How do you tell your best friend you're in love with his girlfriend?

You don't. You take comfort in the thought that this, like every other romantic infatuation that you've had, is ephemeral.

If she hadn't started working out and shoehorned herself into those tight jeans last night I wouldn't have even begun thinking about her. It's just an ass, and all I'm seeing of it is merely outlines. I've summed this up so many times, but I'll do it again.

Attraction, especially male attraction, is overwhelmingly visual. We can reduce this type of attraction to geometry, symmetry, curvature. Certain shapes draw our attention. The curvature of breasts or the line created by their cleavage can draw us. The eyes, nose, ears, and mouth and their distance from each other. The shape of an ass and how it projects from the profile of the body. The clever jean manufacturers are to blame for my current commandment-breaking coveting of my neighbor's wife. I've hated her before and that feeling was just as real as this one. This is what I tell myself to break myself from the idea of fucking her. This thought also leads me to a stark realization that my moods and my emotions are so existentially exterior to their objects. I can turn my love of someone off and on like a light, and either emotional state disavows the existence of the other. This feeling is so complete. I hate this about me. But I love her so much right now.

She was a siren last night, and she was caught at a sausage fest. Two friends stopped by my neighbor's place, and she was embroiled in a tiff with her usual weekend companion. After a salvo of text-messages, she removed herself from that situation and settled into a good drunk. That's when she became a bit of a flirt. She wanted me to join her on a late night beer run. I asked her to do a quick sobriety test. I didn't want her to drive, but the thought of going somewhere alone with her enticed me considerably. Her boyfriend, the guy to whom I address my rent checks, drove us, and we all decided to go. We took the sausage fest on the road.

Nothing came of the night except some very latent sexual sparks, and a disruption in my usual masturbation routine as I couldn't remove her from my mind or my constant attention. As much as these situations make me feel very much alive and well, I've constructed a Byzantine bureaucracy of emotions, thought, and behavior that force a consistency onto my being from which I can never stray. That's why I sit at home. That's why I rarely go out. That's why I rarely flirt. That's why I find any and all reason to avoid relationships. That's why I think that any woman with more than one close friend is a political threat and a liability. I dare not share with someone who will publish my inner demons, my inner feelings, my motivations, my desires to her friendship circle. I am alienated by the sentences people speak and write about me. I am utterly alienated by the grammatical function of the third person. I will not be a 'he.' In order to accomplish this, I must remove myself from the topic of discussion. I will prove to anyone that the idea of them is more important to me than their person. It's so goddamn alienating. I'm in love with the network of neurons that activate when I see my neighbor's common-law wife in a pair of tight jeans, not her. She just makes them activate.

Bring me the researchers in white lab coats. Keep my cage clean, my water fresh, and my food full and I'll happily submit to your electronic manipulation of my mind. At least then I'd feel that someone has some modicum of control over my mind other than this projected mind guard who watches my every move and adjudicates the proper self-inflicted punishment. Damn those tight jeans to their own private hell.