a single block and already I can feel the chill in my bones, in the very core of wherever it is that my soul might reside, if I had one. I have a theory that I would be just as cold if I hasn't spent all that money on the coat that all the magazines said was in this season.

I am wearing the wind.

For a moment I'm anonymous. No one would ever notice if I died right here, among the rain and the trash and the pennies in the cracks of the sidewalks. No one would rush from the comfort of their apartments, from the warmth that festered in between the sheets and curves of lovers. No one would have time enough to save me.

This is almost a welcome thought.

The rain suffers a fleeting death and is momentarily resurrected.

The sound of footsteps on the slick, uneven sidewalk makes my heart slow.

"I..." he hesitates. "I have something to say to you, but I'm not quite sure what it is." Pause. "Or how to say it." When I turn to face him, he smiles slightly, a nervous, beautiful thing. "Hi," he says.

"Hi."

The silence that follows is deafening.

"Well, okay," he says. "I buy this book, right, and I'm walking to my car and I'm trying to put a schedule in order for when I go home, you know - brush my teeth, change my clothes, feed the dog,and so on when it occurs to me that I don't want to do any of it. I don't want to have to put my life together like a puzzle before I can live it. In fact, I...actually I prefer it when the puzzle falls straight to the floor and all of the pieces get jumbled and you think, wow, you know, it actually looks a lot better like that. I mean, you know it's supposed to be a kitten in a laundry basket and it's blurry and kind of messed up, but you can still tell what it's supposed to be. You still know how it all goes together."

I don't know what to say.

"And I get in my car and I realize what I really want to do, with all my heart, is to get infinitely trashed."

A car passes, bathing us in light.

"And I realized I don't need self-help books or support groups or hypnosis. I'm just like everyone else, except I have a special fondness for liquor." He takes a breath. "And I guess I was just wondering if that offer you made me in the bookstore was the real thing."

My heart is still silent and unmoving, like the impenetrable blackness that is closing in and stealing my breath. For an instant I forget that he has asked me a question, and I stand there, just looking at the shadow of him that the darkness allows me to see.

I long to hear him talk.

"Yeah," I say. I look at him. In the dark, his eyes are as much like shadows as they appear to be in surreal daylight. In what I percieve as bad moral judgment, I realize that I care for this complete stranger more than I have ever cared for any person. I wonder briefly if this makes me horrible.

The key fits in the lock, as I expect it to.

I treat him like a shadow, not changing my routine but simply expanding it to include another person. I take two glasses from the cabinet instead of one. I place two cushions in front of the bare bay window, where all the city lights filter in and mix with the sloppy colorless liquid, tinted blue in our glasses.

I take a breath and sit across from him, taking a good look while my vision remains unblurred. Hair falls into his eyes. He looks down into the glasses, and then up at me.

"A toast?" he asks.

"Over vodka?"

"I don't know."

I take my little round glass, full to the brim with perfection, and I hold it up to his. "To oblivion."

Our glasses meet with a reassuring clink. "To the indulgence of our socially inacceptable addictions," he adds.

Clink.

"To finding love," I say softly. "And to losing it."

"To the end of our dismal lives," he answers. "And to the equally dismal hope that there is nothing afterward."

There is something about the rain that makes drinking on a cold, wooden floor with a complete stranger in the bleak hours of the morning seem perfectly normal. The warmth of the liquor seems to course in our veins and in our exhaling breath, and most of the time we talk about the world and what we fear, and what we loathe and what we lust for, and other vague philosophies that only alcohol seems to bring out in the best of us.

Eventually, though, there is nothing left to do but sleep, and in the morning I wake up in my bed, alone. The midnight rain has since subsided, and a feeble light spills over the empty glasses and liquor bottles left strewn across the floor.

"I have to tell you something important." His voice is somewhat frantic, as if he is anticipating the end of the world or his own personal death.

"Did you sleep there last night?" I ask him, because he is laying on the floor.

"I think it's very necessary for you to know this."

"Because you could have slept next to me, or on the sofa, or at least taken a pillow and some blankets..."

"I mean, I haven't had a great deal of time to think about this, but I don't think it's something you have to really think about, it's more like something you know, something you feel or some sentimental thing like that."

"It can't have been very comfortable," I say nervously, because I know what he wants to say, and I'm not entirely sure I want to hear it.

"I think - I mean, I'm pretty sure I love you."

For a moment, I'm positive that time has stopped, that everything has stopped existing for this one second in time. "I don't even know your name," I answer slowly, because there isn't anything else to say. It was true - this perfect stranger had just confessed his love for me and the only thing I knew about him was his absolute lack of perfection.

"Do you really need to know someone's name to know what you're feeling?"

"Look," I say, exasperated. "It's not just a matter of not knowing your name. I mean, I don't know anything about you. I don't know you. You can't just come into my life for one night and tell me that you love me and then leave."

He smiles an awkward, sideways smile. "I have never met anyone like you." He lets out a little breath, a tiny laugh. "I have known you for one night and you are quite possibly the most amazing person I have ever met in my life."

I just look at him.

He returns the gaze for a few seconds, and sighs. "People come together," he says, rising, "and they fall apart."

Pause.

"Maybe...maybe we were just meant to meet each other like that. Can't you just have faith in that? Can't you just accept that something was meant to happen?"

I shake my head.

"Don't you believe that something like that can happen?"

"No," I say, feeling anger rise up into my chest. "No. I don't believe in fate and I don't believe in love at first sight and I don't believe in any of it, because I know that when you've decided you've had enough of me, when your love has run out, I'll be right back where I am after every guy that comes along promising love. Don't you get it? Love is never just love, anymore, it's...it's either great conversation but no chemistry or unbridled, uninhibited sex but no commitment, or he's with some other girl or he's hitting you and calling you a whore or else everything he tells you about love is a lie."

Breathe.

"Love is just a lie. Love is a story they tell you about so you don't get smart and kill yourself while you still have the chance. Love is a way for people to hang on, it's a God complex, it's something for you to hope for and pray for and it's just another wish to waste on your ever-growing mass of birthday candles. Love is a either a series of chemical reactions in the brain or it's an addiction or it's just something people made up in an effort to reason out their pointless, disappearing lives."

Breathe.

"And I can't do it anymore. I can't sit around waiting to be called and I can't soak in pity when you leave me someone else. I can't. I'm sorry. I can't."

He stands looking at me, poised halfway between the door and where I am on the bed. He just looks, and his eyes seem to search every inch of me before he speaks.

"So why did you give me your number?"

I open my mouth to answer, but I realize I haven't got one.

"Answer me. If this is your little theory on love then why did you ask me here to begin with?"

Breathe.

"Look, I'm sorry you've had bad experiences with love. I'm sorry it hasn't happened for you and I'm very, very sorry you've lost your faith in it so young." He comes toward me and sits on the edge of the bed, not quite looking at me but not looking away either. "But you can't just turn away every guy because of one or two bad experiences. You can't forget the world forever just because for a little while it felt like it forgot about you."

Now he looks at me and my cheeks are wet with tears that I rub away hastily. He inches closer. "You can't give up on something like love if you've never even had it to begin with."

Our eyes meet and our lips meet and for a minute, it feels like our thoughts meet. For a minute he knows everything about me that I refuse to admit to myself. He knows that I drink out of the milk carton and that I hate looking in the mirror and that I'm scared of being alone but I'm ten times more terrified of falling in love.

He gets up to leave and he says he hopes I'll answer the phone when he calls me again and that he hopes I'll give him a chance. "We all need a chance," he says.

The door closes softly and I am alone.

I don't want to admit it, but I miss him.