Sometimes I wonder why I turned vegetarian. Perhaps because I cherished the bustling chicken coops of my childhood, which smelled sweetly of warm sawdust and fresh feces. Perhaps because the last word you spoke to me, you spoke while I stared down at my unfinished meatloaf, and now any whisper of that word stirs uneasy recollections. Perhaps because a raw steak oozes with blood and the flat echo of a cow's helpless moans. One day I might return to chicken legs for lunch, pulling stringy pink meat to reveal a polished bone. I imagine that I would lunge forward and vomit, dumping one thousand angry memories onto the cold floor.

I miss you, simply

your sallow complexion, the grim, gray-eyed baby of peer pressure and social obligation, revealed that you are a man of expectation, struggling to catch up with wealthier, worldlier, worthier "friends", who think of champain as they think of beautiful women bundled in fur: pleasurable, disposable, forgettable. That picture always gets me. I squint first, in disbelief that it is you: painfully thin, disintegrating, everything either pulling away, sinking in, sagging down, everything but your sterile white smile, a gash splitting open your face-- fooling yourself so that you can fool the world.