FFFOOOXXX

– Part One –

There once was a beautiful boy named Stefan.

It was October of 2006. We were introduced through his brother one night at a Manhattan bar. I was 29, he was 24. Though he sat right across from me, we hardly spoke – but we were instantly drawn to each other. I sought him out through social media, so our beginnings were of tentatively interacting through Myspace, intrigued by our commonality of weird selfies and art.

We started chatting online and sending drawings riffing on each other’s posts. As anxiety ridden agoraphobes who were used to making art out of ourselves and our environment, we were a perfect pair. A broken narcissistic mutual appreciation society of two.

It didn’t take long for us to grow obsessed with each other. After months of internet interaction, he offered to drive me home from the city and then spent the night. It snowballed rapidly.

Art partners, best friends, lovers. Three days a week he’d spend with me in my solitary existence in Ocean Grove, and we’d chat for an hour or two on the phone at dawn almost every night he didn’t.

The sexual chemistry was an incredible clawing, seething monument to mutual masochism and tenderness, but we were physically compatible in the non-sexual realms even moreso. In spite of his wall-shaking sleep apnea snores of doom, his embrace was an intoxicant of peace. Just laying in bed brought a calm and comfort that felt like drugs, and we helped to quell the frantic insomnia we both were prone to.

electricity. it’s a sexy theme with us.

We didn’t share physical displays of romantic affection (outside a handful of small isolated cautious moments). I’d had two abusive relationships in a row, he’d had a traumatic life thus far, so we were both rather guarded humans. However, we were unabashedly and openly devoted to one another as best friends. He was reserved about sharing details, but assured me that if anyone knew something about his life, I was that person. Not once did he ever get frustrated or annoyed at my OCD or agoraphobia suddenly striking and derailing plans. Not once did we have an argument. Every single time I saw him, I was thrilled. These years were literally the happiest of my life.

We were making art with and of each other constantly. We were each other’s ever present model, collaborator, critic, and champion. A perfect partnership.

We decided to name our art duo “The Sticky Friends” and made things just to make them. The deceptively platonic name was an unfortunate portent of things to come.

We made a silly stop motion short, and the next year we made a sequel (which came out pretty good for being made on a macbook and making it up as we went, with some obvious influence from Sam Raimi):

When he moved out from his folks’ and was sad to leave behind his dog, I painted her portrait for his new place. (I stuck her head on a child and had her holding a Raggedy Andy doll version of Stefan, so they could always be together.) I taught myself to use a sewing machine so I could make him a stuffed animal of a nightmare-devouring mythological beast.

One morning he walked to the corner store to buy some milk, and came back with a vintage bicycle he’d bought on a whim at a garage sale because I needed one. He shrugged it off the same way he did when he brought me grocery shopping or out for dinner every week. It’s how we were with each other. Everything was caring more for each other than ourselves spoken in the language of constant tiny flourishes of presentation, of tribute, and doing so while avoiding eye contact. Everything was turned into art.

We had two separate comic collaborations we were working on, film ideas brewing, while I focused on photography and he focused on tattoo and a new collection of paintings.

We kept talking about his tattooing me, as I was intrigued by white tattoos. One day as he was finishing tattooing a client, he suggested we test out how well my skin kept white ink, and tatted a white line around my pinkie finger. There was a pause. And then without a word he took the black ink and drew a line around his own pinkie. Matching tattoos. We never spoke of it. Feelings, y’know.

The year 2009 was our downfall. In February my bag was stolen out of Maxwell’s, taking with it the hard drive containing ten years of writing and five years of photography. Only what I’d uploaded for public display or grabbed from Stefan remains of those happy beginnings.

That spring I had to move in with an elderly aunt, and the undefined best friends with benefits status between Stefan and I unraveled. Our private world of just the two of us was no more. Stefan would still visit me for outings a few days a week, taking us out for food or random wanderings, and our near daily dawn phone conversations continued. According to Stefan, his prime roommate was no fan of mine, resented the time we spent together, and had essentially banned my presence at their house any more frequently than once every few months. The issue caused fights between them (and us). The rationale kept changing.

It’s a dude house.
But the new roommate moved his girlfriend in.
It’s an issue with women sharing the upstairs bathroom.
But now there’s a woman staying upstairs.
Well, the roommate has temper tantrums and pays most of the rent.

