f_bomb raze i don't have an instagram page. if i want to see someone's pictures anywhere near their intended size, i have to use a third-party instagram viewer. on picuki, most of your pictures have a negative heart. i know it's a glitch. you can give your heart away or you can keep it, but you can't take away a heart that isn't there. it feels right, though, in the same way it feels right that all your self-portraits are out of focus. that's what you'll always be to me. dark and blurry. i never met you. i tried to. you stood me up five times. the last time, you wrote down my address from memory. you knew the house number was wrong. you had a day-old message in your inbox telling you where i lived. you had my address written on an envelope. you didn't look at either one of those things. you walked here and stood on the porch of a house you knew wasn't mine. you knocked on the door. when no one answered, you left. you told me all of this. then you said, "i guess you weren't home." you sent me another message a few weeks later. you said you felt bad for messing everything up. i didn't write back. i didn't hear from you again. before all of that, when you'd only stood me up once, i sent you an album i'd just finished making. i wrote you a letter. i folded it in half, folded it again, and slid it on top of the cd. you found the padded envelope that held the album and the letter on the sidewalk in front of your apartment. it was wet with rain. someone tore it open before it got to you. it was empty. i wonder if the person who stole the album ever listened to it, or if they just threw it away. when i was a kid, my dad bought me "the rise and fall of ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars" on a pretty-looking rykodisc cassette. i loved the bonus tracks as much as the eleven songs that made up the album itself. i loved the stripped-down demo version of "lady stardust" the most. there was a weight to it i didn't feel when i listened to the final studio recording. it sounded like a few friends who were half in the bag, huddled around a piano, singing themselves hoarse for a lost friend. it was just bowie, though, playing piano and triple-tracking his voice for the choruses. when the news broke that he was dead, i listened to that demo for the first time in more than half my life and felt my eyes fill up with water. i posted it on facebook. i wrote: "fuck." i didn't know what else to say. it felt like a part of my life was gone. you wrote back: "fuck." and it made me want to hug you until your bones turned to soup. sometimes i wonder what kind of friend you might have been if you were capable of showing up. at least we'll always have that f bomb. 211203 what's it to you? who go blather from