The day I discover I’ve been catfished, I walk into the local library because I don’t know where to put myself. I am bewildered. Wander among the books. A white police officer is talking to a Black security guard. On my way out, I hear him ask, “Do you want to file a criminal charge?” I don’t hear the answer.

It’s teeming with rain as I walk up Bathurst Street, loud with cars. A bus splashes, and I jump out of the way. A man chuckles behind me, and I jump again, but this time a yell comes out. I’m more than a little startled: I’m like a thermometer on an oven shot to five hundred. I turn to see a young man and a woman, enjoying each other.

Walking, it’s easy to see how angry I am, how fragile. A woman slams her car door and I jump. A man picks up his dog’s poop from a lawn, leaving his thermos on the sidewalk, and I want to kick it over. I see my reflection in a store window, my steps tentative as though I am about to step in mud or cross a river and need to find the solid stones.

“This is like a trauma,” I think. And later, “Maybe not like .” In bed that night, I keep putting my hands on my body to make sure I’m still here. “No control,” I repeat, a teaching I’ve been trying to learn through many years of meditation practice to no effect. But now. No control.

“You can’t magic yourself out of the situation,” wrote Iris Murdoch. “You’ve got to live it as decently and grimly as you can.”

We are vulnerable, porous. I opened my heart to a man I met online, and he reached into it as into a dryer for a lost sock.

He said it was a nine-hour shift on the construction site, and then again from midnight to four a.m., and I asked, “How do you do it?”

“I eat a lot of food,” he said, “and keep hydrated. I try to rest.”

“You’re sixty-one,” I said. “Do you know your l im its? ”

“If I didn’t, I’d be dead,” he answered.

It’s hardly dawned, but I’m ready for this feeling to be over. A woman in the farmers’ market with the sun in her eyes says, “It’ll move. That’s the joy of living on a rotating earth.”

Writers like me, who have made themselves vulnerable in poem after poem for thirty years, have honed their courage into a kind of bravado. It can become a wooing factor for readers and publishers, a “Wait-tillyou-see-this!” I’m prepared for rejection, surprise, appreciation, even scorn, but not manipulation.

I told him I’d have a new book published in the fall. There’d be a book launch. “I’d love to go to that!” he said.

He was not rock-star good-looking but had an interesting face. A long nose. Warm eyes. The first pictures he sent were of him and his twenty-five-year-old daughter with the same eyes and bad teeth.

He did not tell me I am beautiful. I am not. He told me I have a beautiful smile. Which I do. He did not tell me he loved me. It would have been too much. For me. He texted, “You are in my thoughts.” He titrated his responses like a therapist—but better, because no ethics were involved.

I am familiar with those ethics and kinds of responses because I was a therapist. I was an addictions counsellor in a residential treatment centre for women, women who’d had their trust eroded. But for whom is trust not an issue? I worked with people in crisis, in despair. No one’s there because they’re feeling a little bad. They’re there because it’s unlivable.

When I was a therapist at a university, if a student came for a letter of support for accommodations and I didn’t know them, I’d write “X told me she has been anxious and overwhelmed.” Or, “Z describes a low mood and difficulty performing ordinary tasks.” I wrote each letter with care, using the student’s words as much as possible. This is how I am telling you this story.

He sent me a selfie in a hard hat with a headlamp from the midnight shift.

“Night vision,” I said.

“Yes,” he wrote, “safety is important.”

At that point, I’d begun to care. He was on a construction site at night, and I wrote, “I worry about you. Construction sites are riskier than poetry retreats.”

He answered, “I’m scared every day I go to work, though I feel positive.” I was shocked that he shared his fear so easily.

I wrote, “It makes sense. You’re awake. This danger is real.” That was the first text of mine that he put a little heart on, that acknowledgment of his fear and his self-care, that bit of empathy. He put a heart on empathy.

The day before everything fell apart, or came together, the word evil entered my vicinity. It’s not a word I ever use. The sound makes me cringe: eeeevl. It goes into the darkest place of my imagination and has no face. I’d banished it. Call me lucky or naive.