The logic never made sense, but regardless, our physical relationship became a seasonal event.

We went on a roadtrip to Chicago with friends that summer. Hanging out with others? Openly cuddling in bed in a shared hotel room? One cautious step closer towards actual coupledom?

A week after our trip, he went to Atlantic City (a place I’ve never been, a place he’d repeatedly said he’d bring me) and spent the night in a hotel alone with a girl, when we’d not spent a night alone together in months. He began keeping me even more separate from the rest of his life, making me take down some of our photos, while expecting me to remain his best friend and (now platonic?) art partner.

I was shattered and heartbroken. He was my everything person, and I thought I was his. I thought we were shyly and quietly in love. I thought he and I were at the very least best friends, we talked for an hour or more almost every day, but I’d had no idea this other woman was even a part of his life. Suddenly, I discovered he was repeatedly lying to me about where he was and who he was with. He had been seeing someone in his greater friend group, and she was welcome at his house. He kept the painting I’d made him hidden away in his art closet. He’d had parties at his house he kept me from. He was keeping me a side chick in plain sight, never giving me any real answers, just instructing me to assume he was seeing other women. If he wanted only me, I would be his forever. But every time he’d leave my house, I’d break into hysterical sobs, not knowing if he was headed to see her.

I tried. I kept trying. The jealousy, accusation, tears, and rage got ugly and messy. Unable to backpedal into “just friends”, forbidden from interacting with the rest of his life or befriending the other woman, unwilling to battle her for his affections, I tried to step away. He was still somehow shocked, almost offended that I was in love with him, and betrayed that I needed to end our partnership. We continued to damage each other with words and scream at each other through art.

Egad, we’re dramatic.

I kept crying, then trying, then crying more. It is at this exact time that brain fluid leak which went undiagnosed for many years had it’s dramatic start. A new tick bite causing brain swelling joined forces with my genetically weak connective tissue disorder. In the midst of my emotional hysterics over Stefan, I managed to rupture an already problematic poorly-healed wound from a spinal tap months prior. I was bedridden for weeks with a severe positional headache, unable to be upright for more than fifteen seconds at a time. Doctors blamed it on Lyme Disease. Everyone else assumed I was just depressed and being theatrical. I ended up in a near constant state of headache for years after that, and now have chronic migraines.

Trying to navigate heartache from bed on a steady stream of (prescribed) narcotics, it all got much darker. Once back on my feet, I tried to reinvent myself and us. It didn’t work. One of our last outings together was a talk given by Neil DeGrasse Tyson at the Natural History Museum. There Stefan bought us each a petrified shark tooth.

That winter, sad and lonely, I fooled around with an ex. Even though he was seeing someone, sleeping with someone, Stefan was offended and enraged. I thought he and I were just friends, and was confused and lost. As things between us continued to decline, he did a whole series of himself being kept in a 2000AD style space prison colony as expression of the hell he was going through. Therefore, in reference to our last outing, he wears a shark tooth around his neck as he is trapped and tortured.

By the autumn of 2010, we’d stopped seeing each other on a weekly basis. We’d already scrubbed each other from our social media in various fits of upset over the previous year and a half.

And yet… we just couldn’t let go of each other. Even after the angriest of emails, the craziest of phone calls, the most offensive of accusations, we’d say how much we missed each other and send a cute animal picture or something.

He even visited me in 2011 when I moved back to Brooklyn.

(hey, I’m not the artist Stefan is)

During our prolonged separating, Stefan had ended his ten years of sobriety. He continued seeing the other woman. And yet, Stefan and I kept in contact each other on a near weekly / monthly basis throughout. A random link. A picture. An email. A text. A phonecall. We didn’t ask each other details.

It took me years to date after Stefan. When I finally settled with a boyfriend (a fellow I’d known for fifteen years, the most exceptional person I could think of), that boyfriend was so convinced that Stefan and I were having an affair that he read through our emails. In retrospect, he was totally right to suspect. I didn’t mean to, I didn’t realize, but I was using coupledom as a shield to protect myself, and to prove that I’d moved on.

But I suppose I hadn’t.

When I ran out of antibiotics for Lyme Disease, Stefan was who I called. He used his connections to sketchy pharmaceutical nurses and drove into Brooklyn to deliver it to me.

He even visited me a few times when I first moved to Jersey City with the boyfriend.

