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Maya, continued.

I talked to Maya, again, on the phone, three years later. It had been the first time that I had spoken with her since I think shortly after my break-up with Cassie.

In her first semester of University, she had dated a drug dealer. This led to her first experience with psychedelics, embodied in the Mexican Sacred Mushroom.

Shortly thereafter, she became suicidal.

'Maya, we love you!'

She was doing better now, however. She had decided to take a semester off from college. I envied her for her freedom. She told me that she did not understand my enthusiasm for things with a kind of delighted but fundamentally Confused tone.

She was working for a magazine, and her job, something to the effect of a secretary, as I surmised a year later, entailed that she wear high heels.

I later talked to her through a webcam. Aroused by her femininity, a passion fueled by nostalgia but funnelled and side-tracked like chimney-smoke by the degree to which she began to remind me of her mother, I adequately lost face with her.

Several days later, when I sent her a message online, she wrote me this: 'Phoenix, I am homeless. I just had my first experience at a shelter.'

I replied: 'Cool! How is your experience? Several of my friends are homeless, and I've hung out with them.'

Her response was to block me from her users. Her justification was that I did not respect her.

It would be about a year before we would speak to one another again.

Maya was a free thinker now. My contact with her had been limited to a few photographs of a chance meeting with Vivik and friends on their way to a convention of sorts in Colorado. Her hair was long and her eyes were closed, a wicked but innocent grin standing in contrast to Vivik and the tempered smile of Franklin.

Finally, she added me again. She was intrigued by things that I was posting and saying online.

She had a blog again.

Unable to find it in retrospect, I decided to Google her name.

Approximately half the results on the first page were slander reports.

They were all written by a coworker from the magazine company. They began with, 'It is appropriate that Maya _. ___-_______ listed her age as eighteen, for it adequately describes the childish nature of her behaviour...', continued for four paragraphs, and described, with commendable imagination, a scene of Maya using 'language inappropriate to the workplace' to accuse a respectable employee/er of a damage to a company item for which she herself was responsible, and then storming out in two-inch heels.

She gave me her phone number. I called her.

We spoke again, this time longer.

I told her about the slander gossip. 'What?' she said with a groggy tone of surprise.

'Yeah, I'm on your side, though,' I assured her.

She took time to justify my trust.

'The guy who hired me was a pervert.'

'Oh, really? How so?'

'I don't know. He wanted me to be his--' and she half-giggled self-consciously-- 'secretary or something.'

That aside, she was fine. She was about to move into her own apartment.

'Oh, that sounds awesome,' with envy.

'No, it's not. Because I can't have sex.'

She went on to tell me, for about fourteen minutes, about a mistake she had made whilst trying to use a corrosive chemical for the first time. Not knowing it was corrosive, she spilled some on her left calf.

The doctor told her that it would clear away after a few months. Her embarassment at the fact would last that long.

'I think that women can have sex whenever they want,' she told me.

Within a few weeks, she blocked me again. I had posted my most Shakespearean poem and Greatest Poetic Accomplishment on facebook. It was a testament to my frustration with the death of chivalry, the subjugation of abstinence, and Miranda's friends. I had tagged Maya in it.

This time, the verdict was new: 'I don't like you and don't want to talk to you. Stop adding me.'