I don’t want to call you that, but your name tastes like muffins with too much salt. I’ll stick with the undeserved title. Your empire doesn’t deserve a name, either. If I could, I’d wipe it from my mind.
I don’t know what made you pick me, target me. I was blue, godd@mn it. You painted a red target on the front of my f/cking existence. I think of the way you change everything like the laser at the end of a sniper, like they have in movies. I saw it, but much too late. The bullet was in the brain before anybody could make a move. I wonder what made you pull the trigger, why you picked me. But even then, I don’t think I’d want to know. All the things I could have avoided — if everyone had communicated better, if I told Dad of my suspicions before you wrapped your manicured talons around his brain... maybe I could have changed it. Maybe my life would have... to put it plainly, sucked less. I think that knowing would make it worse. Every slip-up solvable. There’s a phrase in magic: the closer you look, the less you see. I should have looked at the bigger picture. I should have watched my back. I should have looked out. I should have done a lot of things. I wouldn’t have had to think about any of that at all in the first place, though, if you weren’t such a huge f/cking piece of rat-ridden junk.
So fuck you. No censoring that one. Fuck you for everything.
I thought you were lovely at first. I never proper knew my mum, and you felt like a dream. A manipulative dream, like a nightmare that tricks you into thinking you’ve woken up only to find you’re still dreaming. I thought you were something good. Naivety is not a satisfactory trait in an official private eye, but I was a kid. A child who wanted love. From the boy who she didn’t quite have feelings for, from her friends, from her father. From the idea of a mother. I don’t think I was naive, so much as hopeful.
I wonder where you are now. I’d like to find you, if only to interrogate you. Somehow, I don’t know where I’d begin with my questioning. I don’t know whether I’d like the answers. I think I just want to have some control, some sort of retaliation in flashing the light in your eyes instead of mine.
For all you f/cked up, and ruined, you are still the reason I found my family, my brothers. I’m not your Jane Crocker. I’m g0d-f/cking-d@mn Zoom Strider. I have short hair, and I cook sh/tty meals for the people who care for me. I play piano to beatboxing and rap. I can kick your @ss with a fork and whack you over the head with a cupcake tray.
I don’t need to, though. I found happiness while getting lost in the train station, and cane across home in the top of an above-the-clouds apartment with two dumb@sses with swords. And that’s all I’ve ever needed.
Brothers are friends, fathers, mothers, and mentors all in one. We’re blood brothers, too. I cut my finger slicing lemon, and Dave and Bro cut theirs too, and we pinky-swore ourselves into a family.
I’m not going to thank you for anything, ever. I am, somewhere, a bit glad I ran away. Perhaps I would never have found my real friends, my real blood without that. And again, still: Fuck you.
I think a lot of things. All of them. All the time. That’s the trouble with remembering. You find things you don’t want, but what you’re looking for seems to be out of reach.
I don’t think there’s a thesis to this letter. Thinking seems to be a big theme here, though.
