Look how all the white flowers in the grass have turned their faces to the setting sun and closed their petals. Not one is turned the wrong direction. Yet just this morning, I watched a bird slam into the glass of the bus station and fall to the ground. Dizzy or dead, either way I had to board the bus, I had to move my body to its next spot, a new romance unfolding beside me. Every man I meet is fifty-two and has a 12-year-old daughter, it’s strange. What differs is the way the mothers feel. My presence, or any woman’s, a threat or obvious fact. To the one who sent me a Facebook message before we’d even met to say I could have her ex-husband but the children were hers: not to worry, you swallowed up whatever space your children and I could have had for friendship, for love. We all felt it, your hot breath on our necks. Your fear and self-contempt. No one could relax. Or I couldn’t. But it wasn’t really about me. We could have been the white flowers facing the sun. Another man, another story, and this one’s teen thinks it's perfectly normal for her parents to end things but still get along. She follows the example her mother sets: kindness, acceptance. Some women are all bad vibes. Some women are always going to be entering naively into the drama another couple left behind, their houses, men. Some women might not know they are the dumb bird flying straight into their own bad ending. We should do what feels right, I’ve learned. We should turn our backs to what doesn’t, get up from where we are lying stunned on the ground and walk away, if we have legs.