She calls me Girl. I call her Mother. I’m talking to you girl. Girl are you listening. What goes on in that head of yours girl. I do not even smile when she says these things. She does not want to know what goes on my head. And I cannot tell her, you are my mother only on paper. Only in name. As Father is only my father on paper.

I am not their child. I am no one’s child. Jim is the only real family I have. We grew up together, and he knows all my thoughts and he sings them to me. We are fire and forest, serpent and tree. I can’t even recall a time before Jim. 

Father-on-paper lives across town, with a slim-hipped blond whose name I forget. “Twenty-something” is what Mother calls her. Abandoned us, she says, for Twenty-something. In truth she is thirty. And Father left Mother for many reasons.

I am not warm, or out-going or friendly. I am not friends with the girls in my school. They seem silly to me. Soap bubbles

Ah yes. Andrew Emory Tate, described by the mainstream media as a "controversial influencer", by which they mean "the fount of all misogyny everywhere", by a certain subset of terminally online people as the Messiah, and by sensible people (i.e. me) as a pathetic grifter who inherited a lot of wealth and multiplied it by running various scams online and selling his pseudo high roller lifestyle as proof that this works. However, that's not the topic that this writeup is

In the movie “The Postman Always Rings Twice”, Lana Turner stands with her hands on her hips and snarls at John Garfield: I used to think the reason I fell for you was because you were smart. Now I find out that you are smart, she says. It’s a really great line in a really great film. I mention it here apropos of nothing. Or everything maybe. I get those two mixed up all the time.

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"Everything is