The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F_ck

and drunk an entire bottle of sake by herself. (In fact, she’s
about halfway through bottle number two now.) It’s four
o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon.
I didn’t invite her here. She found out where I was via the
Internet and flew out to come find me.
Again.
She’s done this before. You see, Erin is convinced that
she can cure death, but she’s also convinced that she needs
my help to do it. But not my help in like a business sense. If
she just needed some PR advice or something, that would
be one thing. No, it’s more than that: she needs me to be
her boyfriend. Why? After three hours of questioning and a
bottle and a half of sake, it still isn’t clear.
My fiancée was with us in the restaurant, by the way. Erin
thought it important that she be included in the discussion;
Erin wanted her to know that she was “willing to share” me
and that my girlfriend (now wife) “shouldn’t feel
threatened” by her.
I met Erin at a self-help seminar in 2008. She seemed like
a nice enough person. A little bit on the woo-woo, New Agey
side of things, but she was a lawyer and had gone to an Ivy
League school, and was clearly smart. And she laughed at
my jokes and thought I was cute—so, of course, knowing
me, I slept with her.
A month later, she invited me to uproot across the
country and move in with her. This struck me as somewhat
of a red flag, and so I tried to break things off with her. She
responded by saying that she would kill herself if I refused
to be with her. Okay, so make that two red flags. I promptly
blocked her from my email and all my devices.
This would slow her down but not stop her.
Years before I met her, Erin had gotten into a car
accident and nearly died. Actually, she had medically “died”
for a few moments—all brain activity had stopped—but she
had somehow miraculously been revived. When she “came
back,” she claimed everything had changed. She became a