After four long, hungry years, we met at a bench in Wash Park; we sat down and all we said was – but of course. We gave each other tapes of The Libertines and Polyphia, we sat in the sun and walked other people’s dogs. And we read, alongside dead cigarettes which we put out on a bad book, we read ravenously. When morning people walked by us we would stink from the night. We went to all the places where those bygone white people were young. Chelsea Hotel, Studios, galleries, Chess Forum, outskirts of Columbia, Prospect Park. We have walked out there so that their myths might become our own. We’d argue incessantly, living beyond anybody’s means. In the summer we’d slam doors on each other and storm away – we couldn’t decide what fruit liquor to make.

Well, the cherries rotted; and half the summer passed, us not talking; I and they apart. But then we were fine again. Summer after summer, we sat in apartments stolen, apartments where we were licking floors, fixing food, fucking the owners; then we graduated to apartments we rented for real, apartments blackmailed to us, littered with old pianos and jazz records and unread Wescotts and Baldwins. But 3 years past that, she threw the plates out of our window, & I stepped out of that room. I took a job with the railway. The last I heard, she was turning tricks still – talking about the book she was going to write, the people she knew at The Drift, the moody banker she was going out with, the new bunch of things she’s now taking at night. But I, I was on the cessant bed of things she’s never told anybody about. And of course, she wouldn’t remember, after all the glitter that’s been doused upon her, that we both began in a Hearts of Iron forum, two innocuous messages in the Discord channel, two faceless floods