A friend told me about having dinner with some other women, all in their eighties and nineties. An acquaintance spoke animatedly of her granddaughter: “She’s evil.” She repeated this over the course of the dinner, with few details. Tears came to my eyes when my friend told me the story. What grandmother calls their own grandchild evil? Was she torturing kittens? Without elaboration, I was left with the mystery of the word.

A few days after discovering what happened to me, I went for a walk. It was a beautiful spring day. The city had had its tulip moment, and they were falling out of themselves into the earth. I passed my favourite yard: it has a small koi pond that I wait for all winter, when it’s cold and covered. Now the water was pouring down through a space in the rocks, and the orange-yellow fish were swimming. Could fish be evil?

He sent a photo of his house, yellow tulips at their peak.

What happened? Must I tell you? If I do, I may never be able to look you in the face after. Clients do that: they share the full load of trauma and don’t come back. The surprised therapist says, “But they were so engaged!” Exactly. Then the ripples of reality gather into a riptide, and they’re flooded with shame.

When I wrote first, saying, “I like your face,” he responded, “I love the honesty!” I’d been starved for an expressiveness as expansive as mine. And when we spoke on the phone, he asked about my poetry. I told him one of the things I do is write poems for others. I listen until the poem comes. “A bit like therapy,” he said. I answered that I’d been a therapist. I felt him get it.

The next morning, he called at 7:15 a.m. 7:15! My ringer was off. He texted, “I wanted the first voice you heard to be mine.” Freaked me out. I saw myself as the emoji with wide scared eyes and paused.

Then I wrote, “Wow, that’s fast intimacy. Shakes me up a bit. But I kind of like it.” Raw and true.

He wrote, “It shook me up too. But it felt right.” Mirroring is profound communication.

Ah, I’m nauseated writing this now; should I go on? Maybe I’ll go for a walk in the sun. I will press my face into the lilac tree. Work not to dissolve in fugue. Note the blue sky and whatever it is that experiences shame and sadness and bleakness too. That carries everything. The lilac helps.

I dream of Michaela Coel’s Bella, a writer reassembling her dismantled life after a rape, in the series I May Destroy You. I remember an article in the Globe and Mail by Canadian novelist Barbara Gowdy, who ran all over town gathering money for an emergency that turned out to be a fraud. If even her, if even them—I need to give my shame a break.

One morning in the first week of our connection, he phoned and, when I answered, asked if I’d been expecting his call. “No,” I’d said, “but glad.” I am slow to open. I am careful.

“It’s good to be wanted,” he said. We hadn’t met. We never met. Then I realized he was calling me in. Asking if I wanted him. “I want to know we’re on the same page,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, opening instantly, shifting from first gear to fourth. And there we were. Or there I was in an imaginary We. Feeling his empathy, I talked to him as though he was a person, not just a person impersonating a person. He talked to me like he was buttering toast.

He sent me photos of the construction site, the building, the crew. The heavy machinery. “I love all that stuff,” I said. “Architecture, construction sites. Would you like to see a piece I wrote on cement trucks?”

“I’d love to,” he said. And after I sent it: “It is a masterpiece.”

“Did you notice the photograph in the WhatsApp profile?” he said. “It’s the building I’m building in Cyprus, a luxury hotel. We had to put it on hold during COV I D, so I’m working from home now.” His wife had died five years ago from cancer. His daughter was visiting from Australia and was going to be there for a few weeks. He was very close with her, he said.

After the first few calls, I suggested we meet. “I’d like to wait till my daughter goes back,” he said. On the sixteenth, Sunday.

On the sixteenth he called. “They’ve emailed me from Cyprus. I have to go back. They started building again and want it done now. I’m leaving on the eighteenth.”

I was shocked. Okay. I spoke to him that night again. He sounded odd. Was he sleeping? Drunk? His profile said he rarely drank. “How are you?” I asked, trying to understand what I was hearing.

“I’m very sad my daughter went back today.”

On Tuesday I wrote, “Are you packed?”

“I’m ready. I’m on my way to the airport. I’ll call you from there.”

