Doomed

^{DECEMBER 21, 10:31 A.M. PST} A Match Made in Heaven

Gentle Tweeter,

Years before, once I’d been retrieved from my nana’s tedious upstate funeral and returned to my natural habitat of Lincoln Town Cars and leased jets, I resumed my campaign of inventing salacious diary entries.

“Dear Diary,” I wrote, “what I once felt for musky moose pee-pees I find was merely a fascination. What initially drew me to a leopard’s velvety hoo-hoo was not love….”

Here, my parents would be forced to turn a page, pulse-poundingly anxious for my next self-revelation. Their every breath bated, they’d read on, desperate for assurance that I’d abandoned my ardor for lemming wing-wangs.

“Dear Diary,” I wrote, “living upstate, among simple, weathered folk, I’ve discovered a single lover who has eclipsed all my previous animal paramours….” Here I altered my handwriting, making it crabbed and jagged to heighten the tension of reading my thoughts. My pen shook as if I were overwhelmed with strong emotion.

My busybody mom and dad would squint. They’d debate every illegible word.

“Dear Diary,” I continued, “I’ve formed an alliance more fulfilling than anything I’d ever dreamed possible. There, in that rudely constructed upstate house of worship…”

My parents had been at my Nana Minnie’s funeral. Both my parents had seen me comforted by the towheaded David Copperfield with his face like fresh-baked bread and his hair like butter, that countrified swain who’d pressed a Bible book into my hands and bade me find strength therein. Now, as they read my diary, most likely they imagined that I was enacting some tantric upstate Kama Sutra with that earnest blond prefarmer.

“Dear Diary,” I wrote, stringing my parents along, “never have I imagined this level of satisfaction….”

I wrote, “Until now my eleven-year-old heart has never truly loved another….”

My mother would be reading aloud by now. In the same elegant voice with which she did voice-overs for Bain de Soleil television commercials, she’d say, “I have at last found happiness.”

Both my parents would leer at the pages as if they were a sacred text. As if this, my humble fake diary, were the Tibetan Book of the Dead or The Celestine Prophecy: something lofty and profound from their own lives. My mother, in her stage-trained, Xanax-relaxed voice, would read aloud, “‘… from this day forward I commit my eternal love to…’” and her voice would falter. To them, what followed was worse than the image of me suckling at any panther woo-woo or grizzly bear nipple. Here was a horror more confronting than the idea of their precious daughter wedding a staunch Republican.

Seeing my words, she and my dad could only stare in disbelief.

“‘I commit my eternal love,’” my dad would continue, “‘to my supreme lord and master…’”

“Lord and master,” my mom repeats.

“‘Jesus,’” reads my dad.

My mom says, “Jesus Christ.”