riding in cars with boys

For most of my life my hobby was having a boyfriend. I had many, different shapes and names and ages, but they all could be a gray generic boyfriend fresh from the boyfriend factory. The purpose they served was not a romantic one, but a practical one - they gave me the opportunity to be a girlfriend, which I took up like a vocation. Not a title I put on a pedestal, but an identity I could assume. A part I could cast myself in. I wore girlfriend like camouflage or a mask to evade facial recognition technology. Observe me as a girlfriend doing his laundry, smiling serenely at his mother fawning over me, pressure washing his vomit off the back patio when he got too wasted on New Year's Eve. I would just show up and not leave because my boyfriend wanted me to stay. I was so good at sitting on the couch watching him play video games. I was good at being a passenger princess in his car when we'd make the 2am Taco Bell run.

Until I got bored or disgusted and it was time to move on to the next boyfriend. I think about an anecdote about Lana del Rey told by maybe her psychic, about how during some kind of spiritual exercise she said all her thoughts were in the shape of men. There always seemed to be a man. I could be on the most barren rocky deserted island and somehow there would still be a man. I kept them two or three deep until one told me they slept better with me next to them. And all this time later, worn down by the psychic erosion of marriage and divorce, I look back and wonder if I even liked men to begin with. It was something to do. It was better than being at my house and looking at the green carpet of my bedroom and listening to the rustle of the air conditioner and thinking about killing myself. 

Let me be clear, I wasn't a party girl or a vixen or even particularly hot. I just made myself available and mostly agreeable, which made up for what I lacked in beauty. The only part of my hobby I regret is that I could have used all the time I took caring of boyfriends when they were hung over or angry or horny to do something enriching like educating myself or traveling. I was neutralizing the fire in my brain by being a girlfriend. It made me feel less like a ghost and more like an anthropologist. 

One short-term boyfriend lived in a trailer with the walls painted black and cigarette burns on the couch. His breath was hot on my neck when he talked about our future Christmases, future anniversaries. I took him to the urgent care when he had pneumonia and the doctor said "Don't go kissing on your bride when you're sick, son." After I stopped seeing him, his roommate tried to hit me up. I don't remember either of their names. Sorry, boyfriend. You were one in a long line of the thousand ways I erased myself, longing to be as blank like untouched snow.