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You’re always telling me I only ever do things because they will make good TV, or say things because I know they’ll make good lyrics later, or do things because I like the way I look doing them. You say it like I have a choice.
Leon held up his phone so that I could see the screen. He had just purchased “Spacebar” by NARKOTIKA (feat. Magdalene). He seemed happier than when I’d first met him, back when he was Larry.
I’m trying to save his life before it’s too late. Come with me, Leon. We shall walk away from this car, you and I. We shall find fro-yo and make the world better.
“I can’t change,” he replied. It crushed him.
Things that you could stick a needle in without it getting angry.
That’s seven years in dog years or L.A. time.
all of us kissable as a plane crash.
The other monsters weren’t good at this because they gave a damn.
Because she looked on purpose.
Or had been. Or was going to be. I couldn’t tell the difference.
lived in breathless fear of failure, time passing, and her mother falling out of love with her.
remove pieces of my identity every time I returned to it, insidiously replacing them with wall-to-wall white carpet and blond hardwood floors.
She was a finely tuned instrument that hummed in emotional resonance with whomever she was standing closest to.
She was a very pretty vulture who reanimated corpses for web TV,
She’d been here long enough that all of her feelings had been replaced with high-end linoleum.
What I wanted was: I wanted.
He’d become Buddhist around the same time he’d become Southern.
I’d always wondered how Cole got anything practical done, how he’d come so far, and now I saw. People were no longer people, they were just parts of the plan, in the goal. And parts could get moved around without thought or emotion.
“And be my — what is it called? Naked person. No. Muse.
just polite introductory things like asking them if they had ever gone skydiving or petted a hairless dog.
“Do you say anything without thinking whether or not it sounds good?” “I don’t even know why I’d bother opening my mouth otherwise.”
Cole got along great with a mirror.
and I knew that every one of her emotions looked like anger from the outside.
“But I don’t think that’s what your job is.”
four or nine or twelve.
“There. Take everything that was mine.”
I had spent so many afternoons doing homework at Yuzu, just being alone there where nobody knew me or what my facial expression normally looked like, and now my time there had gone from present to past in just a few minutes.
intentionally being no one’s.
“I’m trying and it doesn’t matter to anyone.
I knew just how it felt when your worst fear was that you would be yourself.
nine or fifteen or twenty-two
To hear someone else riffing off your tune, to throw a bit of an improvisation back at them, to come back again and again to those same crashing four chords that, for two glorious weeks, America had sung over and over until they were dreaming them.
entire
without complaint or brilliance.
that sometimes the truth wasn’t the most useful thing to add to a conversation.
want to just have you but I struggled to translate. “I’ve just recorded my first real track since I died and it is going to eat every dance floor in the country and it’s not even the best one I’ve written so far and someone is paying me to go into the studio and record the others and I can’t wait,
I’d never left that house in Minnesota.