Luke Brown
I.
I used to worry about how much more intelligent and successful I would
be if I hadn’t spent so much time talking to other people, waking up in
their homes, never sleeping enough, enraptured by temporary intimacies,
by the women I would introduce myself to and the challenges we’d make to
each other. What a brighter mind I’d have if I’d stayed in, if I’d read
and written much more – and I wished I had behaved differently, until I
realised that this was useless, suicidal, that the man I would have
become would feel no sympathy whatsoever for the man I am, and I have
only narrowly avoided being murdered by him, this superior bastard, this
loathsome know-it-all, who would have got away with it completely, and
no one would have mourned me. When I think about this I don’t feel so
bad about my choices.