Stefan’s sobriety was a struggle over the years. Twice he almost came to crash with me (and my boyfriend) to get sober, (he was back with his parents and didn’t want to disappoint them with knowing he’d relapsed again) but each time there were too many sketchy qualifiers and stops on the way, and it never happened. I did invite him over regularly, but less freely once my relationship predictably ended after years of worsening illness and sexlessness.

During the bad times I’d stay on the phone with him for hours through benzo messiness or restless paranoid withdrawals. He’d talk to me though my trials and tribulations whenever I needed. He was always open with me about when he was using, but he’d disappear when his life got too dark and he didn’t want the weight of my concern. I accepted him without judgement, and championed him as much as I could.

I constantly fought the urge to ask Stefan by just to lay down and watch TV together. In spite of this, I made excuses when Stefan suggested a potential visit include crashing overnight. I couldn’t trust myself. Our embrace was intoxicating. We brought a calm to each other I’ve never otherwise experienced. A physical craving that soothes. I wanted it too much, and knew I’d fall too easily.

We rode a perpetual seesaw of cautious desire and distance. Conversations of possible renewed collaboration met with continued isolation. Hyper-sensitive feelings and undying camradarie. Hinting and avoiding. Though it’s been years since we’d last seen each other, I still keep all my “good” medication in a hidden spot away from the rest of my pills, just in case he ever visited, just to keep his world free of struggle. I kept an incline pillow to keep his sleep apnea at bay, in case he ever eventually slept over.

He would say that he was still drawing constantly, painting, working on projects, but his Instagram had become mostly recycled drawings, with some new romantic themes that seethed an envy in me that made me look away. He unfollowed me at some point, so in retaliation I rarely interacted with his content. Because attention means you care, and I wasn’t supposed to. Not the way I cared, at least.

During the winter of ’22/’23, we were in regular contact. We were interacting almost every day via instagram, and talking on the phone every week. I started to grow used to his presence in my life again. I started to hope.

Then I realized he’d limited me on instagram. My comments weren’t visible to others, and parts of his account were blocked from my view. Hypersensitive to being cut from parts of his life, of other women, of lies, tired of weird games, I called him out on it. After three months of my own sad sulking I finally wrote back, but he never contacted me again.

(What I meant was “restricted”.)

I tried repeatedly to poke at him on Instagram or by phone. Sending him pictures and links and recommendations got no response; even asking for help, something we’d always respond to no matter how upset with each other, was met by silence. I assumed, then, I was cut off. I figured he once again had a new lady and didn’t want to share the rest of his life with me.

Around the same time, his feed had added new sexual nature which, I could tell, was clearly some kind of communication with a woman. His type. He was drawing a woman with long dark hair like I used to have, and hinting at bedroom practices similar to our own; posting more and more moody sexy selfies, shirtless and incredibly buff. It made my insides ache and I’d start to get irrationally jealous, prying at the profiles of the women who commented on his pictures. For my sanity, I avoided looking too closely at his social media. It was too easy to obsess. He still drove me crazy. He’s the one I couldn’t shake.

By March of 2024, we’d not had contact in over a year. That wasn’t like us. In our seventeen(?) years of knowing each other, the longest we’d gone without speaking was six months, and that in itself was an exception. Looking for someone to split a hotel room with me at the Chiller Theater horror convention, I threw caution to the wind and asked him (via both instagram and text message) to join me.

I got no response.

Though I’d learned to keep my relationships with the siblings separate, confused by the silence, I even tried asking Stefan’s brother.

April 13th, 2024

Text to Stefan’s brother

It was during our conversation the following day that I was told The Brother had proposed to his partner and was going to get married. The wedding invitations went out shortly after, and I didn’t get one. This lack of invite was only discovered when my mutual friend of The Brother called me in frustration of the short notice wedding, thrown together to take place that July. He assumed I was going. We were both shocked at my omission from the guest list.

In the pondering chat that followed, Mutual Friend and I suspected the issue with my invite was something to do with Stefan. Stefan and I had not seen each other in four or five years at that point, and he wasn’t responding to me on social media, but I thought we were still cool, right? No?

As hurt and confused as I was that I didn’t make the wedding guest list, I was more disappointed to think that I’d miss my chance to see Stefan in the flesh. I asked Mutual Friend about maybe offering Stefan a place to crash with me in Brooklyn for the New York City wedding. At least that way I’d get to see him. Mutual Friend shot me down and told me that was “not a great idea”.

