I'm not sure why I'm thinking about this today. Maybe because she was the first friend I ever took with me to Sesame Street. (You've heard about the latest trip if you read Eleanor's journal, though I may eventually have more to say about it myself.)

I met her two years ago, more or less. "Oh, come on," said Rob, dragging me to another bar in the Village at one in the morning. "Just one more drink." Rob would soon be moving to Seattle, so I agreed.

If it weren't for Rob, I never would have started talking to the two German women sitting near our table. With the notable exception of Laura, who I would meet two months later, I don't pick up women in bars. But somehow she and I started talking, and before you know it she was invited to Rob's going-away party, and her suspicious, ill-tempered friend was dragging her out of the bar, and she was throwing a "Help me" look back at me over her shoulder.

Miracle of miracles, she showed up at the going-away party a couple of days later. Rob was handing a journal around the table, asking his friends to write something in it. My new German friend spent a long time over her entry. Rob showed me later what she had written. It was all very dark and poetic, and one line of it stuck in my head: "I'm a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl." This disturbed me quite a bit, but it also attracted me—the way some people are attracted to knives, I'm sure.

It wasn't until a few months later—after we'd sort of dated for six weeks, and we'd drunk wine in her bedroom while I helped her configure her laptop, and she'd taught me the correct way to pronounce Löwenbräu, and she'd declared us soulmates and I still couldn't get anywhere with her, and she'd eventually confessed to me that she was sleeping with a married man who kept not leaving his wife for her, and she'd started calling me with the news that she was making cuts in her arms and legs—it wasn't until after all that that I happened to pick up a certain Björk album which soon found its way into heavy rotation in my CD changer. It wasn't until then that I consciously heard Björk sing those dark, dark lines: "I'm a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl."

Can I explain how fucking cheated I felt at that moment? How fucking stupid?

I hope my German friend is well, but I'll probably never know for sure because I'm not interested enough to pick up the phone and find out. I'll overlook a lot of things, but as far as I'm concerned plagiarism is the unforgiveable sin.