September 18, 2018:

I don't look like him.

He's so fucking good-looking. Rugged, masculine, handsome. Lady killer.

I look like my mother's family, the real ones from the sticks. Lanky, a bit little-boy frail. Also handsome, but in a more charming way that's less brutally jock-like. I don't see him in me. Too bad, 'cos, he really is a fine-looking man.

He's got a football, I have a machine gun. That's very us. It's xmas, the tree is white, it's our first apartment, on Yale Street, where all my earliest memories live.

Today I have a better understanding of her circumstances as a young adult. The furniture makes sense, the apartment itself makes sense. I also understand her a little better, thanks to her mother's recent insistence on betraying her secrets. I have no understanding of him at all. He seems foreign, and dangerous. Menacing, actually. His intensity is palpably violent, a coiled spring. I think I dodged the world's biggest bullet. I can thank her for that, perhaps the greatest gift she gave me, apart from life itself.