Violence

He was a beautiful person in many ways. The woman who finally saved me from him got upset if I described a “monster” such as he as beautiful, but it’s true. There was something in him of the sleek, silver trains that sped us across Europe... His cheekbones were sharp as knives. He was a very fast thinker. A champion debater, he could weave delicate arguments out of huge blocks of information in minutes…sometimes seconds. He was tall and powerful but he hated his size and fantasized about being dainty. He told me that in his mind it was reversed--he was the little one and I was big. Like your mind, he said. I felt flattered, as the only compliments he gave to other people were about their clothes. We went to cafes and bars and drank for hours. He’d sit hunched over in a chair, his long white bangs in his blue-white eyes as he ran his magnifying glass over what everbook he was reading. He wore an ancient black leather jacket that smelled like cigarettes and scuffed-up black doc martens and a ratty, punk rock blue and black scarf, silver eye shadow and button down shirts with thick, cuffed sleeves to hide his wrists that were covered with scars.

He was ambitious…there, as I floundered in those first weeks at Oxy-Foxy we became friends and he taught me what it really meant to play to win in the business of academia.

I had what it took. The question was whether I wanted it bad enough. Of course, I did not. I wanted other things instead, but i saw philosophy as something important towards getting them.

We read photocopies of Foucault and then wandered outside for air. Sometimes the flannel-thick English mist covered the stars and streetlights, until even the dreaming spires themselves fell into a deeper, more deathlike slumber, and there was no one out on the streets except us and the ghosts.

I didn’t worry cuz he could see in the dark.

He could see into the heart of the heart of a situation.

His blind-white gaze slicing apart everything in its path—





angst is so hot right now.