Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

What may have seemed like a coup from the outside was actually a slow mutation of a conservative democratic state into a country overtaken by an invasive delirium—the fear of God—and ruled by whoever could most convincingly claim to know His Divine Laws.‡

Those who weren’t convinced of a Communist invasion were unsteadied enough by the widespread misinformation to feel there was no longer any objective truth, a belief that numbed any part of the population that might have objected to the forced theocracy.

New lovers are always digging their graves and lying down, smiling, scooping the dirt in with their clean hands.

I was old enough to know I’d been wrong about many things of which I’d once been certain, but still young enough to see possibility and perfection in new certainties.)

“The happiest years are the shortest. We only notice them after they’re gone,” X wrote in The Reason I’m Lost. “Therefore, the attempt to avoid suffering is the most suicidal impulse of all. It is to ask your life to go by so quickly that you never see a moment of it.”