That first time you were at the apartment, I was what, 16? You showed me that irreverent humor which got you so many charm points. Too vulgar to say, not because I'm modest by rights but because of some perhaps-archaic respect for the dead. I was still broken by that loss, and you told me I could do better. I missed it, in that first real moment of relation: your capacity to bypass pain, love, connection for a view of human beings as commodities. A decade later, you would compel swooning art-drunk strangers and those who should have known better to swallow the obvious by playing maharaja at that fucked-up communal birthday party we convinced ourselves was an effort toward egalitarianism, but which really was just a cynical move toward the power dynamic you'd always been working on, like a feat of public engineering, wrapped up in red tape, eventuality and utter myopia. Like you were anything but guileless.
You're no savior, no prophet, no dream. You're an objectivizing shit who couldn't care less when someone worthy of the kind of oddness-worship you always cultivated loses everything in the woods, decades and miles away from your barest recollection. Fuck you and your scales of beauty, your metrics of entitlement, your libertarian sense of freedom which forgets others. I watched you wrestle your other to the floor. Did you think I was too drunk to notice? Did you mistake one vice for another, categorically different one? For all my self-destruction, I never destroyed someone else, not willfully, not without regret. Every misstep I've had the misfortune to recognize has grown like a barnacle on the lonely vessel of my life. Where are you, driftwood that you are? Why did the chaos of the universe float you my way? It's chaos, I can't look for reason. But when I wonder if I am cursed - when, during the darkest corners of the endless night, I give in to superstition - I do wonder about you most of all. That doubt is a sure thing, a certainty, a dream I cannot shake.
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