His friend Andres was also there. Did I mention that? Well, I admit I didn’t want Andres to be there, even though I loved him (but not in that way). Still, Andres did kind of love me in that way, so there we were, a trio of thwarted desire lying in our separate beds, and that’s when Jon introduced me to Tom Waits.

It might be more accurate to say he presented me with Tom Waits. There was enough buildup for British royalty. Shhh. Stop moving. Listen to this part. Did you hear that line? I wish I could remember the song, but I suspect it was early lounge singer Tom Waits. Funny and broken and three sheets to the wind.

I don’t think I’d ever heard of Tom Waits. I was a musical theater fanatic in high school. My friend Catherine and I drove around in her Ford Explorer singing three-part harmonies to En Vogue and the “Grease” soundtrack. But I wanted to know Tom Waits, because I understood that knowing him was a tunnel to Jon, just like Ionesco, and Nietzsche, and Louis Armstrong were also tunnels to Jon. I wanted as many tunnels as I could get. So I listened with reverence, and nodded, and hoped that I could discover some element that would explain Jon to me, or help him find me irresistible. But if I’m totally honest, what I thought the first time I heard Tom Waits was: This is awful.

- – - – - -

A 2002 GQ profile describes Waits’ voice as a clown crossed with a cherry bomb. Waits’ music can be lovely or it can be shot through with carnival menace, but it’s his voice that is his most distinctive quality, a love-it-or-hate-it growl that is sometimes comic in its desperation. It got wilder as he grew older, and his voice serves as a kind of carbon dating system: The early ballads are a boozy baritone; the later stuff is feral. My reaction to his voice at the age of 19 was similar to my first sip of Scotch. My face puckered. I wondered how anyone could drink this stuff. But after years of listening to Tom Waits, I have come to crave that kind of brutality. (After years of listening to Tom Waits, I also came to crave Scotch.)

That GQ story is my favorite profile of Waits. It’s written by Elizabeth Gilbert, who went on to pen a blockbuster memoir about eating and praying and loving. But back then, she was a magazine writer fascinated by masculinity. She wrote a few books on the subject, which I’ve heard are good, and her piece on Waits fits into that puzzle, because he is an off-center, darkly poetic masculine hero. Before I ever loved Tom Waits, I loved guys who loved Tom Waits, and they had certain qualities in common. They all smoked cigarettes (often unfiltered). They loved booze (often whiskey). They drank coffee (black). They had flourishes of eccentricity: A fedora worn to the grocery store, a chain wallet, a deceptively casual method of cupping a flame as they lit a cigarette against the wind. They were reckless and tender and sullen and, good god, they were beautiful. The chips were stacked very high against me back then.

In my sophomore year, I fell in with a guy who practically worshiped at the house of Tom Waits. He and his gang of angry young men (which is what we called them) moped around campus with creative facial hair and a disaffected slouch that marked them as different from other kids who came from the suburbs of Houston and Albuquerque. “I’m interested in the commodification of violence,” one of those guys told me, stabbing the air with his smoking hand, and I went home and wrote it down, because it sounded so cool.

I listened to 10,000 Maniacs — classic, awesome nerd-girl band — and around that time Natalie Merchant recorded a cover of Tom Waits’ “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You,” and the first time I heard it, my breath caught in my throat. It was so fragile, so perfect. “Well, I hope that I don’t fall in love with you / ‘Cause falling in love just makes me blue.” That’s exactly how I felt about the guy, who had sidled up to me at a party, and we had fallen into each other’s bodies in that slumping, slightly meaningful way, and the next day I woke up newly tangled about him, experiencing deep revelations about how gorgeous his eyes were, etc., etc., and all I could think was: No no no, not this again.

That song is one of the greatest ever written about the fleeting romance of last call, the way a dim bar and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s can conspire to make you believe you have lived lifetimes without ever rising from your seat. At the time, I did not quite understand this, but I would spend the next two, 10, 15 years of my life figuring it out.

The guy scoffed at the Natalie Merchant cover. How could a woman like her sing about drinking stout, about “these old tomcat feelings you don’t understand”? I swapped Natalie Merchant’s version in my five-CD changer for the soft grumble of the original, and I never looked back. The guy and I didn’t work out. But I had it bad for Tom Waits.

- – - – - -

I scored points with my next boyfriend for name-checking Tom Waits in an early conversation. The right guy would fall to his knees if you told him your favorite song was “Ol’ 55.” The acquisition of such knowledge was the upside to these botched romances. You would go into a relationship one person — an English major with a kink for Tom Wolfe and ’70s soul — and you would exit with a new list of names piled on your coffee table: Frank Sinatra and Joan Didion and the Violent Femmes. Your heart might be dripping from between your fingers, but hot damn, your CD collection was good.

This boyfriend was the guy who truly made me understand Tom Waits. Not because he explained him to me — the way he explained how to line up a shot in pool, or how to blow a smoke ring — but because I was crazy about him, and he broke up with me a month after we moved in together, and in the six months — OK, a year — after he left, Tom Waits became the soundtrack to my sadness. All those weepers about loving someone who left, leaving someone you still love, all the ragwater and bitters and blue ruin.

I listened to female singers, too. They were a pipeline to rage and melancholy — Tori Amos, Liz Phair, Billie Holliday — but I didn’t seek catharsis so much as I sought to understand, to sift through the wreckage and find some lesson here. Why did he leave me? What had I done wrong? And so on the nights when I felt like running my fingers over those scars I listened to Tom Waits, “The Early Years, Volume One.” I listened to the last track, “Old Shoes and Picture Postcards,” on repeat.

So goodbye, so long, the road calls me, dear, and your tears cannot bind me anymore

And farewell to the girl with the sun in her eyes, and I’ll kiss you and then I’ll be gone

When I listen to that song now, I hear the same desperado cliches I know from a hundred country ballads. But back then, the words were a revelation to me, the final piece of a complex algorithm. You guys, you guys, I got it: He had to leave me, it was destined somehow, locked in our DNA that I would be the one standing on the balcony in my bare feet with tears streaking my face and he would be the one driving off into the sunset in his 1995 Honda Civic, flicking a Camel Light out the window. (This never happened, by the way.) Of course, there were other reasons for our rupture: He had quit drinking, and I had not. He was out of college and finding his way in the world, and I was pouring beer on people’s heads at my birthday party. He needed space, and I longed to be smothered.

But at the time, it was unfathomable: He kissed me, and then he was gone, and I spent the next six months — OK, a year — sleeping with him anyway, trying to get back some of the sunshine and safety I’d felt in his presence and feeling let down all the time. I wrote and produced a play inspired by losing him — it wasn’t about him, but then again, it was entirely about him — and every single night before the curtain rose I would comb the audience from backstage trying to find his face, waiting for the sick electric jolt I would experience when I saw him sitting there. And every single night he would not be there, and I would experience a wave of rejection before the show even began.

