I sat down, settled in.

Laptop, booted up. Client, blank and ready to go. Time to put my little fingers through the dexterity test; putting whatever thoughts that I may have in my mind down on the proverbial page.

But something stopped me. Someone stopped me.

I saw her earlier, Renee, as I later learned her name, stands at the door, sucking down her sweet milk boba tea. She looks over at me, staring.

I made the mistake of looking up, making eye contact. That was all the invitation that she needed.

I got no work done. No words typed. No letters. It was blank. Blank.

Renee is a fairly petite Asian girl, who can shed just a few pounds, not much more needed. Some may see that she’s not too bad looking; cute maybe.

She says that she’s 24 and I gave her the benefit of the doubt until she spun her little tale on me later and now I’m not sure how old she is. Maybe she told me that after she gauged how old I was and adjusted her age accordingly, hoping that 24 would be the right age for me to pay any attention to her. Too old and I might not give a damn, and too young, for sure I wouldn’t give a damn.

There she was, talking to me, out of the blue.

“What are you doing here so early?”

“Just working, chilling. You?”

“Patrolling.” she said.

Patrolling. That’s a weird response. My spider senses are going off warning me about the psycho that I eventually know her to be, a broken and damaged girl of ungaugable mental stability.

One thing lead to another as we traded our small talk and niceties, and there was a staring contest. Awkward, as she stopped talking and just stared at me, not breaking eye contact. I stared back, which ’caused giggle fits from her.

As she sits down, she looks over everyone that walks by or walks into the teahouse. EVERYONE. Up and down. Down and up, throughout the whole two hours we were there talking or her talking and me listening.

She sizes them up, thinking if she can take them if push came to shove.

Troubled.

Paranoid as she goes on and on about things that I have no idea what she’s talking about. “There are many eyes in the trees. They’re watching us.” She said.

“Really? Up in the trees? Sure. We should be careful,” I traded back.

Eventually, somehow the conversation came to a point where she was offering to climb the tree.

I almost kind of dared her to. I actually did dare her to. She couldn’t leave that challenge down, and so she went.

It was then and there that I knew for sure that this poor girl is either fucking out of her crazy fucking mind or she’s high on something and it seems good. I don’t do drugs but at that moment, I kind of wanted what she was having. Just a little.

As she perched on the small wall, like a Bird of Prey or even a Dark Angel, watching the traffic, watching the surroundings, “patrolling”, I laugh at myself, thinking, “Only this kind of shit can happen to me. My first real interaction with someone in this brand new year, it is with this fucking crazy girl, who is literally climbing a tree.”

My luck.

Soon she came back, finishing surveying the area, finishing showing off, finishing winning that “challenge”.

She sat down next to me and continued the roundabout conversation that I couldn’t keep up with. I honestly had no idea what she was talking about.

The words that are coming out of her paranoid fractured drug enhanced mind are on a frequency that I have no way of tuning to. I was lost, but I nodded on, encouraging her to continue as we go about our little playful banter.

Why not?

There were times when I thought, she’s not bad looking, not so bad at all. If only she wasn’t crazy. Fuck, even if she was crazy, maybe a kiss or a fuck if I can steer it to that.

Maybe with my age and my dire need for some kind of physical attention, I was getting desperate, but then that thought just buried itself and suffocated and died as she continued to talk. She sure knows how to turn people off and she’s just isn’t my brand of crazy.

As we continued this one sided fractured conversation, she began to tell me a story on why she’s going from a two-pack-a-day smoker to quitting. This was it. This was the long haul. This was where I truly found out how damaged she really was.

Renee made a note before she started. This is not a happy story. There is no happy ending.

And there wasn’t.

This is a story about love. First loves and from my experience, most first love stories never end well.

I’m not going to relay everything she said, ’cause I really can’t. There was a point where I stopped listening because the story is so fractured and filled with so many holes, that it was just pointless for me to keep up. It seemed she was making some stuff up on the fly as she pull little bits from her life to make it just believable, except for the inconsistencies and whatnot.

Ultimately it begins with her, at a young age. I don’t know, but I’m guessing around 14 or 15, even though she says that she was 17 at this time, or 23, depending where in the story you ask her. I’m guess it is a young age.

She went to a party, got drunk and had a 24 year old man take care of her. She was drunk. He was drunk. While trying to sober up at his place, dodging her dad and grandmother’s call, the man laid next to her on the bed, wanting a hug.

Renee thought he just needed a hug, wanting some comfort so she complied. Then he started to kiss her and she thought this was fine and eventually they did it. Again, I think she’s 14 or maybe 15 at this time.

Many will think this is statutory rape, and in a way, it is. But was it consensual? Maybe. Did he take advantage of her? Most definitely.

So there it flourished. There it was, love. Her first love.

Giddy and lovesick, she would sneak out and hang out with him during all hours of the night. She would ditch school to hang out with him, thinking she is learning a lot from him. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t. She was blinded by what no one else can give her, not her father, nor her mother (which they are divorced).

Renee was blinded by a false sense of security that she was never provided. She’s latching on, for her life to continue feeling that way, that euphoria of young love of being the center of someone’s world. Love.

It’s a powerful and deadly drug if taken by the wrong person.

Seeing how she’s been misbehaving, her father decided to send Renee to her mom’s in Hawaii.

That didn’t fare well either as she felt confined, controlled. She rebelled and rebelled like any misunderstood and lost teenager would. Soon she’ll be sent back to her father.

Here she let it slip that she’s 15, even though she told me this all happened last year in March and she tells me she’s 24.

Soon, as with most relationships, he started to take her for granted. He’s jobless with nothing more than a GED. He can’t find a job and he spends most of his day playing video games.

He’s a catch. Any woman would be happy to have him, why not a troubled lonely unloved girl?

As she rambled on and on in her lost story, I put the fractured pieces together and soon it came to the initial story of why she’s quitting smoking.

But by then, I was already packed up and ready to go. By then, I was done with her story as I it seemed so unreliable and so full of holes that I dismissed everything she said.

By then I was done and want to get away from all the crazy.

I still remember her face as she reminisced, telling me the story. With a hidden strength of keeping her shit together, trying to hold in her tears, she reflected back on her life and the shit that she’s gone through. I see the melancholy on her face, the pain that only drugs can keep at bay.

There’s a kernel of truth in what she told me. Most stories have kernel of truths. It’s just a matter of picking them out and fitting them all together in their proper place.

Ultimately it was a story of a troubled girl with daddy issues who feels lost and unloved. The only thing that she knows about love is what was given to her by a man 10 years her senior who took it from her because of her naiveté; by a man, who manipulated her, raped her into believing that he loved her.

Maybe that’s why she found me, because I fit the bill, an older Asian man who seems nice who may be able to take her troubles away, to bring her back to that youthful euphoria that made her feel alive for once in her life.

But sadly, I am not that man who can give her what she wants. I will most likely fuck her up even more, using her and tossing her aside ’cause I just can’t deal with her crazy.