Last saturday night I watched the band, not noticing HORSEGIRL over there with the new hunk, the guy she dumped me for. She is beautiful, he is beautiful: and thus, they can carelessly ride whomever they like, as if driving a graduation car their parents paid for, and if they fuck it up some other beautiful man or woman will replace their old one, next day service, if need be. Guys like me have no insurance: if we are left alone, chances are the next train won't be along for months, years. Aren't I aloud to be upset and bitter? I hope so, because I had a lousy time Saturday night with them around. I just can't be cool about it. Even though I never expected our relationship to last.

An air of pre-determined temporality pervades all instance of my own romantic happiness. The temporality I feel when happy with a woman, is not bitter. I retain hearts and heartsfull of romantic idealism no matter how many girlfriends dump me for someone dumber but cuter. The sense of temporality doesn't impede my romantic momentum: I still throw myself in with abandon, as if I'm visiting some cool place I never thought I'd get to explore. Some backstage. And I live it with whatever greatness I can before I'm inevitably told to leave.

That's the vague version of my perfect analogy. Here's the long version:

One summer afternoon, years ago, around 3 p.m., A GIRL I ONCE DATED and I drove from Tampa to Disney World, Orlando. in the decaying twilight of our relationship. It was dying but we huddled around it, trying to resuscitate it. If at any time in our union we agreed, it was during that twilight, when we both wished more than anything, that we could bring it back.

So we went to Disney World. But not to ride the rides: broke-ass college students can't afford the Disney ticket. Instead, we rode the park monorail from one Disney-themed resort hotel to the next. We experienced the trappings of each. We swam in the Western-themed pools. Dried off with free Dixieland towels. Lounged in the baseball-gloved-shaped couch in the Baseballand Hotel, in our wet swimsuits, watching cable (a luxury) on a big fat-ass Disney TV.

Around 9 p.m., we got off the Tylenol-shaped monorail and aimed ourselves toward the rock-n-roll-themed hotel and headed straight for the rock-n-roll hot tub, overlooking a guitar shaped pool, that lit up white-blue like a diamond. The dark silhouettes of palms divided the pool area from a manmade body of water. Beautiful and amazing Florida in one of its questionable incarnations.

I had been a fuck to her in our time together. Horrible, nasty little kid. By the time I snapped to my senses and began to appreciate her and treat her right, I had killed the faith she had in me. I can make excuses now, but I won't.

Her loss of faith resulted in a loss of physically attraction toward me. Our bond was gone. No sex. But she really wished it weren't that way. She convinced me of that in speeches and hugs and nights in bed when she wouldn't have slept better in the arms of any other man. But she had no desire to touch. And it was emasculating.

Far past our relationship's expiration date, I was still, completely, physically attracted to her. She was a traditionally beautiful woman. She had only seen past my visual unimpressiveness because she loved me. Big contrast. I knew that within minutes of our eventual breakup, she would find someone new, or someone would find her. My friends were already lined up. But I knew that I would spend months, or years searching for someone to fill the void she was about to leave.

In those months before our break-up, when she no longer wanted to sleep with me, I felt like a toad. I felt like the kind of sexually pathetic guy who leaves his socks and watch on during sex. I felt uncomfortable taking off my shirt around her because I knew it could only further deteriorate her already feeble sexual appreciation of me. I suffered. I learned. I say again, emasculating.

We changed into our bathing suits in separate restrooms on the edge of the guitar-shaped pool. When I had taken off my jeans and T-shirt and was down to my birthday suit, I put my ear to the concrete separating our restrooms, and tried to listen to her change into her bathing suit. Through the wall I tried to hear the beauty in there. Clothing falling softly to the floor. Something.

I'm making this all sound very maudlin. But it was not. We were ripping up the free shit like friends. We were at Disney World with an unspoken hope to re-conjure the shit. 'The shit' being, 'our love'. I was happy and hopeful as I leaned my ear and the side of my naked white ass into the mauve concrete bathroom Disney-wall.