After the last performance, I got wasted on a Sunday afternoon. What else could I possibly do? I wanted to know. I fucking wrote a play about him, and he did not come. It seems obvious now: Of course he would not come. Of course he did not want to interrupt his busy life as a newly minted chef to sit in a drafty auditorium and watch some bizarre simulacrum of our time together. But I wrote with the idea that the sheer force of my desire could change his mind. I wrote short stories. I wrote letters I never sent. The thing is when we’re wounded everyone’s a bit insane, Tom Waits sang, and I lived it, man. And what I never stopped to appreciate amid all the soggy tissue and melodrama was that he had given me something far more extraordinary than a college relationship. Fifteen years later, the framed poster for that play still hangs in my hallway, one of the proudest moments of my life. That guy — I think I have his photo in an album, somewhere.

- – - – - -

Waits is such a guy’s guy that it takes a certain kind of woman to love him. I grew up in awe of my older brother — his music was the first guy’s music I ever learned — and part of my story has been an urgent wish to have the same shambling adventures as the men in my life. I wanted to jump off balconies and stagger through the streets of some foreign town, shirt stained with blood. I wanted to pour Bushmill’s down my throat and light myself on fire. I knew every word to the song “Pasties and a G String,” a winking, bawdy ode to the low-rent freedom of live nude girls. In the year after college, I went with a male friend to a strip club — one of those junky roadside joints — and I had this idea that I would run my eyes all over those women, I would devour them, but instead I felt strange and wrong inside, and I made him give all his dollar bills to the heavy women and the older women no one paid attention to, and I went home that night and lay alone in bed feeling so blue. (Because I wasn’t one of those women? Because they were?)

It was hard to find my place in those songs, and in the macho novels I was obsessed with (books about war, books about madcap travels, books about drink and damage). What I never realized — what never occurred to me — was that Tom Waits’ greatest collaborator was his wife, Kathleen Brennan. A former movie executive wary of the spotlight, she has co-written much of his work since “Swordfishtrombones” and in his rare interviews, he speaks of her with genuine warmth. “I’d be working in a steakhouse if it wasn’t for her,” he says in the GQ article. “I wouldn’t even be playing in a steakhouse. I’d be cooking in a steakhouse.”

Maybe that’s what I needed: my own Kathleen Brennan. And where do you find them, anyway? Waits attributes Brennan to cracking open his sound, but it was no doubt her stability that enabled such a grueling, decades-long career in the sideshow. Every sinner needs a saint, or something like that. For a guy who used to fall off piano benches, Tom Waits looks pretty healthy in his old age.

In 1999, I saw him when he played at SXSW in the most-coveted showcase of the year. To say it was a spiritual experience feels too small. It was the best live music show I’ve ever seen, and I can’t imagine I will ever see a better one. I sat in the first balcony with a spectacular three-beer high — not drunk enough to be gone, just drunk enough to be right there — and I remember thinking how booze and music and storytelling were like God. Or maybe I should say: If that’s all God was, it was still a lot.

At 28, I fell in love with a guy who listened to Tom Waits. Of course I did. I assumed that every man I ever loved for the rest of time would be as besotted with Tom Waits as I was, just like he would be as besotted with booze, and cigarettes I could bum from him, and impulsive late-night trips to nowhere in particular, a night and a hangover we could share.

- – - – - -

The next boyfriend was the ultimate Tom Waits boyfriend. He was a homicide detective in New Orleans. He was handsome and solitary. He told me stories about prostitute sweeps in the French Quarter and what it felt like to touch a brain. Decades of kneeling at the altar of such grimness was no doubt part of why I fell for him in the first place. I love gangster movies where everyone dies in a hail of bullets. My favorite show of all time is “The Wire.” It was one of a hundred reasons our romance felt written in the stars to me, but the funny thing about the ultimate Tom Waits boyfriend is that he had never actually heard of Tom Waits.

He liked the Eagles. “I can’t stop listening to this song ‘Hotel California,’” he said to me once. “Have you heard of it?”

“In the seventh grade, baby,” I said, and ran my hand across his cheek, and he gave one those twisty little grins he offered when he felt slightly self-conscious. He didn’t pay much attention to music, or movies; they were necessary distractions from the soul-suck of the murder police. During the holidays, he kept the radio on the Christmas music station all the time (it drove his partner crazy).

But I knew he would love Tom Waits, just like I knew I would move to New Orleans and we would get married and have adorable babies with twisty little grins. I sent him “Small Change” with a note that said, “I am honored to give you your new favorite album.”

I went even further than that, actually. The first time I visited him in New Orleans, he took me to a bar where the cops hang out. (“Don’t mention you’re a journalist,” he said, which was a joke, but not really.) It was one of those epic nights. The whole bar singing to the Pogues. And when I got back to New York, I sent a gift to the guy who runs the place. Two Tom Waits albums, because the jukebox had a few empty sleeves, and I wrote something like, “These CDs are looking for a home in a smoky dive bar in the French Quarter. Maybe you can help them out.”

I was so pleased with myself, but it didn’t go the way I planned. The guy who runs the bar is a big Irish cop with a mustache — he is exactly the person you see in your head when I say “Irish cop”  – and the next time I saw him at the bar, he said to me, “Yeah, I listened to those CDs you sent. They sucked.”

I laughed, but I was scrambling to cover up my embarrassment. How could I have misjudged this so badly? I clapped my hand on his shoulder. “I feel like I’ve given you a fine Scotch, and you’ve pissed all over it.”

He looked around. “Do you see any fine Scotch around here?” He stuck his cigar back between his teeth. “Van Fucking Halen,” he told me, and walked off.

So there you go. There is a world of difference between the men who love Tom Waits and the men who live the life he writes about. When the detective broke up with me, four months later, it occurred to me I was on the wrong side of the divide.

- – - – - -

In 2006, Tom Waits appeared on “The Daily Show.” Jon Stewart seemed uncharacteristically nervous. “I was struck when I met your wife, your family, how unbeaten by life you are,” Jon Stewart said at the top of the interview. “I used to listen to your music and think, boy, I’d like to lie in the street nearly dead with that guy.”

Waits nods. “It’s an act,” he says.

And I remember feeling weirdly betrayed by that. I mean, I knew it was an act, but maybe I didn’t? Nobody can ravage their body the way he purported to and then stick around for four decades. So of course Waits was sober. Of course he no longer smoked. But it was impossible to imagine him without the neon glint, the clang of empty bottles in the background. Consider: Tom Waits on a treadmill. Consider: Tom Waits juicing. Consider: Tom Waits, happy family man.

It was impossible to imagine my life without such wicked accouterments, too. I put off quitting drinking for as long as I could, but in 2010, I had to stop before my life tipped into parody, the 36-year-old drunk woman all dressed up and falling down. Since then I have been forced to wrestle with so many false delusions, like the one in which every romance comes with a pack of smokes, or the one in which I spend each night sinking into a vodka tonic, cold and fizzy and fantastic.