This was the general response I’d get to inquiries about Stefan. I was told I shouldn’t get involved, keep my distance. My time with Stefan was only during his solidly sober years and I’d little in-person interaction with him struggling to maintain sobriety. These past few years I’d relied on The Brother (and by extension our Mutual Friend) for an earnest assessment of Stefan’s state. I’d renewed my friendship with The Brother five years prior, borne of near daily commiserating while we both went through break-ups. Conversations with him about Stefan were prone to end in friction between my concern and compassion vs The Brother’s frustration and criticism. To avoid familial tension and maintain our friendship, my infrequent inquiries and his answers were kept brief and cursory.

I didn’t want to complicate things, so I kept more distance than I had. From afar I constantly worried. I’d even written to artists and arts organizations in pursuit of sponsored rehab facilities, ayahuasca retreats, etc to no end.

But maybe I was the problem. Maybe I was triggering. Maybe that’s why Stefan stopped talking to me shortly after moving to a sober house.

I was suddenly and unexpectedly invited to the wedding just two weeks before the big day. Fourteen years ago, Stefan and I were supposed to attend a wedding together (a proper couple event!), but our relationship had crumbled away between the time of the invite and the wedding date. Seeing Stefan at his brother’s wedding for our long awaited reunion, what symmetry this would be! Dare I hope…?

Hope was countered with anxiety. Would seeing me at the wedding cause some kind of drama? Was I an issue? Is that why I wasn’t invited? I spiraled into self-conscious questioning.

The super short notice combined with the apprehension of Stefan’s reaction to me and the questionable welcome of my attendance made my health go haywire and my mind race. My shingles/herpes reactivated in my jaw, ear, and throat which triggered Trigeminal Neuralgia (aka Suicide Headaches). I spent the little time I had before the wedding in a panic. First I went to a doctor for medication. When that didn’t work, with days to spare, I went to the ER and they tripled my Valtrex and Prednisone. Battling the worsening symptoms and medication side effects of dizziness, nausea, and stabbing head pains, I bought three different dresses at the local thrift store in two weeks, upgrading each time my weight further ticked upward, nervousness increasing.

The day of the wedding, I was still sick and popping various pills, so my secret dreams of a sexy smoochy wedding reunion seemed shot. I was dizzy and nerve wracked. My guts wrenched and my brain exploded in migraine. I tried to push myself through the sick and the panic to get to the ceremony, to the dinner. By dusk my woozy symptoms stabilized (summer heat is not my friend), and rather than possibly disrupt family formalities at dinner (would I cause a scene?!), I instead bicycled through the anxiety to the afterparty in Brooklyn at 9pm. I was expecting a proper reception. I didn’t know it was just a house party at an apartment.

Upon my arrival, the first thing Mutual Friend said to me in a cautious whisper was “Stefan isn’t here”, as though I should be relieved. Stefan, the insomniac night owl for whom I’d been psychologically preparing myself for weeks, had gone back to Jersey with family already?! He could have crashed with me!

I hid my crushing disappointment. Is Stefan avoiding me?

Or does he think I’m avoiding him?

All week I contemplated if I should write to Stefan, and what, and how; all week getting more annoyed at the perceived drama and anxiety of my invitation making me literally sick with worry. I kept checking his Instagram, hoping he’d post some wedding photos. If he did, then I would have cause to comment under them, let him know I was disappointed to have missed him! By Friday night with still no wedding pictures posted, I nearly messaged to him via Instagram, but then remembered…

Fuck it, he doesn’t even follow me, or write back. He’s ignored me online for over a year, and I’m restricted. What’s the point? I asked myself as I finally unfollowed his account. I’ll figure something out tomorrow.

The next morning, The Brother calls me, but I don’t answer. “Ugh, that guy, not inviting me to things, to his wedding, making me feel weird about me and Stefan!” I project. “I’m not answering, I’m going to a movie!”

Off I went to see a matinee of Cassavetes’ film Love Streams, and for good reason. Sickness had ruined my plans to fit in a viewing before the wedding as a kind of pre-gaming my Stefan exposure. Stefan has total Cassavetes swagger, y’see.

Stefan is far more handsome, but they’ve that same kind of charisma.