From the airport he called me, sent a photo of him and his daughter. “The two of you are beautiful,” I said. I sent him a photo of me and my mother.

“I see where you get your beautiful smile from,” he said.

He sent a picture of the crew. He called and said he was talking to me from outside a coffee shop, where he was drinking a chai. I went down to Annapurna Restaurant on Bathurst Street and ordered one and sent him a picture of the cup. “I’m drinking a chai thinking of you.” I toasted him.

An elegant spiral staircase was being built, and a skylight sent a well of light through it.

Once, before he’d gone to Cyprus, I told him on the phone, “I don’t usually talk this much to a new person. Even when I’m in a relationship I don’t. I’m very solitary, you know.”

He said, “Oh.” Then, “No, you have to talk to me every day.” Yikes.

“Every day?” I said. “No, I don’t think that’s gonna work .”

I described how I live, how I write, and how I’m a bit of a loner but when I’m with someone, I’m really with them.

“I’m embarrassed,” he said. I couldn’t remember ever hearing a man be that honest that fast, that vulnerable.

I asked him then about previous relationships, the contact. He talked about his marriage, the closeness. I said, “I understand. You don’t need to be embarrassed. You had a different kind of life.”

He asked, “What should we do then?”

“Let’s go one step at a time,” I said.

“I like that,” he said.

In the middle of a meditation practice, I notice the light in my room. The trees outside. I am wherever that is. And this comes: The antidote to rupture is to stop trying to be continuous.

Either he was there in Cyprus, on that site, inside that face, or he’d found a cache of photos of someone else’s life and dripped them like an IV feed into our relationship. For it was that, a relationship.

Eventually, I called it a love affair, said it out shyly, delightedly to the few friends I told. I gave up trying to prevent disappointment, fully prepared not to like him in person but enjoying what we had now. As he, in the most Zen fashion, would say too, “I am enjoying us together.” And when, in a surge of caution, I’d say, “You know, we have to earn this intimacy all over again when we meet?” he’d answer, “Correct .”

I let myself run wild inside.

I thought I was going to take him to an art gallery.

I thought I was going to cook him some of those kielbasa sausages.

I thought I was going to wear my big jeans for him.

I thought we were going to go for ice cream.

I thought I would first meet him at the Amadeus Café, halfway between our houses.

I thought I’d get to see the tulips at his house.

He said he grew his own food and asked what I’d eaten for dinner. “Chicken and vegetables.”

“I love chicken and vegetables.”

The reservoirs of hope and fantasy run deep. Eventually the slot machine in my mind came up three jokers, but not until after I tried to make a transfer for him from an account that had twenty million dollars to an account that didn’t exist. (Who has twenty million dollars in an account? I don’t know. He’s an architect building a hotel, and that costs money, right? It’s amazing what you can ignore or rationalize.) He had won me. He had softened me like Play-Doh. And for his purposes, I was.

His acumen. His attunement. His vulnerability. How he responded to poetry, you wouldn’t believe. And the details: he was waiting for three shipments of building materials from China. The first had arrived (“Good news!” he wrote.) He paid the customs fee and had it delivered to the site.

Meanwhile I got COVID-19. Fainted three times one night, hitting the back of my head on the floor, my mouth on the edge of the tub. When I staggered to the bed, I thought of him. He who’d been bringing so much to my days. This man I hadn’t met. I almost but didn’t call. I told him the following day. “You held back!” he said playfully. Was I being deeply understood, or was he delighting in my being so close to needing him?

The second shipment comes. There’s a problem at customs: he’s exceeded his monthly limit at the bank and can’t transfer the money. I can feel a question coming for me. Two days later: Could I make the transfer? And I was in.

Toward the end of I May Destroy You, Bella has dozens of Post-it Notes up in her room. Each Post-it has a different piece of the story, and she rearranges them, adding to what happened to her until it makes sense. Trauma is like that: we are fragmented by the shock, and it is in the ability to see the whole that some sense of integrity begins to emerge again. Even if it keeps shifting. I’ve been writing this in fragments, and I forgot a piece.

