Love, it turns out, is a very difficult thing to grab hold of. It is, to me at least, quite like a buttered trout. Not the cooked kind, but the recently free from the water, still alive kind. The spastic floppy kind that flips all over the place while it tries to figure out why, exactly, it can no longer breathe and has suddenly been covered with a dairy product. I say this because I have in my years tried surprisingly hard to wrap my hands around the thing—love—but have never been able to actually hang on long enough to get a good look at it. I’ve come close I think, although I’m still searching for ways to sneak up on it so I can bonk its head and really look hard in its face.

There was the first girl I thought I loved. We were sixteen, or maybe fifteen, and I had a pimply inclination toward her exotic background. In my little town, even a last name that sounded Italian meant you were foreign. She had a Roman nose and an olive complexion and I wound up losing my virginity to her sister. She hated me for about a year and it drove me mad with longing. When we did eventually connect, I broke up with her after a couple of weeks. I was seventeen and tired of being in love anyway.

The next time that slippery fish came through my hands was while I was living in Australia. Everyone in Australia looks good, except 21-year-old stoners like me. I had smoked so much pot since the Italian affair that all the color had drained from my face and hands and chest and torso. Feet too. I hadn’t talked to a girl in months, but for some reason one of the most beautiful girls in town took a liking to me. Actually, check that. She was the most beautiful girl in town and she took a liking to my station wagon. Mobility is an amazing draw when you meet a girl who has been dating her third cousin. We were together until she was able to find a decent enough excuse to get on a plane to head back to her incestuous little village, which I think was actually called Calgary.

Being ditched by the cousin lover hurt. I fumbled along through a lot of different countries strumming the same three lonely guitar chords in her honor, until I eventually started drinking Nicaraguan rum and got to be fun again. I met a few trouts along the way after that, tricking myself for an afternoon here and there that I’d found what I was looking for. I had a relationship in Florida that lasted 17 hours. There was also the First Mate’s wife on a boat I worked on. The last time I saw her was while I was being thrown off it at 3 AM on a small island in Spain. (She never calls.) I wrapped my hands around a German trout for a while, too, but as soon as I did, it went limp and I learned that a boring trout is even worse than one that won’t stop trying to escape.

I tried really hard with a trout that had red streaks in her hair, and had I not been so stupid I would have done more to keep her around. Sometimes years after letting go, it dawns on a person: I’m a complete idiot. That’s happened to me a lot. When that happens, it’s best to stop thinking about fish altogether and go get drunk, but not until after you hide away all communication tools.

I just turned 30 and have still yet to pick up one of those slippery buggers and look directly in its eyeball, or fisheye, or whatever it is that a buttered-up trout uses for vision. You see, that’s part of the problem. I don’t know what exactly it is I’m supposed to be looking at. Is it the eye? How do I look at them both? Should I just look between its eyes like you do with a person who has a wobbled cornea? I simply don’t know. And maybe that’s the answer. I’ll know that I’ve found love when I understand what part of the fish I’m supposed to look at. (My god, what if it has been the tail this whole time?) It will smile with its smiley bit and I’ll get all tingly. “Hello Trout of my dreams,” I’ll say. “You fit rather well into my hands. Would you like to have dinner with me?"

The end.