Love Streams, what a great film! The dynamic between Cassavetes’ portrayal of drunken desperate charm and his acceptance of Rowlands’ manic attempts to cheer him was perfection. While they played siblings rather than lovers, their interaction was even more reminiscent of Stefan and I than I’d imagined. Pure acceptance and devotion in the face of broken madness. How us!

Inspired by such relatable cinema, I was determined to somehow message Stefan about Love Streams and explain my anxiety about seeing him, about feeling not terribly welcome at the wedding, regardless of what drama my words may cause between the brothers. We’re The Sticky Friends!

Still in the theater, I pulled out my phone to try and email him (why didn’t I think of that before?!) only to now find a text message from The Brother:

“hey give me a call when you can”

What is with this guy?! First a phone call without texting first (weird), now a text message all ominous and vague and …

oh.

….. oh.

oh, I know what this means.

no no no no no no no no no no no.

I don’t call him back. Instead, I find his mom’s social media.

Her profile pic is of Stefan, below it a stream of condolences.

Stefan is dead.

Exactly one week after the wedding, Stefan is dead.

Wait. What? He can’t be dead, I was gonna kiss him. I’m about to email him.

I’m about to…

What?!?

I look at Stefan’s instagram again. The last image he posted was Tuesday, nothing since. It was of a theme he’d started drawing when we were splitting up.

Oh god.

Text message to The Brother:

The funeral was four days later. I wore the same outfit to his service that I’d worn hoping to enchant him at the wedding. The gathering at the house afterwards was not what I was expecting. I assumed I’d be largely unknown, as my time with Stefan was spent mostly in our own private bubble so many years ago. Instead, his parents played our short films and the whole house gathered to watch. His cousin said “oh you’re THAT Rachael!” and told me she felt she knew me because of how much Stefan told her. (really?) His father said “I don’t know if we’d ever met, but I feel I know you from the art you guys made.”

The Brother told me that I was the best influence on him. His best years. His most artistic and creative years.

(Mine too. Did nobody ever consider that he was as significantly positive an influence on me?)

I don’t think there were any female figures in his life present aside from me and the original “other woman”. (We finally met in person, and I gave her a hug.) No other creatives since highschool?

I’d not thought I was so solitary and significant a figure in his life. If I was so good for him, why was I told to stay away?

Late in the evening, once everyone was a bit drunkish, the father explained the circumstances of his death. They know Stefan was posting wedding pictures to Instagram (his stories, which I couldn’t see being restricted). He was doing so until around 2am, and was then found dead by dawn.

“He was doing so well! He’d been sober for months. He was actually looking forward to things again. What could have happened on Friday?!”

My soul froze.

…

Was it me?

I’d unfollowed his Instagram late Friday night. Did he notice?

I was at the after party. Did he see photos of me there and think I’d been dodging him?

Was it me?!

Was he looking forward to the future because he thought we were going to see each other at the wedding?

Was he as nervous to see me as I’d been to see him?

Was he as crushed as I was that we missed each other?

Was he frozen in fear and silenced by anxiety like me?

Was it me?!

This seems egocentric to even ask, I realize. A lovelorn almost-ex spinning fantasies of impossibility, perhaps. A classic case of addiction survivor guilt placing more agency in my hands than is realistic, you may be thinking. And at that point I may have agreed with you.

Then I started looking through his Instagram with fresh eyes.

I am everywhere. I am throughout.

I never caught it because the most obvious examples use photographs from many years prior. At first, I only noticed the most glaring references:

(So it seems I’d been jealous of myself?!)

(he could get my likeness if he wanted to. It never occurred to me he was hiding me in his drawings)

He’d posted this one in 2019, ten years after my photo was taken:

Once I started, I kept going… and kept going… and kept going. Once I knew what to look for, it never ended.

He’d leave clues, visual or otherwise.

Post after post after post. How is this happening? How did this exist?! How did I not see?! Why didn’t he say anything?!

There’s a language to it, not just for me, but for us. Masks and clown garb have always been a theme of his, but as previously mentioned, as we were splitting he’d started drawing a figure carrying another in it’s arms. It’s not just a general expression of human relationships. It is not simply, as I’d suspected, a metaphor about he and I specifically. It is literally referencing me:

During our partnership he wore a hat which we both often used to indicate him in our drawings, a trend he’s occasionally continued:

I’m tearing his heart out with my teeth.