I forgot to say, he’d greased the wheels for this request by asking a few weeks earlier if I’d simply check his account balance, how he couldn’t do it from there.

“Why not ask a friend?”

“I have friends, but no one I trust with this.” For three days, I hedged. I saw the red flag. No one had ever asked me to do anything with money before. But he wasn’t asking me to share my banking info; he was sharing his. So I did it, which brought me closer.

At my desk, I become efficiency on a sham webpage for the Polish Slavic Credit Union. I think he hears a different me. “Don’t fuck with me,” I say. I say this after I ask questions about what I’m seeing as I make the transfer, and he teases, wondering if I’m wearing my glasses. “I’m the daughter of a businessman,” I say. I can become my father in a moment’s notice. Sharp. Then: it’s the wrong account, and nothing happens. Nothing is transferred. But I’m still here, willing, waiting for the next instruction.

“I have to call my interpreter,” he says.

My friend Mary calls. Mary has been in on the adventure from the start. When I tell her what just happened, she says, “Ronna! The money!”

“No, no,” I protest, “not my money. He’s asked for nothing. These are all his numbers!”

Mary’s seen The Tinder Swindler. She says, “That is the method: to gain your trust he gives you his numbers, and when they fail, borrows yours. I fight and sink. I get off the call and look up “signs you’ve been catfished.” Tick, tick. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

In the Air

Let us have our unverified connections

and our uncharted intimacies.

Let us make our small republic in the air

where no one lives, between servers,

satellites, and equatorial poles.

Let us suffer the non-stop whispering

of our multilingual brain cells, our impulses

unpure and pulsing. Let us sleep in their pull,

in the assumption that we are not invented

but breathing. Let us wake up groggy in the rented

houses of our imagination, architectural fantasies

that arise in the night fully formed, but are broken into

by morning. We will do unspeakable acts here.

Our orbit is drunk in its spin, and sobriety comes

only in flashes. No one knows who we are.

We live in that freedom and peril.

Let the imagination be the beast it is

that eats and fattens on us.

But let us not believe a word it says.

I wrote this in the throes of my attraction. I cringe at the accuracy. He was invented! In spite of my intention to protect myself from entering the fantasy, I couldn’t. No control.

When somebody lies, presents themselves as another, lures you into a relationship, something breaks. Basic expectations are suspended. It’s like someone suddenly driving toward you on the wrong side of the road.

Joseph Brodsky, in a commencement speech, said, “In the course of your life you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what’s known as Evil. . . . You never see it crossing your threshold announcing itself: ‘Hi, I’m Evil!’” I laughed. Righto.

“Have you always had such an open heart?” I asked.

The world is rife with deception. Scams exist on an industrial scale. Ontario has an anti-fraud phone line. Please listen to the following options: If you lost money or are thinking of sending money, press one; for all others, press two. For scams regarding computer repair or virus protection, press one; for offers concerning a prize or vacation, press two; for pop-up messages with extortion scams, press three; phishing emails from the bank, four; for Canada Revenue Agency, five; fraudulent job offers, press six. There was no number for romance scams. The wait was long. I hung up.

I contact police, write to the bank he’d used as a front with his fake webpage, send a note to the dating app that hosted him. No one responds. No one is interested. There are simply too many of us.

The day I found out he was a crook, I wrote: “He’s not in your life; he grazed your life. A scrape that draws blood.”

Pharmaceutical firms continue selling drugs they know are addictive and lethal. Tobacco companies simply pay the fine and keep going. Governments feign reasons for invading and occupying other countries and depriving their own citizens of clean water. It’s like standing in a cloud of smoke you can’t see through until it moves, but you can feel it eating your lungs.

I thought he was a nice, empathic man who liked me. He was not. He was a predator.

When I tell my sister what happened, she claps her hand on her chest and listens. I can’t look at her. “My trust is fucked,” I say.

She says, “How do you resolve something like this?” She means internally.

“I don’t know,” I say. “You’re way too far ahead. I’m just trying to get through the nausea and shock.”