The palms whipping in the wind outside obscured any soft sound from her side of the wall. So, I took my ear away and peeped out my bathroom door. The guitar-shaped, diamond pool was totally uninhabited, so in a rush of love, hope and stupidity, I broke naked through two feet of night, sliding into the LADIES' ROOM. We stood together in the damp, 4 X 4 foot, concrete changing room. Naked together for the first time in bitter months.

"What are you doing?" she smiled like a schoolteacher who wished she loved me.

"I dunno, what are you doing?"

(she laughed breathless but unsensualy)"I'm changing."

"Oh." I feel redundant and dumb telling women their beautiful. So, I said, "I just figured I'd change in here with you."

We stood there naked in the cramped bathroom looking at each other's faces. Pedestrian. To break it up, she hugged me for a second. Then broke and began putting on her bathing suit. I touched her hip and tried hard to catch her gaze. She laughed as if it tickled, as if she'd rather not.

She strapped on her string bikini, I slipped up my green, nylon shorts and we stepped out onto the cool poolside painted-concrete. Two 16-year-old boys, who had commandeered the rock-n-roll hot tub while we'd been changing, saw us come out of the bathroom together.

The glow from the pool was celestial. I remembered the movie COCOON, when old fuckers got the power to never get older. Staring into the bright water, I thought to make a joke to her about jumping into the guitar-shaped pool and never falling out of love again. But refrained.

We walked over and wordlessly slipped into the hot tub with the two teenage boys: jock type guys with muscular, beautiful, young bodies.

Her in a string bikini still drove me nuts. 'I will never again be with a woman this beautiful.' Bubbling, rock-n-roll water: and me and her in absolute Plutonomy.

It hurt to be so overwhelmingly attracted to her, and look down through the hot white refracted water, to my flaccid skin and wish I were better: physically irresistible, like her.

We lolled around in the hot tub, spitting water at each other, the boys' presence impeding our conversation. At one point, MY EX embraced me (maybe I pulled her to me) and as her face nuzzled into my wet shoulder, instead of enjoying the embrace, I looked over her shoulder and caught the two boys checking her body over, her back, her ass, her shoulders, up and down. At that time, they had a better chance of bedding her.

We eventually got out of the hot tub and cut through the poolside thicket of palms. Thin slivers of diamond light from the pool peaked through the palms like ghosts onto the fake Disney-beach. There was no one else around. The towel around her 98 pound frame whipped gently, 10 feet in front of me, tucked under her armpits, coming down to the tops of her delicate thin legs.

We smoked a joint while wading, ankle deep, through an abandoned Beach-Cricket course. Very animated little Disney thing. I concentrated on the whipping of her towel.

She stopped, reached under her towel and somehow took off her wet bikini top without showing off a thing. She heard me sigh. She wrung out her top into the synthetic Disney-sand. With her wet bikini balled in her hand, she walked to a palm tree, turned around convincingly, leaned back and smiled. "Michael." She said in a soft voice like forgiveness, opening her towel like a gentle flasher or flower, exposing herself, bare-beautiful. She tried. I thanked her. I had earlier put my shirt back on, but still felt damp and inadequate walking to her. I pressed her against the palm tree and she let me put my mouth to hers. It felt sad. It felt wonderful. It was last the instance of mutual love in my life. And I had my damn shirt on.

After our kiss, we tightened our perfectly white, complimentary towels around us, and set out to explore Disney's Hotel Rock-N-Roll Hard Rockin' Hotel. That was exactly what it was called. We began on the first floor: exclusively Disney-themed activities, board meetings, dining halls, BINGO. Guests slept on the upper floors.

Disney run the air-conditioning like a motherfucker to accommodate tourists who've never been so hot in their pasty-white lives. In the Florida summer, you'll freeze your ass off in gas stations, oil-change-places, sandwich shops, banks. It gives the natives Summer-seasonal flus and cold shakes. But nowhere is colder than Disney World. My girl shivered like a mouse in her towel, in the frigid, rock-n-roll hallways.