Sometimes I feel embarrassed that I loved Tom Waits so much. I talk to cool women who defined themselves by the riot girl sound, or Patti Smith, and I think, why wasn’t I like that? Maybe the embarrassment I feel isn’t about Waits at all. It’s about the girl who tried so hard to be someone she wasn’t, the girl who languished in her own self-pity, who posed so many ways for those boys to see. Those boys are all nearing middle age now. They have wives and children and mortgages and, if I had to guess, some nicotine gum lying around somewhere. I’m still friends with most of them. I wonder what they hear when they listen to Tom Waits.

I’ve heard that Waits doesn’t like those old songs, the songs pre-Brennan, and I wonder if what he feels is the tweak of regret and loss we all feel when we stumble on old pictures of ourselves. Not long ago I found a cache of them — me with a Marlboro Light in one hand and a giant margarita glass tilted dangerously in the other, me with a Dos Equis wearing a see-through undershirt staring at the camera like I’m trying to start a fight — and I laugh at those pictures at the same time I feel grief, and this is one of the qualities in Tom Waits I have long appreciated, the way a good feeling can get wrapped up with a painful one. I feel sad for all that I didn’t know then, but I feel grateful that I forged ahead anyway. I feel sad that it’s gone now, but grateful that I had it. I feel sad that I spent so many hours wanting those guys to love me in a certain way — all that time and energy and agony wishing the world could be something it was not — but I feel grateful that they did love me, all of them, in the way they knew how.

“People won’t stop telling me I look healthy,” I complained to my friend Mary.

She laughed. “Those assholes.”

Don’t get me wrong: I love compliments. But I feel a stab of mortification for the bloated, slightly sweaty woman who thought she had everyone fooled with Target hoodies and elastic waistbands. I have spent a lifetime hoping no one noticed my weight, and so it is a special terror that everyone now does. I tend to deflect in these moments. I say things like, “It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you stop burying your misery in Chipotle burritos.” Or I pass the weight loss off to quitting drinking, which is not a lie, since I was a beer-binger who could put away a six-pack on a Tuesday. (It’s hard to keep your girlish figure when even a casual night out includes 2,000 calories in sheer lager.)

It’s interesting, though, that so few people mention the word “weight.” It’s almost like they’re afraid of it. Like it would sound crass. Not putting a focus on weight happens to be what most reasonable diets do these days. The counselors will tell you about “healthy lifestyle choices” (not “calorie restriction”). They will explain concepts like “portion control” and talk about “a new way of eating.” (Classic motto: “It’s not a diet — it’s a live it.”) Restaurants rarely tout their “low-calorie” options but instead offer meals that are “heart-healthy,” as though when I lost 40 pounds, what I really had in mind was a stellar cardiogram.

We are a society badly messed up about body image. We mock celebrities for getting fat and then mock Keira Knightley for staying thin. We scream about the dangers of the obesity epidemic while half of us continue to text and drive. So I can’t blame anyone for being weird on the subject of weight. I am super weird on the subject of weight. In middle school, I ate iceberg lettuce for lunch and scissor-kicked my way through Kathy Smith’s aerobics video three to five times a week. By college, I had settled into serious “screw-it” mode: The worse any food was for me, the more I wanted it. I was all bacon and melted cheese and Camel Lights. Over the next 15 years, I gained 20 pounds, lost 15, gained 30, lost 10. My closet contained enough sizes for many sister wives. I agonized about my weight all the time. But I did very little about it. New Year’s resolutions dissolved mid-January. Broccoli and cucumbers bought with the best of intentions turned squishy with neglect. I relied on the optical illusions of the Dillard’s hosiery department: Spandex and control-top pantyhose and enough bizarre, constrictive doodads to outfit all of Madonna’s backup dancers.

When I quit drinking, I hoped the pounds would melt away. But I had swapped imported beer for peanut-butter-chocolate ice cream and pasta with cream sauce. Four months into sobriety, I was at the hairstylist in Brooklyn, seated in that hateful little chair where you are forced to look at yourself speak in a full-length mirror (I despise that chair!) when my self-loathing became radioactive. There I was, getting pampered in my fancy first-world way, but what I thought was: “I am going to have to lose weight, or I am going to rip off my own face.” Those were the words that formed in my brain. I knew drinking had kept me from losing weight. I did not realize, until that moment, how it had buffered me from the misery I felt about it.

So when I moved back to Dallas, I went on a diet. Not a clipped-from-the-magazines, let-me-try-this-for-a-week diet, but the kind where you step on a scale once a week and pay for the privilege. I didn’t tell anyone but my family and a few friends, which is a little off-script for a woman who has written publicly about making out while wearing Spanx. But on this matter, I felt deeply private. I have known people who trumpet weight-loss regimens like a sparkly new ring on the finger: Have I told you about my diet? Do you want to hear about these pills/this lap band/this juice fast/this amazing injectable hormone? Not me. In high school, I went on Jenny Craig, and I was so terrified people would find out that I refused to eat lunch until I came home at 4 p.m., because the food was branded with a logo. I had nightmares my classmates would look inside our kitchen cabinet and see a beef-and-bean chili.

When it comes to our bodies, we all have no-fly zones. I have a friend who has lost weight, and she couldn’t care less if you know she’s on a diet. But she refuses to say how much weight she’s lost. Recently a co-worker grilled her, and when she politely demurred, the woman kept pushing. No really, how much? Come on, you can tell me. “She definitely wasn’t nervous about touching the weight issue,” my friend said. She added that the woman was heavy, and the candor may have come from an assumed “we’re in this together” solidarity. Still, can’t people take a hint? This stuff cuts deep.

And because it cuts so deep, different rules apply to different people, which makes the conversation that much trickier. My friend doesn’t want to share that number with you because when she finally screwed up her courage enough to step on a scale, she was shocked by how big she had gotten, and the number plunges her back into that shame. I don’t want to admit that I’m on a diet because, on some basic level, I seem unable to forgive myself for needing it in the first place — for not being born tall and thin with the metabolism of a marathon runner. I never wanted to be a woman on a diet. (I also never wanted to be a woman who cried easily, or showed people pictures of her cat. This did not work out as planned.) The fact that everyone notices I lost weight reminds me that everyone noticed I had gained weight in the first place but they said nothing because, seriously now, what is there to say? They said, “Your hair looks great.” They said, “I like those shoes.”

There is the added conflict of being all too aware that most diets fail, that our culture is slavishly focused on appearance, much to the detriment of our souls, and that I’m supposed to love my body at any size, not “rip off my own face” if I can’t wear short-shorts in the summertime. But what do you do? Recently, I heard a story about a woman who had lost more than 100 pounds on a strict diet. With tears in her eyes, she admitted that she told everyone she was doing it to be healthier, but that was a lie. She didn’t give a damn about being healthy. She did it because she was sick of being fat.