There is something disastrous about wanting your tormentor not to stop calling, even if you don’t answer. It means you’re not even halfway home. I change the ring on my phone so it doesn’t sound like him.

In the dream, my hands go straight through the wall I was leaning on. But oh, it had been glorious to lean briefly in the astonishment of my good fortune! People would pay to have that adventure. There’s always a cost.

A Catholic friend called it purgatory. I don’t have a name for it. I’ve been somewhere between Jewish and Buddhist for a long time. Now I’m somewhere with a really good tear in anything solid.

Religion, if you are born into one, gets in deep too. Whether you like it or believe it. It’s in the cells. At synagogue, there was the Aron HaKodesh. The cupboard of holiness. The ark. It’s where the Torah sits behind a curtain or small doors. Each Aron HaKodesh has its own design, but mostly they’re spare. A blue velvet curtain maybe, or dark wood doors. We would stand when a congregant opened it to take the Torah out. When the Torah was put back, we stood again until it was closed. When I was grown and began to have relationships, I had a dream, or a vision, that inside everyone’s chest was an ark of holiness where the heart is and that we should stand for each other when we open our hearts.

I attend a group meditation online, one I occasionally join. The teacher has been working through the thirty-seven practices of the Bodhisattva. The teacher begins today’s session with the third practice: “You must let go of bad friends,” he says. “By letting go of bad objects, disturbing emotions gradually decrease.” The teacher goes on to say he does not think there are bad people, only patterns in ourselves we need to interrupt.

My longing made me visible. I was like a big dog with my tongue hanging out the window of a station wagon. My patterns could be seen from a satellite. But I wonder if this teacher has ever looked in the face of evil. And if evil is what I was seeing. The word is a shadow. I only know that his presence was corrupted.

Everyone has their betrayals. Everyone also betrays. When I entered therapy in my twenties, the therapist said, “You will have to betray everyone.” What she meant was that people lean on you in a certain way, and when you decide to stand up, they may fall over. Writers too betray.

In her article “On Betrayal,” Dani Shapiro writes: “Writing is—as Joan Didion inimitably put it—‘the tactic of a secret bully.’ Writing about other people is, according to Janet Malcolm, ‘morally indefensible.’” I struggled with this. I said to my therapist, “But it’s not nice!”

“Writers aren’t nice,” she answered, which relieved me. Is there a difference between the “morally indefensible” writer and the catfisher? My betrayal was upfront. After I betrayed my family in print, to those who were willing to stay connected, I said, “Please don’t tell me anything you don’t want to see in a poem.”

I’m writing these bits as though they’ll get me somewhere. But every time I finish a paragraph and stand up to walk away, I mutter, “Fucker.” All the understanding and metaphors and attempts at understanding and analysis do nothing to mitigate that. Fucker.

I feel a puncture in me. In the idea of a me. All my projects are interrupted except for this writing. Suffering, groundlessness, and no self ? Aren’t these the marks of existence, according to Buddhist philosophy? When the face I thought was his became a mask and lost the spirit I’d infused it with, he was like a man who died. The man I made and who he wasn’t. And I deleted him.

Oh, my Buddha, my teacher, my catfisher. Wrathful one, clearer of obstacles, reminder for me to see now or I’ll have to see later. Cut and run, my dear old accountant used to say. Take your bath early. Get out while you’re ahead, while the going’s good. Blow this popsicle stand. Run for the hills. Get the fuck back into your body. Take your finger out of the light socket. Sell. Bang the gong, bang it. Mahakala was looking at me out of the eyes of a lover, saying, Get a move on, saying wordless things with his tongue out, flashing me with strobes of light, and I saw. My internet went down and came back on another circuit, and all the lights were green, and spring rearranged itself into summer with hundreds of arms, each one with a peony at the end opening with a hundred pink-and-red eyes that saw only this instant simultaneously, and I was in the seeing too.

I ghosted him.

Catfisher dharma. This is a deep and ruthless practice of waking up.

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RONNA BLOOM is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom, selected with an introduction by Phil Hall. In a Riptide was published with Brick Books in 2025. She is working on a collection of essays.