To me, Pan's Laborynth remembers the beginning; grainy and heartbreaking, jutting ribcage and sprawling lanky body next to mine, you emanating anger and a broken future to match the past, everything fragile and new. I would have found it someday, but I found it in you, in scrappy strength and Guinness and outspoken angry dreams. I felt impossibly safer and more free. All the heavy dark was an almost easy price.

And now, no borrowed faith. Over. I remember how you were more real than anyone I had ever met.; now I am a person, I am real, I am more than a sophisticated toy. Now, for myself. You were right--it's exhausting--it's better--it hurts--it's exhausting.

Bad faith is hypnotically easy.
Honesty is hard to come by.


I will show you how I hurt you, and you will do whatever you want
which will not fix it
because the time is past
and there is nothing we can do
and this is what it means to be alive.