Can you blame her? We’re a fat-phobic culture. That obsession drives toxic behavior. Another friend of mine tells a story of being at her thinnest in college. She tried crazy stuff to keep the weight down: Diet pills, Ipecac. People kept telling her, too, “You look so healthy!” And she would think, “Really? Because three hours ago I was crying over a toilet trying to make myself throw up.”

I don’t know what to say to someone losing weight, any more than I know how to respond when people remark on my own transformation. And so I reached out to Kate Harding, a friend and the founder of the blog Shapely Prose, who has written more on body image than anyone I know. When I was her editor at Salon, Kate challenged my thinking about the ways we conflate thinness with healthiness, how fat people (her term, which she uses with pride) get railroaded for so many societal ills. She was the kind of eloquent, compassionate feminist who would know exactly what to say in these situations. Except, she didn’t.

“I do struggle with what, if anything, to say to friends who have clearly lost weight,” she wrote by email. “I don’t want to be like, ‘Yippee! Weight loss rocks!,’ but I also don’t want them to think I’m being a jerk who doesn’t even notice, or worse yet that I’m judging them for losing weight and/or being proud of it. It’s a big effort, and lord knows I understand why people want to do it, so I want to be like, ‘Hey, I see you doing a tough thing that is making you happy. High five.’”

Actually, that’s as good a reaction as any. Kate also pointed out to me that it’s likely people keep telling me I look healthier because I am, in fact, healthier. After all, I quit drinking and, though I rarely talk about it, I quit smoking at the same time. (One never made sense without the other.) If you had taken a peek in my bathroom cabinet during my last years in New York, you would have seen the signals of a body in distress: Tagamet for an ulcer, melatonin to sleep through the night, antihistamine for a mysterious skin rash that erupted across my legs, antidepressants attempted and abandoned. At 36, I got an EKG because I was convinced I was having a heart attack. The stress and pain and discomfort were so unbearable that, while it is impressive that I lost 40 pounds, it is far more impressive to me that I kept on 40 pounds for as long as I did, knowing how unhappy it made me, what a drain it was on my system.

It’s funny what you notice when you lose 40 pounds. I notice that I no longer flinch when someone’s eyes linger on me. I notice that I rarely try to smother a bad day with a plate of cheese enchiladas. I notice that my body is a marvelous engine capable of feats I never knew possible.

I notice how friends’ eyes light up when they see me, and I worry that I need that too much — that part of what got me here was being too needy for the spark in other people’s eyes — but I also wonder if that has less to do with my weight and more to do with me. They often tell me I look happy. And that is an easy compliment to take.

I just say, “I am.”

“He told you he played soccer in Germany?” She stifled a laugh. “And you believed him?”

I believed him. Over the next two weeks, as the bizarre story of Todd unfolded, this was the humbling phrase I would be forced to repeat. Yes, I believed him. I believed that he was a wealthy entrepreneur who had started his first company at the age of 20. I believed that he got a soccer scholarship to a liberal arts college in upstate New York and later traveled all over Europe. I believed that he had a daughter, and that she had sparkling blue eyes, and that she liked cats and pirates. I believed these things because — well, because he told them to me. (Todd is not his real name, by the way.)

But staring at the ceiling that night, doubt took root. It blossomed and grew vines. Once you begin to suspect someone is lying, it is hard to stop suspecting them. I felt like I was caught in my own version of “Catfish,” the 2010 documentary about a New York photographer who falls for a woman he met through Facebook only to unravel an epic deception. I loved that movie (I saw it twice), but the film came under fire for its own narrative sleights of hand. “That guy would never fall for that girl,” a friend complained to me, and maybe he had a point, but I think we will all fall for anything if we want to believe it badly enough.

Still, we are in a complicated house-of-mirrors moment with the truth. Just ask Mike Daisey, whose tale of Apple hiring underage workers was debunked last weekend on “This American Life.” It’s a breathtaking hour of radio, not only because Daisey is lying, but also because he is lying to himself. The nature of truth has always been slippery, but technology has given us so many tools for deception, and such a powerful megaphone, that we are constantly forced to defend against it.  What can we believe? Who can we trust? It’s like we’re all suffering a giant crisis of authenticity.

This is the herky-jerky place in which I found myself with Todd. Although to be precise, I never “met” him. Ours was a thoroughly 21st relationship that unfolded through the Web, email and iPhone, a drama in which the two main characters never actually shook hands. It was one of the strangest romances I’ve ever had, not simply because I did not know him in person but because I truly came to believe he did not exist.

It was the evening that he canceled our second date when I decided to confront him on this. “So I have to tell you something,” I said to him on the phone. Mine was the low, shaky whisper you reserve for difficult conversations, like how you cheated on someone or want to break up. “I kind of don’t think you’re a real person.”

Todd’s charming Texas drawl grew strained. “What the hell does that even mean?”

It’s a good question. Honestly, I don’t even know where to start.

- – - – - -

I dragged my feet to online dating. I spent most of my 20s and early 30s in bars, where my entire dating strategy could be boiled down to this: Get drunk, and see what happens. It worked pretty well.

But at the age of 36, I quit drinking and moved back to Dallas from New York. My life was lovely, for the most part — quiet, low-key evenings spent with family, or a handful of amazing female friends, or a marmalade tabby loved beyond all reason. But I was aware that some key part of existence was missing. I longed for the kind of companionship I once found in Stella Artois.

“You need to start online dating,” my friend Jennifer told me. It wasn’t a suggestion; it was a command. I didn’t know if it was my age, or our age in general, but the whole discussion about online dating had shifted from, “Why don’t you try this?” to, “This is what people do now.” I hated it. Why couldn’t I meet my future husband in a coffee shop, or in the produce section of a grocery store? (“You like kiwis? I like kiwis!”) When I told Jennifer my usual complaints — that online dating made me feel hopelessly awkward, that it depressed me in some existential way — she gave me a little pat on the knee.

“Well, maybe your mom can set you up with someone nice,” she said.

Two weeks later, I had a personal profile.

By now, most of us have tried online dating, or at least know its narrative arc: The agony of creating a personal profile (what picture should I use? What should my profile name be?), followed by the rush of adrenaline that arrives when emails begin to pile up in your inbox. It’s such a funny mix of insecurity and power to be a woman on those sites. Some days I felt like a little lost puppy scratching on anyone’s door: Please love me, somebody love me. Some days I felt like a queen who could cast aside suitors with one click of the mouse. Yes, yes, you think I’m pretty. I’ve heard that before. Next! I have the requisite number of anecdotes about men who were comically unsuited for me. The guy whose profile picture featured him shirtless and flabby, shooting a rifle. The guy who answered the question “What I’m doing with my life” by saying: “I’m just working at Staples, living life to the fullest.”

