first of all: thank you for reading my story and thank you for your interest.

second of all: i don’t know! i don’t know what happens in my story—i just wrote it.

third of all: if i had to explain, i would say this: the boy and the girl were both searching each other for some feeling that they could never find in each other, some feeling that is lost in the past—he feels it as a cavernous lack of something that registers as an emptiness in his abdominal region; she feels it as the fleeting vestiges of a lost childhood innocence. he is still just a boy and she is still just a girl. they are too young to really be in love with each other; each loves his or her projection of him or herself into the other. it is the last text she ever sent him because they break up because she realizes she never really loved him: she just loved that smile; she just loved the way it made her feel about herself to see him smile at her like that. and the album doesn’t make her feel better because all she really likes is that one moment at the beginning of the first track. i think of the hold steady: “crushing one another with colossal expectations.” sometimes i feel like we’re all just a generation of boys and girls; sometimes i wonder if the world is just drumming its fingers waiting for us to become men and women; sometimes i wonder what that would mean. sometimes i wonder if it would mean learning to know other people as they really are instead of just making them into tidy receptacles for our own archetypal/stereotypical expectations of them. we expect everyone to be exactly like our idea of them. we expect the world to be like the internet, because the internet is the idea of the world. the problem with video games is that then we expect the world to work just as smoothly. the boy in the story expects the world to be exactly how he expects it to be. think of him like the boy in (500) days of summer, which is a great movie—anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to be cool and doing it wrong. anyone who called zooey deschanel’s character a manic pixie dream girl totally missed the point of the movie—the point of the movie is that joseph-gordon levitt’s character expected her to be a manic pixie dream girl, and she wasn’t, and that was why it didn’t work out between them. we’re all like that guy: sheathing our expectations of each other inside each other like daggers. we see pictures on the covers of magazines—even the new yorker—and make up stories about those pictures, and then try to act out those stories. and we get pissed when it doesn’t work. how often have you thought of some cool thing to do/say and think about how cool it’s gonna be when you do/say it and then then do/say it and have it totally fall flat? the best things to say are the things that just came to you. maybe that’s the point of twitter—fresh thoughts. fresh thoughts—yum yum!