see you space cowboy

she was raised by wolves
in the warmth of their fur
surrounded by fangs
she knew she was secure

---

I've been clean for a few years now. I used to work at a reputable company. Reputable. The word felt like a noose around my neck. So I went to the frontier, but it wasn't enough to conquer it. I wanted to be part of it. This rage, could it really be wrong? This tempest, this storm in my veins. So when the next solar flare made its magnificent arc, slicing through the darkness, reaching across the abyss, I, Romulus, went out to meet it.

---

all these violinists in sailor outfits; it has to mean something
right?

---

We had a therapist at my old school, except she wasn't called a therapist. She was called the school counselor, but it was basically the same thing. Early on during my final year at college, a kid in the year below jumped from the balcony of his 21st floor apartment. I didn't know him personally, but from what I heard he was a quiet kid. Didn't really mix much with others. A week later the school counselor appeared. Some of us speculated that she'd only been summoned for PR reasons, but by the end of the week, they had carved out a small office on the top floor for her, which she settled into almost instantly, it seemed - sitting there at her desk beside a couple of well-placed ferns - as if she'd been there her whole life. I interviewed her once for the school magazine, but never saw her again after that.

The only other therapist I've known was a family friend. He studied in Birmingham with my dad and trained with him at the same hospital for a while. When I first went over to the UK, he and his wife met me at the airport and helped ferry my stuff up north in their car to where my university was. Since then, it's become something of a routine to stop by their house on the way to the airport, sometimes spending a couple of nights in the guest room before leaving to catch my flight. Occasionally, they'd take me to their friends' houses for dinner and drive me to the airport if they happened to be free. Of the myriad talents that I possess, getting along with my parents' friends is not one of them. Adults have always been something of a stumbling block to me. Not that I am some sort of prodigy at connecting with human beings my own age, but I feel there has always been something hindering my interactions with older people especially. Any sort of discourse between myself and their species is invariably shallow and superficial. To go any deeper than that would be to risk awkwardness and alienation, so we don't. But lately I've found a few exceptions to this rule, perhaps because I am getting older, or perhaps because I am discovering that this rule only exists in my head, but whatever the reason, I find myself becoming increasingly comfortable in the company of certain adults - in particular, my paternal uncle and my dad's therapist friend. Perhaps it's because we finally have something real in common. Amazing how tragedy can tear people apart while pulling people together. But back to my dad's therapist friend - he was a quiet, unassuming man. He didn't like to waste words and possessed a quick wit. Reserved, he didn't try too hard make conversation but wasn't the type to shrink from it either. He would refrain from making baseless statements and state his opinions without bias or bigotry. He understood the virtues of silence and space, and did not condone the deplorable practice of asking questions simply to chase the silence away. Everything about him suggested a man deeply grounded in common sense. I could see why my dad would've been friends with him.

Once, we were both having a late lunch at the airport. His wife was out of town, babysitting their grandson while their daughter and son-in-law worked. While we were sat there munching away quietly, something like a wave of loneliness or curiosity came over me and I felt the urge to ask him what my dad was like in university and during their time as colleagues at the same hospital - to share and compare the shapes of his absence; to speak freely of our respective bereavements; to drink in the sweet sorrow of missing the same person; but then I thought about how uncomfortable I'd be if he were to suddenly start soliciting that sort of information from me. In the end, I decided not to ask him and we just continued eating our burgers in relative silence, but it wasn't a hollow, insecure kind of silence - it was dense and organic - as if you could rest your hand on its body and feel it breathe. Only years later would I fully come to understand, that the spaces between us were what tied us together, that we were connected by intangibles and had shared the same star - swallowed up by a void that had swallowed up all of our words along with it, and that our gravity now belonged to a black hole instead - our wordless worlds now sharing the tacit weight of things unsaid.