I was contemplating pulling down my profile entirely when Todd emailed. He wasn’t exactly my perfect match, either — a sports fanatic and a business type who peppered his emails with unnecessary ellipses. But he was funny (my weakness) and fluent in HBO programming and Monty Python and the kind of pop culture that allows me to speak freely without ever revealing too much (my crutch). I also felt uncommonly drawn to his pictures. Two included his 18-month-old girl, and I liked that he frontloaded this fact, much like I had my own sobriety. This is me, and it’s the non-negotiable part.

One afternoon when I should have been working, we engaged in one of those zippy back-and-forths that can turn a drab afternoon into a Billy Wilder comedy. Looking back, I can see that he was way too quick to lavish me with compliments. He would say things like, “You are so amazing,” and “If you are half as funny in person, I am going to fall in love with you.” That makes me cringe a million times now, but in the moment, it was fuel for my ego. It’s not like I thought we were going to get married; I wasn’t even sure we should date. But I did believe that I was being hilarious and clever in those exchanges, and it was about time some random good-looking dude on the Internet appreciated it.

Todd and I spoke on the phone the following day. I expected to chat with him for 20 minutes; I hung up three hours later and was so wired I couldn’t fall asleep till 2.

“He played soccer in Europe,” I told a friend over IM the next day.

“That’s hot,” he said. (He’s gay.)

“It’s a little too hot,” I said. In fact, a crucial shift had taken place during that phone call. I had gone from thinking Todd was not good enough for me — too Texas alpha male, too conservative — to worrying I would not be good enough for him. I am nothing like the generously embellished, long-legged trophy wives that populate the Dallas society scene. Beside them I can feel so dowdy. There is still an insecure 12-year-old inside me, and in the days leading up to my Sunday coffee date with Todd, she held center stage. I tried out three different outfits for my mother. I wore the outfits with heels and without.

“What if I he doesn’t like me?” I asked her.

She smiled. “What if you don’t like him?”

But all the anxiety was for naught. Two hours before we were supposed to meet, he sent me an email. “I am bearing bad news. I have ended up taking my little girl to the fall carnival today, as her mother is sick. If we can reschedule this week soon it would be wonderful. Can I call you later?”

He did not call that night. And in the space where that conversation might have gone, a conspiracy theory grew. I should mention, at this point, a few suspicious details about Todd: For one, I could not find him on Facebook. Now, I have dear friends who have decided against the slavering jaws of social networking, so on its own this didn’t raise red flags. More troubling was that I could not find his “successful marketing company” online. Or rather, the site existed, but it had a banner that read “under construction” in a chintzy font that no successful marketing company would ever, in a million years, actually post. I figured he was exaggerating his accomplishments, which would make him no different from any guy I’ve met in a bar, ever.

But there were other weird things, too. Todd told me he had sold a reality television show to Mark Cuban’s HDNet, which is based in Dallas. His reality show was inspired by “Top Chef” (he was obsessed with cooking shows), but it was set in the Dallas strip clubs, which are ubiquitous around here. The concept was rather head-exploding: Strippers face off in a competition to open their own restaurant and thus leave behind their cash-strapped, pole-dancing days. The working title for the show: “Topless Chef.’”

This is the part of the story where my friends can’t stop laughing. They bang on the table they are laughing so hard. They say things like, “I can’t believe you fell for this!” And, “God, I always thought you were smart!”

First of all, I never claimed to be smart, particularly not in romance. Second of all, I know diddly about Mark Cuban’s HDNet, but “Topless Chef” sounds exactly like the kind of programming that would be purchased by an eccentric billionaire who owns the Dallas Mavericks and made a city of silicone and steakhouses his adopted home. Was it bonkers that I thought the show was kind of genius? Like, in a really evil way? When Todd told me that anecdote, I was not thinking, “This is completely made up,” I was thinking, “Can I really date the guy who invented ‘Topless Chef’?”

But then he canceled the date, and it all seemed so obvious. He was a complete phony. The pictures were fake. The little girl was fake. (What a convenient smoke screen, what brilliant chick-bait.) How could I be so stupid?

As the embarrassment subsided, though, I began to sense the flutter of a different kind of romance. After all, I am a journalist and a personal essay writer always on the lookout for new material, accustomed to shaping the hurt and disappointment of my own life in an attempt to tell some greater truth. As an online dating prospect, Todd was a flameout. But he had given me something just as thrilling, something I’ve chased for many years: I had a good story.

The next day Todd asked me on a sushi date for that Friday. I agreed, and we talked on the phone for the next three hours.

- – - – - -

I’ve never been an online stalker. I have friends who will cannonball into the deep end of Google for any prospective date, but I am far more interested in the crackle of our conversation, the speed of my heart when we are sitting across the table from one another. Maybe it’s because there is so much dirt online about me — my drinking problem, my credit issues, the time I accidentally sent a promotional email to 900 people — I tend to be uninterested in what’s available on anyone else. Still, I had to make an exception for Todd.

I didn’t find much. He was, indeed, a leading soccer scorer at that college in New York. But all other roads went cold. I was excited to come across an actual picture of him from the society pages of a local magazine — finally, confirmation of his real appearance — but the link was broken, so that the photo only displayed a tiny blue question mark. How poetic.

I popped his phone number into one of those “people finder” search engines advertised all over the Internet. (“Find everyone and anyone!”) When it came up registered to his mom, I fell down the rabbit hole. I spent $50 and two hours on that site, excavating any shred of evidence on him I could find. A personal bankruptcy, a DWI. Then there was the part that chilled me. It listed “known aliases.”

My friends, of course, were hooked on this saga. They all had their own theories. He was a troll living in his mother’s basement. He was married. He was an alcoholic who spent his evenings in fantasy land with women he met online. I did not usually tell my friends about the “known aliases” because I knew it showed an extraordinary lack of caution on my part to find out that information and go on a sushi date with this guy anyway. Any person in her proper frame of mind would have called it off. Indeed, she would have pushed the ejector button long ago. On this count, I can only say that I believed this story would be incomplete if I failed to meet Todd in person. But also, since giving up drinking, I have been drawn to risk in surprising ways. I have come to crave the flood of adrenaline, the lump in the throat. (As one friend recently told me, “You really need to start jumping out of airplanes.”)  But there has long been a part of me chasing a bad romance, wondering how close my hand can get to the flame.

It didn’t matter, though, because Todd canceled our sushi date that day. His text message came at 3:30, right after I’d blown out my hair: “May day may day u may kill me. I have a 102 degree fever.”

So that’s when I called and told him I didn’t believe he was a real person. My heart was a kick drum, but my voice did not waver. It was fantastic. Todd was all over the map in that conversation. He sounded angry, and then wounded. He backpedaled from all of that and became apologetic. “If I weren’t so sick you know I’d be excited about seeing you tonight,” he said. “But I want the first time I meet you to be special.”

