In response to Veracity Flog.

It's never what you think it's going to be, & that is doubly so when you aren't certain of something to begin with.

"This is childish. You're so concerned with having the last word, aren't you?"

It's not as much as I wanted the last word as much as I wanted there to be no more words. How could someone I had only known for a few weeks rankle me so badly that I wished for a shelf of tchotchkes I could knock down in one fell swoop. So I also wish I had hardwood floors instead of this remnant carpeting. Brown can hide a multitude of sins, but the nap will absorb your energy without making a sound to show for it.

While I half-listened to Wallace rant on about my decidedly— to him— puerile behavior, I searched in my head for signals that I may have missed along the way which would have indicated that it was going to unfold like this. A mutation in the genetic structure that made this pairing unsound & would have eventually meant cancer. It was there all along, but it was too small to notice until things went south suddenly. The symptoms picked up speed at a breathtaking clip, like a shiny thoroughbred approaching the first gate.

I could live without any of this. The tedious graciousness of listening to someone I'm barely familiar with dissect my personality made my bones ache. It's not as though any of us is beyond admonishment, but how often do we get to receive it from someone we know socially who doesn't even know an eighth of our lives? An eighth of an understanding of me is all I'm asking. Can't this task be reserved for those who have seen me through much more than some tacos & a magic show?

I think I used to feel things more for people to this over-the-top degree. I remember taking a bus across town in the pissing rain to see a boy seven years ago. I was wearing a thin coat that didn't do much other than make it appear as though I was covered when I was suffering from about the same amount of exposure as I would without it, & a pair of flats I knew would fill from puddles & never be the same. My father would not approve of such an impractical choice of footwear, & I would think to a pair of pink sneakers he insisted I wear in 1993. The flats were not the same after that- the leather lost some luster, & the stress wrinkles were slightly puffier. It was worth it, to give up a few more months with those shoes that I had to work five hours to pay for just to have seen the expression on the face of that person who took me in & appreciated my effort. That expression might have been the entire point of our relationship. This memory, stood on its own, does suffice for me, after all that was said & done.

I would not do that any of that now. Now, I would expect someone to meet me at some halfway point, & if it rained, I would just wear boots. I have more sense & less abandon, & I couldn't expect Wallace to understand this. Had he an inkling of twenty-three-year-old me, she would be his preference. She was volatile & self-sacrificing to a fault; these days, I try to be more measured. She spent the last of her paycheck to fly to be with someone for only four days. I no longer cringe when I look back on it, but I cringe to think of those missed signals that stated in all capitols not to board that plane, absolutely so.

Baudrillard says we find the value of something in the differences from other somethings, and the value of Wallace & that of myself was decidedly stark. It had all been a process of elimination is all, & the code for protein in a fruit fly is going to be the same code that is within us. You start with the similarities until you find the fork. Now I veer left, you go right.

I knew I had arrived at the part of the fork where I could no longer see him going his other way as I listened to him start a yarn on a yogi. His tone took that of a substitute teacher trying to endear himself to a class full of children who regarded him with mild contempt for being so unfamiliar. It made me squirm, but I was too curious about how he was going to bring it home to cut him off. "It was a gift to know this yogi." Yogi what, I was dying inside to ask, but something in me said that maybe he never knew a yogi, that this yogi was a means to illustrate a point I hoped for him to arrive to faster. "The yogi was always performing acts of charity, & while he improved a lot of lives with his acts-" 'his acts'? He's saying this like he's giving a eulogy. OH WAIT, I get it, this IS a eulogy, which means the end is so close you can nearly grasp it like a fruit dangling near your reach! You've grazed its skin, so you know at some angle, some way, it will be yours!

"...while he improved a lot of lives with his acts, there was something in his...his manner...it...it just didn't sit well with me. Like...like there was this egotism to his charity. I respected what he did, but I just felt a certain impersonal, kind of detachedness from him." I felt this hotness spread through me, like phantom hives as I began to understand the parallel he was drawing. It was too late to stop him because my curiosity, as it is wont to do, had already dug its dirty claws into me. Apparently the faithful way I cling to my personal truth is off-putting to the lad in such a way that I throw off some kind of chill. I'm a freezer, preserving my hermetically-sealed notions, & when opened up I will emit some arctic blast that compels those well-intentioned, warm-bodied men curious about my insides to slam me shut after some minor investigation. Brace yourselves boys, she's a frosty one!

The end came before I saw it. His tone shifted from grotesquely ginger to warp speed so quickly it could snap a calf's neck. "Itwasnicewhileitlastedgoodbye," call ended. His was the low-hanging fruit of the last word, that acerbic, wormy little crab apple of a thing. I walked into my bathroom to watch myself laugh in the medicine cabinet mirror, laughing more when I noticed how big my teeth look.