When John broke my cheekbone I was eleven and I like to think his fist was made from butterfly wings, and when Peter gashed my palm to steal my lunch money I dreamt his switchblade was composed of caterpillar cilia that had caught a falling star he’d put on top of his dollhouse like a Christmas tree ornament, because I’d visited his home once after school and saw his drunk mom lying in bed asking him why he didn’t bring more friends like me over, although his dad was saying to him he shouldn’t hang out with fags like me because I lived with two moms and didn’t know shit about football, and I shouldn’t forget about Paul because his eyes groped the world with such sadness that I always imagined him rubbing them with fennel, which I’d read somewhere snakes do when they molt, though I do not know if this is true except I heard later he’d gone to Iraq and had his appointment in Samarra with an IED or had got his head twisted into a labyrinth he couldn’t find his way out of, but no one really speaks about it, and, yes, it would be remiss to forget about Mary, the crush of my high school existence who always got the solo in the mixed choir, but who to my infinite regret—because I’m a petty person—did not give every guy on the wrestling team a blow job and end up on the streets with track marks on her soles, mostly because she never thought of me when she touched herself and partly because she went to Yale and married the class president and blasts the socials with pics of their exotic vacations and announcements of their children’s accomplishments, which is her uninspired way of saying, ‘You see, genes are genes,’ even if a part of me feels sorry for her because I don’t really trust happy people, not to mention once, while walking with her many years ago, I caught her indifference towards an achingly-moving sunset, the pink and orange wavering streaks creating a music against the purpling sky that left a taste of plum and cherry in my mouth, and I gathered that her soul hadn’t been properly charged, that I would never see the wingbeats of starlings behind her eyes, though another part of me wishes I had her life because I read somewhere that happiness is the art of deluding yourself, which I think Mary, a/k/a ‘Little Miss Perfect,’ has mastered, but I don’t want to say I have some kind of I-love-my-misery fetish, some addiction to darkness, or that I was born under a saturnine star, or, even worse, utter patronizing clichés like ‘sometimes you have to be sad to appreciate happiness,’ it’s just that I can’t conceive of suffering as something separate from existence, though I’m not advocating for that old chestnut ‘suffering ennobles the soul’ because the truth be told there’s so much shame that comes with what I hold dear, but, as I said, sometimes I feel sad for all the Marys out there because I don’t think they will ever know what it’s like to eke this triumph out day by day or to hear the whispers of butterfly wings and catch falling stars in the deepest recesses of a stranger’s eyes, but maybe I’m just fooling myself because perhaps there are really only sad people and happy people in life, winners and losers, for I never really got past what Peter and John did to me, although I know I should have, notwithstanding all the meds, and therapy, and the wisdom aging should have brought, but I guess what I fear most is not so much that I’ll never be able to fix what they did, but the certainty that the thing you hate the most is what you can’t live without.