Oof, the nerve of this guy.

I spent that Saturday sifting through public records with the help of lawyer and cop and journalist friends. I also discovered — to my relief but also to my disappointment — that the “known aliases” were benign, probably nothing more than clerical errors, a name misspelled in a courtroom late at night and mistaken by a computer system as a nom de guerre.

As my attorney pal put it, “What you have on your hands is less of a criminal mastermind, and more of a garden-variety asshole.”

I figured I’d never hear from Todd again. Accusing a person of being an Internet fabrication has a way of dooming your friendship. But once again, I misjudged Todd. He emailed me on Sunday night, which I discovered following a date that had been fine, but a little boring: “I’ve been thinking about you,” it read.

I stared at my email for a long time, trying to figure out how to respond. “That’s funny,” I typed back. “I’ve been thinking about you too.”

- – - – - -

I made another date with him. A third date. This imbroglio was acquiring a disturbing meta-quality, like the moment in the reality TV show where the characters have stopped being themselves and are now existing purely for the camera. Everything I said had quotation marks. It’s good to “talk to you.” I’m glad your “daughter” is well.

But there was a twist, too: He actually did have a Facebook profile, and he friended me as we spoke on the phone one night. I paged through picture after picture of him with his little girl, and his short-haired, petite mother. I did not realize at the time that Facebook allows you to hide your profile so that it doesn’t come up on searches, and for the briefest second my certainty about him unraveled. How could I miss this? What else did I get wrong? I wondered if it was possible — if there was the teensy, tiniest possibility — that I was the one being duplicitous.

On the Wednesday morning we were supposed to meet for coffee, he texted me that a planning session for “Topless Chefs” was running late. Apparently it ran really, really late because he didn’t get out of that meeting until 6, when he told me the day had been a nightmare, but did I want to meet now?

Oh, what the hell, right? I told him I’d meet him in 30 minutes. He responded that, actually, it had been a helluva day. Rain check, maybe?

There is always a part of these real-life stories where the reader goes: This is ridiculous. This never happened. But I don’t know what to tell you. I wouldn’t make this up, because it sounds too preposterous: Who would believe that, after all this, he would still be trying to fool me? Who would believe that, after all this, I would still be responding?

I was spelunking deep in his Facebook account when my mother called that night. By then, I knew his friends. I knew his friends’ friends. One of his many pictures was from a local magazine’s society pages — the broken link that had eluded me online. And get this: It was the same picture he’d used in his dating profile. The ultimate reveal: He looked exactly like he said he did.

My mother sighed. “How much more time are you going to give this guy?”

I didn’t know the answer to that. I understood there was more to life than this man’s pathetic deceptions, but I needed to find something. I needed to get something. Some piece of information that would bring the whole sorry mess screaming into focus, like the last scene of “The Usual Suspects.” I had invested so much time and energy into this. Could I really leave so unsatisfied?

“He has a perversion,” my mother said. My mother is a therapist. “He likes to meet women online and see how long he can string them along. It gives him a thrill. What more do you need?”

Didn’t she get it? “I need to know why.”

“Sometimes ‘why’ is not a valuable question to ask,” she said. I hate it when my mom whips out heady little aphorisms like this. “People’s motivations point back into the past in so many ways — there’s usually not one reason why. And if there is one reason, chances are Todd doesn’t even know it.”

I knew she was right — about Todd, and about every other busted relationship I have tried to solve like the end of an Agatha Christie novel. I was always searching for some moment when it would all make sense. Why he did this, and not that. Why he liked her, and not me. I was always in search of the smoking gun. But real detectives rarely find a smoking gun. Real life rarely comes with neat and tidy explanations. It is a hopeless tangle of confusion and desire and mysteries left unsolved.

“So what do I do?” I asked my mother.

“You get on with your own life,” she said. “And you never speak to him again.”

It was a relief to discover how quickly Todd collapsed into an anecdote. For a while, I told everyone about the huckster I met online. And then I told no one, because with time and perspective came a certain humiliation. What had I been doing?

One Saturday morning, I dashed into the grocery store a few miles from my house for cat food and coffee when my eyes were snagged by a handsome guy in the checkout line. He was holding his little girl in his arms, an adorable blond toddler I recognized from dozens of photos, and she was playfully batting his head with a stuffed animal.

There was no doubt about it. It was Todd.

He was as handsome as his photos, although his eyes had tired gray circles around them. I watched him call over to his mother in the line beside him. I recognized her from photos, too.

I stood there, slack-jawed, unable to move. I could not shake my disbelief. What were the chances that I would run into him like this? In a city of a million people? In a checkout line on Saturday? I wondered if I should say something. I wondered what on earth that would be.

He was playing with his little girl on the coin-operated rocking horse near the exit doors when I finally left with my grocery bags. I saw him look up, but I don’t know if he saw me, or recognized me. I could not stand to look at him. I passed him as if he were just another stranger. And I guess, in a way, he was.

The song I loved the most on that tape was “Didn’t We Almost Have It All.” Fourth song, first side. I would perform the song to the wall, then rewind it and perform it again. Play, rewind, repeat. I can still hear the squiggle of the tape in my head as I pressed on the jam-box button just long enough to find the song’s opening once more. This is a lost art in the age of the iPod, but back then, knowing how many seconds to rewind a cassette was a sign you truly understood its rhythms. You had literally learned the music backward and forward.

“This again?” my brother would ask as the tinkling synthesizers kicked in. My brother was a metalhead, who loved the righteous anger of AC/DC and Judas Priest and did not give a rip for the likes of Whitney Houston.

He did not get a choice in the matter. Here is how the song begins:

Remember when we held on the rain, the nights we almost lost it?

Once again, we can take the night into tomorrow

Living on feelings, touching you I feel it all again

It’s a bit mundane, frankly. It’s a fill-in-the-blank tale of a broken relationship. Funny how every love story sounds the same but feels so different when you’re inside it. That’s the poignancy of love stories, I guess. You’re never alone. Then again: You’re never unique.

But this song is all about the chorus. It is a song constructed almost entirely of its irresistible chorus — half a dozen times in less than five minutes — and the chorus launches a mere 45 seconds in. No foreplay, no footsie under the table, no lingering glances and sighs. This song grabs you by the collar and sticks its tongue down your throat.

It’s a really fantastic chorus, by the way. It’s OK to sing along:

Didn’t we almost have it all, when love was all we had worth giving?

The ride with you was worth the fall, my friend. Loving you makes life worth living.

At 12 years old, I had never been in love. I had never even kissed anyone. And so it’s peculiar that I experienced this song so powerfully. The agony. The crashing emotion. The ka-pow of it all. Why did I feel it so intensely? What was it teaching me? I wonder if all these songs of woe and regret didn’t warp my sense of romance. I wanted to grow up and fall in love, but more to the point: I wanted to grow up and lose that love, because that’s when the real drama began. I understood, even then, the delicious pain of being brokenhearted.

