When your father is a professional gambler, you learn from a young age to disassociate from people and regard them as nothing more than the sum of their tells.

This can be a very lonely world for you, especially as a child. But it’s no harder than you allow it to be. As far as one can tell, it’s no harder for you than it is for any of the other country club kids.

Happy little suburbia. One way or another, it’s all about cunning and artifice.

Besides, it gives you a certain amount of power. Without even trying, you are able to perceive  weaknesses in your peers. And as you slide into adolescence, you learn how to turn these to your advantage without seeming like a total dick.

You are one smooth motherfucker.

You fall for a girl whose life is total shit. It’s not a wise move politically. So you pretend not to care when your best friend fucks her passed-out body on the bathroom floor.

Still, you can’t help but notice that she wears her reality as if it were an amusing choice. She is too smart to bother with the truth. Like you, she is strong, self-created, and completely absent.

You grow up. Away. You both go through hell.

Who doesn’t?

There is nothing particularly special about either one of you. Each of you are true to yourselves only insofar as you continue on with the strategies you have been given.

She lives her life as if amazed to have found herself playing the main character in such a strange, long story that has nothing whatsoever to do with her.

You turn your ability to read people into a completely meaningless, full-time game.

One night, you meet again.

It seems that her life is no longer shit. Or is it? She may just have more control over fictionalizing it than she used to.

You lie with her in a park by moonlight, and you can almost hear the hum that emanates from her hollowed-out chest.

(what is the story what is the story what is the story what is the story what is)

None of it will matter if she can’t turn it into a story.

Meanwhile, you talk openly without revealing anything, and watch for the shift in her eyes.

Together you fail at having any kind of genuine interaction with each other.

And yet…

(and yet…)

And yet, there is something so familiar in both of you, like this.