Look, loving you has never been a favour to you. Why would I do you any favours? I don’t even like you! I don’t want to do you any favours, and frankly, I am annoyed as hell about loving you as much as I do. And I don’t have feelings for you because I think you need it. You don’t need it (and actually, I might be in love with you precisely because you don’t need it) and if I didn’t have to love you, I would definitely stop – because this sucks for me. Really, really sucks. It’s officially the worst thing that’s happened to my relatively short life.

If I had it my way, the love of my life would be taller, hotter, better built, richer, more mysterious, more successful, less self-conscious, more talented, and generally better. But I don’t have it my way.

I didn’t agree to this. I am forced into this. I didn’t shake my hand with my heart in a deal that both of us were satisfied with or willingly sign any contracts. But my heart is a dirty fascist tyrant pig and it just decided one day (one quick breath of a moment) without consulting me that it would give itself to you. And I just had to go along, because it’s a stupid asshole jerk fascist tyrant pig and you can’t talk like a rational adult to a crazy bigoted evangelist like that.

I want you to understand: I wouldn’t give a crap about you if I could help it, but I do because how I feel is not goods that I can give away and sell and trade. I can’t refund or exchange it. None of this has anything to do with equal distribution of resources or fair trade. In fact, it’s just blatantly unjust. It’s unfair. It just is (and that pisses me off! I demand a reason, a real concrete reason!). And I didn’t choose it like how I would normally choose a product (after calculating in my head how much I need it, the said product’s quality, price versus value — for the best possible choice). It just happened.

So shut up. Shut your damn mouth if you’re going to talk like I am doing you a favour or something. I would be spitting on you and punching you in the face if I wasn’t too busy hoping that you would be unbearably happy for the rest of your life – and hoping (like a complete bimbo) that you might find it in your little black heart to smile and laugh at me (forever, and without my having paid for it or anything) like you are doing right now.

  11:21 pm  |   July 15 2009  

Prompt 02:
“My Good Deed” by Shearwater

  1:38 am  |   July 14 2009  

But the ways in which they are alike! For the narcissist, charm must be powerful. It must cancel out all negativity and pierce the very organ that both circulates blood and facilitates romance. It must upturn frowns, unhook brassieres, and unbutton skirts. Isn’t that power? Isn’t that an unsettling amount of power? And the megalomaniac doesn’t necessarily prefer fear over love; the megalomaniac seeks a frightening kind of devotion. A love so fervent that it is scary. The megalomaniac wants people to be afraid of how much they love him. He knows of passionate pecks and fanciful love letters, but remains unsatisfied. He wants selfless attachment, excessive allegiance, crippling worship. And isn’t that love? Isn’t that the vow one makes when sealing a monogamous relationship?

  11:57 pm  |   July 13 2009  

Sometimes I dream that I am Napoleon’s magnificent hat. I am the gleaming embodiment of his triumphs and other smashing successes. And my Napoleon (who loves me and wears me on his arrogant head every day, even when he goes to the bathroom) looks like his more delusional portraits, like a bright lovechild of violence and freedom. My Napoleon isn’t bald either. So when I look down at the empire atop the emperor’s head, I can’t help but fall terribly in love with him. What a stud!

“I dream about being Napoleon, not his hat,” Riley says when I tell him about it.

“Well, I can’t be Napoleon because Napoleon is Napoleon.”

“It’s your dream – you can be anybody you want. I’m Napoleon when I dream.”

He takes a lazy drag of the cigarette in his hand. He is squinting even though it is midnight and so there is no light.

“You dream?”

I ask sincerely, because I can’t imagine him to be the dreaming sort of a person. People that are up to their necks in reality don’t dream. So it never quite struck me as a possibility that Riley might dream, that he might have a presence in the unconscious world, where stuff like Freudian symbols and mommy issues and Salvadore Dali are. In my mind, he is incompatible with all of that and the notion that he would be capable of dreaming seemed implausible.

“Oh yeah. Once in a while. But not about being a hat.”

He is a bully. He is grinning like a smug cat and I contemplate picking a fight. But he is armed with his lit cigarette and I am thoroughly unarmed. So I roll my eyes instead.

“I knew I shouldn’t have told you about it.”

I only did because he asked me to. Because he said, you were talking in your nap earlier, something about French toast – what were you dreaming about?

“I’m glad you told me. I think it’s amusing. Way more amusing then dreaming about being Napoleon. Everyone wants to be Napoleon.”

“No. Only you do.”

He laughs and I smile too, because we both know I’m right. It’s late and I shudder as the alcohol exit my body via pores.

“Are you done yet?”

Regarding the cigarette he is sucking at.

“Cold?” He wonders in response to that.

“I’m freezing.”

“I’m done,” he says. He quickly grabs the last bit of smoke and smears the orange light against the red brick. We jump back inside together to friends, warm food, and beer.

  9:54 pm  |   July 13 2009   |  3 notes  

“The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved.”

— The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell

  8:32 pm  |   July 9 2009