It’s the early 2000s and I have already lived my life and watched it end. It felt like I died and yet I remained alive. It’s said that the body twitches for a few seconds after decapitation—reflexive movement with no conscious origin. A series of unfortunate events happened in my life and led to this point where I felt like that headless corpse. I also felt like nuclear fission encased in skin and believed I needed a cure for my existence. I chose school + scholarly pursuit, work + career pursuit, and copious amounts of mind + mood altering drugs.
At one point I believed that I could substitute humans for the hallucinogenic drugs. One human in particular proved explosively enticing. Loving him felt like holding a live grenade. Marines who learn to throw live grenades in training describe the grit needed to survive such a training exercise — if you fcuk up someone dies. You learn about yourself in that crucial moment. You learn about fear. Why did I find a human grenade so appealing? I remember that he brought out the very worst in me, the same way cocaine did. It felt ridiculously thrilling. It felt horrifyingly awful. The wild + unbridled chaos I could not resist and yet I felt strangled by it.



How do you love a live grenade disguised as a man? With great difficulty. He will not love you back. He cannot love you back. He does not exist except as an explosive ordinance. The psychic chaos squeezed the life from his mind. Why did I place my loyalty in a man who tried to take my life over and over again?
Do they give out prosthetic hearts to those who lose their hearts to Machiavellian Psychopaths?
The question still stands ~ how do you love a grenade?
Never contradict him, imply that he made a mistake, or imply his culpability in anything.
The fault always lies with me, and I am eternally wrong and insufficient
When he tells me I'm free as a bird, he means a caged bird ~ I am his capture, and live only inside a bell jar of his creation
He feels satisfaction only when I behave myself in the bell jar ~ that means making him my world
Forget that, when he tells me he loves me, he means it in the same way a fashionista says she loves her shoes
Forget about the fact that, eventually his rage will drive him to kill me
Never mind that, when he does, he'll lay the blame on me
Leave him at my peril ~ when he feels abandoned by me, he'll unleash the full force of his unrepentant rage [see no. 6]
Cling to that fantasy-notion of him which I've conjured in my mind, forget about the monster, the live grenade; make all the excuses I can for him and his monstrous behaviour
Believe his lies, never doubt him, even when I suspect or know of his dishonesty
The man in question is dead, he could not survive himself. Weak men choose violence to solve problems, and they choose violence on themselves in the end because they never learned anything better. A man who tries to scare you is a weak man. Stop giving weak petulant men so much legitimacy.