When you feel the silence get to be too much, you think back to third grade. The purple dress and being in the third row back. A lunch menu pinned up across the room with cardboard stars and hamburgers and hot dogs decorating. The faded colors reveal that they've been there longer than you've been alive.

A man with a bald head and black mustache, whose name you've since forgotten, tells you that, "Knowledge. It's your know ledge and the more you put on it the more you can achieve." He walks across the room from the teacher's oak desk to the closet door which hides your coat and gloves. He sniffles before he speaks and as far as your eyes can tell he speaks the truth.

You try to count the years since then on your fingers, but you run out of fingers and it's 2:37am so it doesn't seem to make sense to expend so much effort to figure it out. The silence crawls into the bright strip of light glowing under the door and out into the hallway. Your mind rushes with thoughts about every dark alley you've walked down in broad daylight and neon signs too blurry to read.

You pull the blankets up until your toes pop out. You feel the cold front rush along your ankles as you wait for your eyes to adjust and you begin to read a post: The easy way out. Post a photo, tell you what video games I play, that I'm goofy and safe. I could convince you with ideas that I love puppies and volunteer. Tell you that I'm shy and quiet and there's more depth to me than this post represents, but I can't seem to find the words to articulate it.

But I'm not looking for the easy way out. I don't want the nice girls to reply. The ones that are looking for love ever after and think their life should look like a Disney movie. There are no promises here, I'm only half of what happens tonight. If you're the type of woman who likes her secrets whispered back to her, even when she hasn't spoken. Likes to be undone and figured out and then excited by the fact that a man is pushing her in all the right ways until she aches for more, then maybe we can make tonight more than you thought it'd be.