The chorus returns, a little different this time:

Didn’t we almost have it all, the nights we held on till the morning?

You know we’ll never love that way again. Didn’t we almost have it all?

This song climaxes so quickly. Not even a minute into it, and we’re already basking in Whitney’s vibrato, the glorious burst of sustained sound that would become her signature. The woman could push a note like nobody else, squeeze it and feel it up till the listener wanted to cry for mercy. But when you peak this early, it’s hard to know where to go next. The excitement is unsustainable, and for the next three minutes the song will throw out its back trying to one-up itself — a series of elevated key changes, strings atop swell. The song wants you to know the singer is bleeding.

For the moment, though, it pulls back. Whitney’s voice grows subdued. We get more of the back story, which, naturally, is like every back story we’ve ever heard.

The way you used to touch me felt so fine

Kept our hearts together, down the line

A moment in the soul can last forever, comfort and keep us

Help me bring the feeling back again.

I can understand why people hate Whitney Houston. I mean, these lyrics are dreck. It’s cooler to love the big, dirty riffs of Van Halen, the gritty excess of Guns N Roses. But I still find the stadium ballads of the mid-1980s strangely moving. The REO Speedwagon, the Air Supply, the Chicago, the Bryan Adams. The cheesy, lighter-held-aloft songs. They are not clever. They are not sly. They have the temerity to be earnest and unblinking, nothing but a desperate plea to be loved. Like a boyfriend who dims the lights and scatters rose petals in the bathtub. Please, baby, come back to me.

Or, as Whitney Houston sings it:

Didn’t we almost have it all? When love was all we had worth giving?

The ride with you was worth the fall, my friend. Loving you makes life worth living

I finally did fall in love in my sophomore year. He was sweet like my father, charming like my older brother. I still adore him. We drove around in his Chevy Nova listening to David Bowie and Elvis Costello. I began to understand that Whitney Houston was bad and not to be encouraged. We made fun of “I Will Always Love You,” the No. 1 song that would not go away in 1992, the year we graduated. We wanted to stab that song with knives; we wanted to punish it somehow. We were not the only ones turning on Whitney. That was the year Nirvana hit. Culture was edging away from the light and toward the dark, and there was Whitney in the video for “I Will Always Love You,” singing her heart out in the middle of an empty winter landscape as Kevin Costner walked away.

My boyfriend and I broke up at the end of high school, and I secretly bought the cassingle to “I Will Always Love You.” I listened to it in my bedroom, over and over. Nothing could touch the pure emotion of that song. I listened to “Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” too, and it was exactly the comfort I wanted, like pulling an old teddy bear off the shelf and cradling it in your arms as you cried.

Didn’t we almost have it all? The nights we held on to the morning?

You know you’ll never love that way again. Didn’t we almost have it all?

“Didn’t We Almost Have It All” is a good breakup song because it grows temperamental. It’s not just a lament. It’s a bit of a tantrum. It’s all so unfair, Whitney is telling us. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. We had it all, and then we did not. How could that possibly happen?

And I like this part, the growl in Whitney’s voice, like she is stomping her foot.

Didn’t we have the best of times, when love was young and new?

Couldn’t we reach inside to find the world of me and you?

We’ll never lose it again. Cause once you know what love is, you’ll never let it end.

After college, I stopped paying attention to Whitney Houston. I guess a lot of people did. There was a reality show, and crack, and debasement that defied easy explanation. It was easy to shove it off on Bobby Brown — the controlling spouse, the bad influence — but she was the one who stayed with him. The reality show made her seem coarse and a little bit mean. When she told Diane Sawyer that “crack is wack,” it was like she was participating in her own satire. This was unanticipated. Crack addicts were not supposed to look like Whitney Houston.

The thing is, I’ve met other crack addicts since then, and they don’t look the part either. That might be the one characteristic they have in common, other than an addiction to smoking crack. I never did drugs; I was a boozehound, a pure-bred lush. But I understand that you have to keep pushing to get the same feeling. You level out, and so you need more. You level out again, and you need more again. Play, rewind, repeat. It’s not just the crack or the booze that destroys people. It’s the always needing more.

I once heard drug addiction described as nostalgia. Chasing the perfection and the abandon of that first time.

Didn’t we almost have it all? The nights we held on to the morning.

You know you’ll never love that way again.

I was reading a book about Marilyn Monroe when I heard that Whitney Houston had died at the age of 48. Monroe’s is the ur-diva downfall, and these tragedies have elements in common: Drugs, a questionable taste in men, the inability to live up to a public persona, success like a rocketship. And they had beauty, of course. Uncommon, breathtaking beauty.

Earlier that afternoon, I had been taking a walk with a friend. I am 37, she is a little older, perhaps 39. We were talking about how hard it is for gorgeous women to age, because they get too accustomed to the oxygen of male desire. One of the good things about never being the best-looking woman in the room is that you never have to stop being the best-looking woman in the room. It is a dangerous game to base your meaning and self-worth on other people’s admiration, because it will inevitably recede, and I don’t think anyone would understand that better than Whitney Houston. It must be agonizing to hold the world’s attention in your palm, and then to feel it slowly drain away.

Didn’t we almost have it all?

After I learned about Whitney Houston’s death, I went searching for this song on YouTube. It is such a corny song, I know, but it made my heart pound nonetheless. I love it completely, without reason, the way you feel about a high school sweetheart, the way you feel about a drug, the way you feel about a song you loved when you were dumb and splendid and 12 years old.

I listen to songs over and over again. I have always been like this. I asked my mother, who is a therapist, why I did this, and she said maybe I was trying to unlock a song’s mystery, to master it in some way.

And I do notice different things every time I hear this song. I notice a quiver in the voice, a breath, a pause. I notice how the song ends by asking the same question twice, different each time. First it is defiant. Then it is sad and vulnerable.

Didn’t we almost have it all?  the song asks. And I don’t know the answer to this question. So I press repeat, and listen to it once more.

The next morning, I walked out to the car to head to my friend’s house when I discovered where my iPhone had been all night — lying face-up on the driveway, inches from the driver-side door of my car, water still pooled on its black screen.

An iPhone suicide.

I thought I could save it. A friend who once dropped his iPhone in the sink told me rice sucked out the moisture, though it could take a while. I cradled the little guy in my hands and rushed it to the ICU of my kitchen, where I nestled it in a bowl filled with brown rice. (Nice to know that brown rice was good for something.) As the days passed, it languished, unblinking, in its starchy bed — and my life without an iPhone began.

