you could fall in love

on heaven’s gate, aol chat rooms, misappropriation, getting divorced instead of dying, and roadkill

You can make yourself fall in love with anything. There are people who keep spiders as pets and creatures like rats enjoy special warmth from their keepers. Maybe that’s why I sometimes cry when I see roadkill. A raccoon on the shoulder, stiff on its side, tweaks my heart in the same way an ugly boy who I imagine would worship me can. 

Suddenly I’m fantasizing about a life with him, sure I would be able to make him love me. That’s the easy part, my ability to manipulate a man into submission. And even though this part of me can be grotesque, some people love snakes, and he is just a boy.

So, it’s a really good thing that I was only a child when Marshall Applewhite convinced a bunch of people that the comet was the gate to heaven. Because there have been many times that I’ve thought: I literally am going to have to die to get out of here.

The worst time, I cradled a bottle of my ex-husband’s pills, thinking there would be no end unless one of us died. I lay on the bathroom floor where I could see the dust and hair piling up. Here was evidence that I was always leaving little parts of me behind without even knowing it. Disappearing into a cult would have seemed easier than simply getting divorced.

I was only 11 in 1997 when they found them dead in their huge rented mansion in San Diego, wearing crisp Nike Decades, and it’s a good thing because I love cool shoes and kool-aid. I think I would like to live in The Monastery, too. And because Hale-Bopp was in Sagittarius, and that makes sense to me, I, too, would probably Just Do It.

When you go to www.heavensgate.com, their Red Alert notice still, almost 30 years later, flashes indicating that the great comet of 1997 marked the arrival of a spacecraft that would carry them to Heaven’s Gate. I wonder how many of my crudely-coded GeoCities are still live. 

When I was a kid, the mascot of my elementary school was a comet. The Harrison Hill Comets. Eventually, we rebranded to become The Hawks, and I wonder if Heaven’s Gate had something to do with it.

When I was in the sixth grade, I made a burner account on AOL to catfish people I supposed were men in chat rooms. I always claimed to be 17/f/FL and when people would say, “IM me,” I would respond, “I’m me, too.” Nobody had pictures online then. You had to have a scanner, and if you received a picture, downloading it could take all night and had the potential to infect your computer with a deadly virus.

I love the way the word “and” means that two things can be true at once. There’s that which you believe is true because it is your experience and there’s the fact that any alternate realities can also be true.

Some people take the Bible so literally, believing wholeheartedly, and never doubting that it is a word-by-word account of actual events and circumstances. As if people had never played a game of telephone. As if scribes had never existed, painstakingly chiseling words into stone. As if people don’t make mistakes, misspell words, misinterpret a story. 

More than once, I used this account to arrange a meet-up with these supposed men from the internet. My mistake back then was misinterpretation. It didn’t occur to me that they may not be real, or that the mall wasn’t actually a safe place. I believed that I was smart, and that most men were like my father—safe, kind, and gentle. I hadn’t yet learned that many of them are bad, ill-intentioned. I published mortifying letters to them on a live journal that still exists out in the ether, a disgraceful record of my misdeeds available for witnessing, just like the memorial of Heaven’s Gate.

I don’t think they were wrong to believe that the body is a vehicle you can use to advance yourself to “higher planes.” Hopefully, my belief would have stopped there. Hopefully, my acceptance of their theories would have been arrested by the fact that they called themselves Ti and Do. I would have seen the comet as significant, but I wouldn’t have implicitly believed Art Bell when he reported that there was a spacecraft following it.

The first known victim of internet luring thought she was meeting a girlfriend she’d been talking to online for over a year. The girlfriend turned out to be a 38-year-old man who coerced her into his car. He then drove her across state lines back to his home where he shackled and raped her, holding her captive for four days. 

It was 2002, and this girl was two years younger than me. The same year, I attempted to arrange with a hockey player named “Shawn” to meet me at the mall. I was devastated when he didn’t show up but he was just one in a string of many men who somehow, blessedly did not abduct me.

You could clear your cache, delete cookies, even change your account. You could simply not show up when you said you were going to meet someone. You could have your mom call Hunter’s mom when he sends you something that installs a virus on your computer. You can’t un-swallow phenobarbital, though.

Smile, you’re on camera. Fall into the gap. The song of a generation: meet me at Barney’s Coffee at Castleton Square Mall at 3:30.