I'm All Out of F*cks

a song for the ages — by which I mean any age.

When I was a child of twenty-two, I met a man at a bar.

He was several years older and had recently moved to New York from Paris. He had swoopy hair and chiseled features and a wardrobe so scarf-heavy it bordered on cliché. This was a breath of fresh air after four years of college, where the shape of “romantic” encounters often centered around 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor and a reluctance to exchange phone numbers.

It was idyllic, if not ideal. (Were his frequent blunt observations — on everything from American culture to aesthetics to “women pee like cows, everything splashing down everywhere” — the result of a language barrier, or a lack of sensitivity? The world may never know.)

We dated for several years. In another dimension, I might have wound up with this man, but as a child of twenty-two, I wisely intuited that I had a great deal of life to figure out before I would be capable of such a thing. And so, this chapter became the stuff of memories — of youth, Paris, and something his mother once said to me.

*

For his thirtieth birthday, I orchestrated a surprise party. His family flew in for the occasion. The morning of the soiree, his mom and I perched at my coffee table, inflating balloons and stringing letters into a homemade “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” banner. That’s when she said it.

“Thirty-year-old men are the best.”