because movies were a religion in that moment, they could change you, alter your perception, you could rise toward the screen and share a moment of transcendence, all the disappointments and fears would be wiped away for a few hours in that church: movies acted like a drug for me. But they were also about control: you were a voyeur sitting in the

And I wanted to write like this as well: numbness as a feeling, numbness as a motivation, numbness as the reason to exist, numbness as ecstasy.

The day really became effortless once you faked it and it actually became more real because of your changed demeanor; the act became the reality and it affected everything in what seemed like a positive way. In fact, it was preferable to reality.

a time before video surveillance and cellphones and DNA profiling, when serial killers were allowed to be cavalier and bountiful: the number of murders committed by just one or a duo could hit twenty or thirty, fifty or sixty, during that particular decade. (Mass shooters have replaced them.)

began engaging in flirtatious ways that I thought I wasn’t quite worthy of. But looking at photos of myself from that senior year I now realize I actually was cute enough to warrant their attention,

And I just stood there in the fading afternoon light, realizing at seventeen that I was already staring into my past—that the past had a meaning that would always define you.

I made this connection and though it was tenuous I was haunted by it. And since I felt so alone that day it became a friend.

The basic reason why the weekend happened was, I realize in retrospect, sex, and the hope tied to the sex. It was about desire in its simplest form, and a purity that I would never experience again.

He was just part of the overall erasure that I was enacting: the eradication of my real self into the tangible participant who saw everything as normal.