This is not one of those uplifting stories in which the author disconnects from technology but finds meaningful connection with the people in her real life. I’m not all that addicted to my iPhone, and it has never deterred me from long, deep conversations with other humans. This is also not one of those screeds wherein I tell you what a hideous, overhyped device the iPhone is. To be honest, I think the iPhone is the single greatest piece of equipment I have ever owned, and though I was reluctant to buy one, it took mere minutes to determine that I held in my hands the stuff of which history was made. No, this is a story about giving up an iPhone — or trying to, anyway — because the cost of keeping one had just become too high. That was my problem: I loved my iPhone, but I could no longer afford it. It was too much phone for me. I was like one of those homeowners sinking into debt, realizing too late they are heaping money into a sinkhole to pay for a life beyond their reach.

This is about my iPhone foreclosure. It didn’t exactly go as planned.

It made sense, in 2008, for me to buy an iPhone. I was an editor who needed to check email often during the day and work on-the-go. I liked the way the iPhone looked, and what it said about me. It telegraphed to strangers that I was tech-savvy and fashionable and high-powered (though I was none of those things). But if I’m honest, I was also afraid of slipping into irrelevance. There is an anxiety in this hyper-connected digital age that you must adapt to new technologies — or you will perish. You’re not on Twitter? Enjoy your life as a dinosaur. You don’t use Facebook? Welcome to 1988. And so I took a big cannonball dive into my fancy two-year contract and wished for the best.

But problems began to emerge. Not with the iPhone itself — but with me. For all my phone’s superpowers, for all its techno razzle-dazzle, I knew relatively little about how to use it. I texted, sure, and I could set the alarm. But I would guesstimate that I learned 10 percent of the iPhone’s functions, maybe even less. It’s like I had a magic wand in my purse, and I was using it to scrape glass off the windshield.

In July, when I reupped to my iPhone 4, I actually carved out an entire afternoon to figure out the sucker. But that afternoon came, and I was less interested in reading CNET stories than I was in listening to Marc Maron podcasts, one after the other, which I actually just streamed from my laptop. The iPhone might be capable of changing the world, but alas, it can’t change me. There is nothing I find more deadly dull than an instruction manual. If I can’t figure it out by tapping around for 10 minutes, it ain’t gonna happen.

There were other issues, too. My having an iPhone was like driving an elegant horse-drawn carriage in the demolition derby. Mere weeks after purchase, I was texting as I walked past an elementary school one morning when my shiny new phone tumbled out of my hands and landed on the sidewalk with an unmistakable crunch. Little kids passed by me as I literally stomped my foot on the ground and said, for perhaps the first time in my life, “Oh fudge. Oh fudgety fudge.” My gleaming, flawless companion now had a split right up its middle with two branches coming off it, like a line-drawn tree.

After I moved to Texas and shifted into part-time work, my iPhone bills started to climb. Frankly, they were staggering. I switched plans, but the next month the bill was even bigger. This was a problem, because financially, I didn’t have much wiggle room. A year ago, I paid off and cut up several credit cards — a slow crawl back from when they were maxed out, at 29 percent interest — and I only purchased items with the money in my bank account, as opposed to simply purchasing items with the magical thinking that money would appear somewhere down the line.

I was still trying to scheme a way to pay those massive iPhone bills when the poor guy drowned himself outside, and I had to wonder: Why was I holding on to this thing anyway? Why was I going broke for a piece of equipment I didn’t even know how to use? Since I’d started working from home, the only thing I really used my iPhone for was to talk. And that’s the one function where the iPhone isn’t all that great. I’m not just talking about dropped calls. Have you ever tried to hold the iPhone against your ear for long periods of time? It’s like cuddling with a curling iron. The iPhone is for typing, for deep dives into Internet underworlds, for home videos and schedule management and working from the back of a taxi cab and tweeting quips about a ham sandwich to your 2,000 followers. If you want to lose three hours chatting with your friend on a Monday night — not so much. And that’s too bad. Because as the world grows more digital, an ever-percolating mix of emoticons and instant messages, I find myself drawn toward the warm sound of someone else’s voice in my ear. Skype is just not my bag; I resent any device that draws attention to my shiny forehead.

So that was it: I had to give up my iPhone. It felt good just to say it. It gave me a jolt of consumer rebellion. I fired up my old iPod nano and pulled my cracked old second-gen iPhone out of the drawer to see if it still took pictures (it did). See, I didn’t need a fancy new iPhone after all! I could make my own smart phone out of the misfit tools I already owned. I felt so practical, so boldly against the grain. I was leading a charge away from high-priced must-have doodads and back into the calm waters of clunky flip phones. I was going to save so much money. I was going to make a statement. My phone wouldn’t say, “Ooh look at me, I have an iPhone!” It would say, “My phone doesn’t define me. Also, I’m working part-time.”

But the powers that be don’t make it easy to give up your iPhone. In fact, they make it very very hard. When I arrived at the AT&T store, brimming with pluck, I was met by a friendly employee, his hair gelled into a perfect triangle.

“You know, thanks to a one-year warranty, you could purchase another iPhone for just $200,” he said.

“That’s OK,” I said, smiling. I did not feel like explaining to him that a proper “warranty” would not involve paying the exact same amount you did in the first place. I did not feel like complaining to him about the injustice of the Apple empire, because I had a plan. “I’ve decided to downgrade to the flip phone for the rest of my contract. You can just give me your cheapest one.”

He began to shift on his feet. His eyebrows started to flutter. “But those flip phones cost $200, too. Because you’re not eligible for a new contract.”

Wait, what? I had not anticipated this. It had never occurred to me that anyone would have the gall to charge $200 for a piece of machinery that was roughly as current as the horse and buggy. Shouldn’t they be giving those away on the street to homeless people? “So wait,” I said, trying very hard not to be That Customer, though my strained voice hadn’t gotten the memo. “Those clunky old flip phones cost as much as another iPhone would?”

He nodded. It was silent, except for my sighs. “You could look on Craigslist,” he said finally. “If you find an AT&T branded flip phone for sale, you could use that.”

Great. Just what my afternoon didn’t need — freaking Craigslist. Now I was going to have to drive 60 miles into the suburbs to buy a Samsung that had been jacked from some poor old lady.

I rubbed my forehead. “How much would it cost to just cancel my contract?” I asked.

“$250.”

Oof. This revolution was getting awfully inconvenient. I had to wonder: How much did I want to pay for freedom from my iPhone? Would I be saving that much money in the long run?

Earlier that afternoon, I had dumped my old iPhone in my purse. Not the one that died, but the one I shoved in a drawer last July when I upgraded to my fancy new widget. I had this idea that I’d use it to take pictures from now on. It was clunky all right, the bottom half of the screen so shattered it practically turned everything into abstract art. I wasn’t certain if I wanted to keep using it. But I knew I needed to get a cellphone — some kind of cellphone — today. Like, now. And so I sucked it up, and set it on the counter.

“And how much would it be to just power this up again?” I asked.

He smiled and clapped his hands together. “I could do that for you for free.”