Entropy is a measure of chaos.

Last year I went to a party.  My friend and I scoped the party for the cutest guy, and the boy we rated cutest came up to me that night.  He's at Drexel now and majors in chemical engineering.  

He said, "Tell me you have a boyfriend?  You're really cute."  

I told him that I didn't.  

He asked me why not, and I said, "...because I am crazy.  Do you have a girlfriend?"  

He tells me, "I'm an asshole... there's a girl who wants to be my girl, but she's not my girl."  

I say, "I'm an asshole too."  

He says, "I don't think so.  You're sweet...  I see you at this party, and I think to myself, this girl... this girl wants one guy to fall in love with and get married and get old with and have a bunch of kids with."  

I say, "How do you know that?"  

He says, "You're that girl, I can tell... I wish I had met you before I stopped believing in girls."

I say, "Do you go here?  What do you major in?"

He says, "Yeah.  Engineering.  You?"

I say, "Art... I am a painter."

He says, "Ha, I used to paint and draw... Then I realized one day I would need to provide for my family."

"Okay, but I'm going to make money."

"Art is patience.  Science is determination."

"Do you live on campus?"

"No.  I live at my parents."

"Do you get along with them?"

"Yeah.  Family is important.  Family is everything."

I touch his necklace.  It's a crucifix.  he jerks away.  "Are you religious?"

"I'm Catholic."

"Really?  I was raised Catholic."

He quotes a bible verse.

"You're strange.  I don't know anymore."

He shrugs, "Faith."

"What are you wearing?"

"Ah-ha, I was playing basketball earlier."

He buys me a drink at the bar, vodka and cranberry.  I give it to my friend who is thirsty when he's not looking.  A girl stops us to give him a hug.

"Who's the girl?"  I ask.

"That's my ex-girlfriend," he says.

"She's kind of hot," I comment.  "...My ex is also here."  I must be drunk now.

He shrugs.  "You know.  I wish I had met you earlier.  You're the kind of girl I could fall in love with."

We're sitting on a couch, and I ask him, "What was your first time like?"

He tells me it was a friend and he was a teenager and they don't talk anymore.

He's on his phone.

"Who is that?"

"It's a girl who thinks she's my girl."

We sit on a dirty couch in the back of an even dirty living room, and talk about even more things that I can't remember.

"I'm not going to kiss you," he says.  "I have your number.  You can go back to your friends.  I'll see you later.  I'm not trying to waste your time.

We talk for awhile, again about things I can't remember.  He kisses me on the cheek.

There is a half of a moment where I think to myself, he's wrong about me, and I am just a college girl who is at a party to have fun.

"It was nice meeting you..."  I get up and go to my friends.

Sometime later when the party is dying down my friend almost fights him.  I can't really remember but it was probably about me.

When I added him on Facebook a few days later, I saw that his girlfriend was very pretty and she thought she was in love with him.  All her profile pictures were the two of them and her info has the date that they started their relationship with "<3"s everywhere.  She must've wrote, "I love you, baby!" and "I miss you, baby!" Half a dozen times in the past month on his wall, and he replied with the same sort of cutesy nonsense.  It was odd thinking that he picked me to try to cheat on her with.  It was odd thinking he could go to a party and tell another girl that his girlfriend wasn't his girl.  I thought to myself that I could destroy her world with a simple Facebook message, but I never sent it.  I rationalized it, by thinking who hasn't been "the other girl" at some point?

He texted me today over a year later that he was on Temple's campus and someone mentioned Tyler, and that made him think of me.  What a crazy world...  What a crazy unapologetic world.

Entropy:  Betta Fish Streaming.  Acrylic on canvas.  16x20 inches.  2007.  Uban.

I made this in high school.  I was seventeen.  I was still invincible.  I was certain I was the shit.  I was still certain there was a god.  There is the bracelet from the hospital when they tried to kick me out of school.  There are the barrettes I used to wear when I cut my hair short and felt insecure.  There is the tie that a boy let me have.  There is the watch my grandma bought me for my birthday that I wore everyday until the strap broke.  There are the slips of paper that got me out of class because before I was sad all the time that I wanted to be perfect and before I realized I'd never be but neither would anyone else.  There is the fish that I failed in the sixth grade and my brother had to throw out.  There are the cranes I used to fold until I had a jar with a thousand of them.  There is the strand of fake pearls I used to wear before I got real ones.  There is the statue of St. Joseph, the saint my parents pray to every day that one day their kids will marry well.  There is the tape dispenser that I always remember my mother having in her desk.  The heart that I remember painting and re-painting.  My parents told me this painting was me exactly... because it was a mess.