For our third date, we robbed a taco truck at gunpoint. I don't remember doing it. But I remember the run, the outskirts of the Costco parking lot, the teenagers chasing each other with a taser between the cars. My eyes tracking them while I passed. They never returned the stare.

It was the fastest I’d ever run, or the perfect illusion of it. Swells of empty grace filled my body, like foam, to my chin. There was nothing in time that I hadn’t already done. My muscles bent and flexed with the ease of worn leather. The wind was thick like water, like the womb, like the nectar of breath, like syrup for the hunger that had eroded my lungs all these sorry years.

We planned it beforehand. So, even in the white glow of amnesia I have this imagined memory. Where he squeezes my hand in line and I shift to the back of the truck. The blind sensation of fabric on my skin. I climb up on the hatch. Pick the door latch and let it drift open. He climbs up behind me and then I point the gun. We don't say anything when she screams. Just advance through the gap. Stay cool. We keep going til she gives us what we want. She knows what we want. Then we run. I don't remember doing it, but he tells me I was good.

After that day I decided I loved him. Not for the crime, but for the passion it revealed. For the way I could tell in this world of threat, he was a good person to have. I’m not sure if there is any true scandal in crime. Maybe there is no crime. Only things that have been criminalized. And thoughts that spit on angels. And moments on the precipice. In this way, none of us are criminals. Or all of us are. We might as well make it count. At least bring something back to our families.

We bought a fish tank with the money. It takes up the only table in his studio apartment. I spend every night there on the mattress kept awake by the incandescent neon glow and the low rumble of bubbles. We’re like a little family -- me and him and the three fish. I watch the ceiling shiver all night and wonder what I can bring back. I can time his drifting in and out of sleep by the way his fingers cease to run across mine, in the place between us where the hands are latched. It’s the first sign of life every morning, his fingers reading and re-reading the form of my hand.

In the afternoon I sit on his ancient, pilling carpet, while the flies come in and out since the window has no screen. I put my face up to the glass of the fish tank. He feels bad that the fish food floats up to the surface. He wishes he could just give it to them. Instead, they have to chase it.