afterword raze i'm beginning to believe those months spent subsisting on the bland gruel of your gutless guile were the dregs of some ruinous dream i slipped into and was slow to stir from. nothing else explains my failure to die after eating so little for so long. sometimes i wonder if you ever return to the house you haunted for a while. if you creep through a casement window and strain to hear the music the rooms have gone on making without you, perched in a precarious place that lets you see the furrows where floorboards used to be before you pried them loose and passed them off as your own handiwork. i want to erase the entire chapter of my life that gave you a starring role. even the good bits before the bottom fell out. but i know the books we write by breathing aren't built that way. we do what we do. we say what we say. we are what we are, until we aren't anymore. 260725 what's it to you? who go blather from