The mosquitoes that weekend were horrible.  They ruined both our camping trip and our relationship. Making love while being wounded from all directions at all angles by vicious little cupids, a Valentine’s Day massacre. It didn’t help that the tent’s zipper had given out years ago, and I’d replaced it with Velcro strips every foot or so, leaving large gaps all the way around. It didn’t help that it was my tent, and I had neglected to mention the Velcro when we’d decided that one would do us fine. And it actually had gone fine, quite fine in fact, until the scouts for the mosquitoes found the gaps and tasted first blood. We slapped them away without thinking, until they returned with the rest of the Army.

We tried to escape by getting back into our clothes, but mosquitoes undeterred by a velcroed tent door  laughed off the futile gaps between buttons, between shirt tails and jeans, and collars and throats. We tried to escape by zipping up in our sleeping bags and pulling the drawstrings, but the mosquitoes found us there. Desparate, we bolted for the car, like Redcoats from Concorde, harried in our retreat by murderous, sniping swarms of Minutemen.

In the car, we slapped dead that ones that made it past the slamming doors. We swatted until the dash, the windows and windshield, the backs of the seats were specked with protoplasmic measles of our own blood. We snuggled down to endure the rest of the night. We got as comfortable as two people can get in a Prius, so much so I was thinking she’d forgiven me my Velcroed tent but, for the record, our relationship ended the instant I wiped a smashed mosquito off the dashboard, held it between us on the tip of my finger, and said, “Imagine, our blood commingled.”

“My tent! Our sleeping bags!” I said as she started her Prius.

“Screw your tent,” she said, and drove down that mountain into town, where she dumped me on the curb in front of my house at 3 AM, desolated, burning with red welts.

I tried to sleep, but the itching wouldn’t let me. I tried cortisone cream, and Benadryl, and uncounted shots of rye whiskey.  I lay writhing in bed, part from the itching, and part from shame. After giving me every chance, she’d found me wanting, not up to scratch. Except, after a sleepless hour, I was.

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