My birthday is creeping up. I really don’t care for holidays; I mean if someone wants to buy me a present, they’ll get it when something screams out my name, not when they have to. I’ll be 28. It’s almost 10 years now since I finished high school. 10 years I’ve been a vegetarian. Many things have come full circle, come and gone. 10 years ago I was dating a wonderful woman, slender and pale (I know I use that too much, it’s from a silly musical number that I listen to a lot.) She had almost waist-length, extremely fine blonde hair, porcelain-white skin that seemed impossible in the San Bernardino sun, and azure eyes; perfect Aryan complexion, even if her body was too thin for that ideal. She weighed about what I did, which is really not healthy for a woman. A woman that thin usually can’t menstruate and has very brittle bones. I remember that she had surgery on her wrists. I had such a circle then. The young, (dis)affected, and drunk. Someone gave me a Smiths tape; another drove me to Club Metro every few nights. We lived in the Cafes and subsisted on Cinema. (“Music in the Cafes at night and Revolution in the air.”) Context and time have gone supernova, red-hot plasma in a furious course across the Void (“Jaded reputation / on which you're staking / Lots of money for the making / For all the stars / they're just faking / Love in a Void.”)