Was I not your lithium?

I have long been open about my hunter-esque dating tendencies. I am slow, circumspect. I identify my prey from a distance of months, sometimes as they are still living, happy and unsuspecting, in relationships with other people. I carefully size them up, decide what seduction tools I will need for the willing capture, and embark on the long, cautious journey toward capturing their gaze, desire, and, occasionally, hearts.

The seduction of which I used to be most proud happened in college. It was a dangerous game; she was older, and dating a senior who was about to graduate. They were one of those established couples, which only I seemed to understand (about 5 years before my peers eventually would) meant that they were probably unhappy and/or bored. I slowly befriended her, stopping by her room to ask her questions about the treasurer position that she occupied that I was about to step into, worming my way into her line of vision. When she left for the summer for a program abroad in Paris, she left me in charge of her car and her address in France. Bingo.

I started crafting letters to her. Careful, innocuous letters, full of the suggestion of my "deeper feelings," but short, and only in response to hers. Caution.

This delicate, graceful seduction was consummated on the first day of the fall semester, not particularly delicately or gracefully, as we got raging drunk and then blisteringly high on the green and headed back to my room. Her extreme dry mouth and my tendency to drool while plastered only came in a close second to the hotness of my two best friends, whom I had forgotten were crashing with me in my one-room single, walking in while both of us were naked and writhing in a booze-sweaty single mass on my dorm-issue single bed.

From that moment on, it was love. We spent several evenings a week together watching movies, holding hands, and having copious amounts of sex. For one blissful month, I was as happy as I'd ever been in college, even though my body burned every day in the shower when the hot water hit the spots where the sex had scraped my skin raw.

One day, she asked if she could come over. My room wasn't clean, but that didn't matter to me in the face of the sure possibility of getting laid. I gave her an ebullient affirmative, and five minutes later she was at my dorm room door. And five minutes after that, she had told me that she had been off the meds she took for her bipolar disorder, that she had fallen in love with a senior in another dorm, and that things clearly weren't working between us. Five minutes later, it was over.

I will say that I put on a good show; when she told me, seemingly out of nowhere, "this isn't working," I thought on my feet. Seven years later, I remain proud of my kneejerk reaction, which was a casual, disinterested, "Yeah, I was thinking the same thing," although my twenty-year-old china shop of a heart was internally suffering at the rages of the bull that had been unleashed in it. She left, I called a friend who was effectively a functional alcoholic, and we drank ourselves blind and later vomited in the dorm bathrooms, side by side, holding hands under the institutional-yellow wall of the bathroom stall as we emptied our insides into the communal porcelain. I spent the next two weeks crying, moping around campus, and learning that with the aid of a little excessive drinking, I could be my own lithium.

[coda: my muscular sense of pride compels me to mention that I later re-seduced her, dated her for ten months, and broke up with her over the phone. So, you see, I still won.]