Those walking the hotel halls, outfitted for evening activities, gave us looks for dripping chlorine water on their thin, extravagant carpeting. We ran around that hotel not-giving-a-fuck like we had trapped the mouse. Like Uncle Walt's head was upstairs chilling in our beverage fridge on the 1000th floor Penthouse Presidential Suite. We ran, stoned, dripping in laughter, down pastel corridors.

We slid to a wet footed emergency stop as a set of opening double doors opened quickly in front of us. A man of 35, in a casual suit, came through the doors, tossing us a derogatory glance and continued down the hall. As the double doors crept slowly closed like some giant stone wall in an Indiana Jones Movie, we craned over and peered in.

Inside, 100's more well dressed men and women stood around laughing and gesticulating. The crowd was mostly gray. Women dressed like elegant wedding cakes, and the men dressed in suits. In the vast, darkly lit room, a band played crappy, smooth jazz to the right wall as suits and dresses lined up for free booze at a bar across the room. The middle was a 6-foot island, littered with 100s of extravagant desserts.

The double doors shut slowly on the glory.

"Did you see those?!" She exclaimed more than asked.

Woman and dessert.

Drops of water shook from her dark-brown hair as she shivered and bounced up and down on the balls of her feet. "Let's go!"

It seemed implausible. 10 feet into the room with wet hair and towels, it seemed the smooth-jazz might halt, free drinks pausing on their way to Disney-business-lips, all eyes turning to ask us in unison, 'um?'

We decided: run in, grab a dessert, run out.

We re-opened the double doors quietly. The glory inside was loud. The band played Jimmy Buffet, as all Florida cover-bands eventually do. 10 feet in, no one seemed to mind us.

We reached the island of desserts. And partook. Big, authoritative, silver forks with dependable fingers. Icy glass plates. A palm tree made of ice sprung from the middle of the two-car-length table. Three levels of baby-head-sized deserts. Whipped and Iced creams and elegant, dripping, contained chocolate chaos. As we explored the island, she tapped a finger to the crisp, sand-colored tablecloth underneath the plates, "Dessert Island Beach they call that. Prime real estate." She said. I thought that very funny and clever.

When we'd each picked out some hellish Tiarimisu, blown up like a pufferfish on a chilled-glass plate, we walked to the bar, wondering if the liquor was free. The suits stood around talking, celebrating something boring. I bothered a man as he walked past us to the bar. "Is the bar free?" He told us the bar was free. He didn't blink at our damp towels drying, the prune-lines in our bare feet and fingers working themselves flat again. Red, chlorinated, rock-n-roll eyes.

We walked over and stood in front of the smooth-jazz band amidst some dancing old people and drank our Jack and cokes and dug confidently into our desserts with huge metal forks and we laughed and booed the band and little laugh tears came. But we knew it would be over. We ate and drank it all, looking around over each wet shoulder from time to time waiting for some old security guard to escort our raggedy asses out. Two Jack and Cokes and a piece of lemon meringue pie later (we split the pie) we left on our own. And it ended and it was over and it was wonderful.

I remembered that trip to Disney this weekend, as I sat in the boring club, half-assedly watching the bands, HORSEGIRL's aura attacking me from across the room, my bitterness attacking me from the inside.

Twice a year, at best, I'll have a fun, temporary girlfriend. When I do, I feel like I'm walking around in a soaking wet towel, attracting attention, eating desserts I don't deserve, with a huge, chocolate smeared smile on my face. I try and eat too much iced-cream-cake before it turns into a soupy mess or is taken from me.

And when the damn iced-cream-cake is gone, I'm satisfied. I don't get mad because it's gone.

But seeing HORSEGIRL out at my favorite hangs makes me ill. No matter how much my heart says "forgive," my body rejects her. She is the cake and the security guard who took it away. I know the security guard only does what they think is right. But if I see the security guard out at New World Brewery, the first thing I think of, is how he took away my dessert. And whether or not I want or need another, he still seems like a dick.