The First Thing I Would Do With A Time Machine

**Editors' Note: Thomas Richter sent this guest post in today. We personally don't see anything wrong with being remembered for a harmless request such as he made, but then again..."

When I was younger I got engaged to a girl I had met online. Before I squandered my savings on a ring and asked her father if I could marry his daughter, I had met her in person just five times. She lived on the other side of the country and she believed in abstinence until marriage. I didn't, but I pretended I did. We talked on the phone constantly. Both of us were still in college.

About six months before we were planning to get married, she went to study abroad in Malta. I thought, who studies abroad in fucking Malta? Why Malta of all places in the world? She was majoring in child psychology, but most of the classes she was enrolled to take in Malta were about the Knights of the Templar. We said goodbye over the phone.

On her way to Malta, she called me from a payphone at the London Heathrow Airport and said, "Listen…I've been thinking." I've noticed that when people start parroting clichéd Hollywood script lines it's because they don't know how to go about saying something difficult. But I wasn't expecting her to say anything difficult, so I interrupted her and said, "Yeah. So have I. I know you don't want to have sex before marriage—and neither do I, believe me—but can we maybe try phone sex?" All I could hear on the other end of the line was the announcement of a departing flight in the background.

"I'm going to Malta," she said after a huge pause.

"Yeah, I know," I said. "I mean when you come back."

I saw a movie a while ago in which one of the main characters says authoritatively that the only reason girls go to Italy is to sleep with Italian guys. Same goes for Malta, apparently.

Even now, years later, I can't believe that happened. It's too much like a movie. I just wish it could have been more like a movie in which the last memorable thing a character says before getting dumped for the countless potential romantic encounters that an exotic island has to offer is not "Can we maybe try phone sex?"