Faithlessly Yours

There is an honesty to this impulse, which is what made me fall in love with Cass at the start, makes him one of the best writers I know. But at the same time other people have to clean up Cass’s messes and sentences and, for a long time, that person was me.

Maybe I believe that by putting together the pieces of Cass I can show him that entropy is failure: death is inevitable but a failure. But Cass has always liked it best this way, rushing toward it. The music so loud you can’t hear the words; the velvet cake I spent three hours making from scratch smeared like feces on his palms and fingers as he shoves handfuls of it into his mouth; teeth sore and clanging against the bottom of an empty glass; sex slow and deliberate, and especially best in the morning, best when you wake and don’t know who you are yet.

Maybe Cass is right: entropy, dying, is truth, after all, the only certain one; without the broken fragments there is no unity.

Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 7. Purchase the book to read the full piece.