We lived in a tower overlooking the Washington Square on the West Third Street of lower Manhattan, where children laughed and roamed free. It was a year before we grew up, when happiness was produced by a perpetual machine. We were vigorous, naïve, like Beethoven in his younger days.

She was a musician and me a chameleon. The girl loved music, classical and the like, and this city had abundant supply. We hopped from Kissin’s Rachmaninoff Third to Slatkin’s Carmina Burana, Pollini to Abbado, and then some.

“Richter will eventually come back to New York City,” said the girl.

“Then it must be so,” I said, with confidence, like believing the spring would last forever.

“What are you doing?” asked the girl.

“Listening to La bohème,” I said.

“I know what the music is, but what are you doing?” asked the girl again.

“Tell me something I know not,” I challenged.

“Mental masturbation,” said the girl with an evil smile, and caught me by surprise.

“Do you know when a robot had a wet dream, it leaked oil?” I improvised a bad joke.

She laughed, without really getting the idea. Her smile dazzled me like the sun, and wrinkled her nose like a baby.

I wished the moment eternal, and that the music were the only language spoken ever.

“We all live in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” I said.

“You speak like a poet,” said the girl.

“Not me, Oscar,” I said.

“Did he win the best screenplay?” asked the girl.

“Maybe so, if he lived long enough,” I paused a while. “I felt like Temba, you see, with my arms wide. And you, like Kiteo, with eyes closed.”

“Is that also from the same movie?” asked the girl.

“Never mind,” I said. “You know, the gods eventually die with the destruction of the world in Norse mythology, no matter what they do,” I added, as I sipped the last drop of Macallan out of a Riedel.

“Good that we live in a real world,” said the girl with an absent-minded smile.

"Wish I could," I told myself.

Whatever the meaning was, it ain’t when the words came out of the mouth. Our love was like a Long Island Ice Tea missing vodka, gin and tequila. It still made a good Cuba Libre, just not what I asked for.

First there was silence, then there came fights, like thunder after lightning.

“Who is she and when did it begin?” asked the girl.

More silence, which was like darkness after the Nightfall. I couldn't find any word for a thing not happened or a person not existed. The desire to communicate dimmed, and the perpetual machine broke down.

“The world as the Nordic knows will eventually come to an end,” I said, softly.

“To hell with everyone in Valhalla!” shouted the girl.

That was the last thing I heard from the girl.

Loving a girl is like picking a bottle of spice without label for your favorite recipe, and you won’t get the same taste again for good or bad. I thought as I sped into the highway with my turbo engine wailed like the ride of a banshee into the night sky.