Everyone has a sad story. Mine features Carla. Well, one of them does. This one. I met Carla when I moved to New York, back in 1979, when the streets were still jagged like broken glass and the orange-blue-green-purple-puke neon lights never quite managed to light up at the same time. Even back then, before I knew the city, I knew it was keeping something from me. I walked into Petterman's Books one night, bored and dejected, while shuffling around the Upper East Side like I had something important on my mind, and headed towards the Eastern philosophy section. My ritual when entering any bookstore was always to find the latest Alan Watts or Ram Dass treatise, or their equivalent, in this section and ponder the meaningless words and pretend they weren't the insane ramblings of bizarre fanatics.

"You need any help finding anything?" a voice arose from the edge of my hearing and threatened to crumble the facade I had constructed like any number of underworked actors in this city.

"Uhh. No I'm good, thanks," I replied with a quick glance and in a tone that sounded more irritated than I was. Whoops. I got a glimpse of her, the employee who asked. She was short, a little disheveled and thinner than a box of matches. But I could tell from her tattoos and sharp blue eyes and lips that always seemed parted with some undelivered remark that she could catch fire about as easily.

"Okay, well, let me know if you have any questions," she answered quickly, hoping I wouldn't. She spiraled away in a theatric spiral before I could answer.

I glanced around. I hadn't been to Petterman's before. The lighting was low and orange, almost like some dank bar at two in the afternoon but even less noisy if you could believe it. The dusty smell of used books filled my nostrils and that transported me like it always did to my grandparents' attic, when I was six and liked to dig through old treasure chests of their expired memories.

The girl was watching me shift around her store like a blind burglar trying to make it out of a house. Nobody else was in here so I decided to say hi. I'd had a lonely night, a lonely week - jeez who am I kidding, a lonely month - and this was how you fixed that. At least, that's how I imagined you did. I was never very good at connecting but I never stopped trying. How do you move forward if you don't move forward?

"Hi."

"Yeah." From behind her clerk's counter she seemed unapproachable, non-real, non-human. Just a vague symbol of authority.

"How's it --?" My throat chopped the second half of my sentence into a swallowed pool of silence.

"You lookin' for somethin' after all or." Or are you just hitting on me, her drawling OR suggested. At least that's how I interpreted it. I can't read these things. People, I mean. Women. Can't read them. Why don't they ever make it EASY.

"Uh. No."

"K." She turned away and lit a Camel with a practiced casual flick.

"What's your name?" Ah jeez I committed now. Oh well, whatever.

"Bored," she replied around her cigarette.

I laughed like an idiot in an idiot's school for idiots on Idiot's Day. "Coincidence. Nice to meet another Bored. That's my name."

She stared at me with an unreadable expression for two seconds which felt like two minutes. Then her lip twisted and she said, "That was the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

"Yeah." I was starting to feel hot. Uncomfortable. I was very aware of my shirt and its effect on my body temperature. 

"I'm Carla."

"Okay. Nice." I grinned and nodded like a bobbing piece of garbage in a sewer pipe. "Okay. I'm going to go now." Hard to breathe. Just get out. I made my way towards the exit, vision tunneling down into myself like I had just smoked the world's strongest marijuana. Carla was quiet as I pushed the door open and went back outside, towards the safety of the cracked, unmaintained New York sidewalk. I walked past a huddled man asking for change. My shoulders were back, my head up. This body language projected confidence.