While I am often indicated by my scrunchy face, a skull helmet, and/or having one eye, he is most often a clown or a corpse.

Here he his both, a corpse in a clown hat trying to catch this one eyed creature, with a backdrop of a banner with our initials; and then a reversed version with me gripping a clown creature in my fist:

My oblivion has proven to be tragic in it’s magnitude.

Here he is on our dawn smoking steps in Ocean Grove:

One of a pair of possible Sticky Friends bio photos, taken in Ocean Grove:

During that last year of painful separation, he was working on these portraits. I knew the cigar one was him. I didn’t realize until now that the one with the curlers is me.

Again, it’s us as sad clowns. He is crying and a window of past silly fun is in the background.

He’s drawn himself as a clown holding a large rose, looking downwards at me underneath the large wild rose bush beneath which I photographed myself curled and heartbroken as we split apart.

It seems he’d tattooed a rose onto his ankle. Again, just like the roses I was curled under, just like he drew himself offering. But wait, no, there’s another picture a few hours later, and it’s actually TWO roses. One for each of us?

It’s on his ankle, which means, I think, he gave this one to himself.

Almost all of the songs he used in his Instagram reels are about love, longing, the ocean, and/or best friends.

(I found so many examples of me in his art that it is now its own sprawling section, linked at the bottom of this page.)

But it’s not just us.

It’s my childhood.

My annual Fox Fest family reunions.

My scanned in family history.

My artwork.

My photography.

It’s anything I’ve taken, drawn, or uploaded to myspace, photobucket, tumblr, facebook, flickr.

The fact that I just let my obsession run wild for months in one last battle between his visual OCD and mine in a mad scavenger hunt is further proof of how ridiculously perfect for each other Stefan and I are.

were.

fuck.

He’d reposted this drawing, now captioned “Needs”:

There’s a “Needs” collection of stories at the top of his Instagram profile which I couldn’t see because I am restricted. (Is THAT why I was restricted?!) In that collection of stories, he has the above “Needs” portrait, as well as these sexy drawings I assumed was about a woman he was involved with:

I now realize that all those drawings are based on my/our photographs.

So. It would seem that the man I’ve been craving for years has been pining for me for years as well? Him assuming my feelings changed, me assuming his hadn’t. Both terrified and hiding from each other.

The night before the wedding, he posted this photo of himself peeking out from behind a mask. “Holding up in Brooklyn tonight.”

I think it’s fair to assume he was talking to me.

We were so close.

Just a few hours could have changed my entire human existence. Had we seen each other in the flesh, looked into each other’s faces, I have no doubt that we’d not be able to keep our hands off of each other, and I’d have experienced what it was like to be in love with Stefan while he was in love with me.

We’d have gotten to finally take our masks away.

It seems obvious in retrospect. There is an existential horror to losing yourself in your perfect partner. We had that. We truly did. We were both too broken to know how to handle that intensity.

We would now, though. With fifteen years of experience and introspection, loneliness and longing, with the identity chaos of our twenties long behind us and our fifties on the horizon, we would ride that tsunami of love with the grace and dexterity of Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse.

Do I think that with me back in his life he’d stay sober? I honestly do, especially now grasping my impact and influence on him over the years. I recognize that I may be woefully delusional about this, however. He might’ve died the same way down the road, regardless of my presence.

It would have been worth it.

One kiss would have been worth it. I never stayed away from him because of the drugs, wise as that might be. I only kept at a distance when I thought I complicated his recovery. And because my heart still trembled at the thought of him.

For seventeen years he’s been posting art that is based on my life, tattooing himself with my presence, and I not only didn’t notice, but I missed out on us finally seeing each other in the flesh for the first time in nearly a decade.

He’s relapsed many times, but this time…

Regardless of blame, of responsibility, of the unknowable specifics of what triggered him, of the dark gravity of addiction… My distance wounded the man I’ve wanted more than anything, and he died thinking I didn’t care.

I can feel the spectre of our almost reunion haunting me daily. The cobwebs of that tangent universe brush across my brain in a million tiny ways of every moment.

I never loved anyone else with such abandon, felt such contentment and peace radiate from their embrace, or craved them like a goddamn drug as I did Stefan.

I never wanted an open casket at a funeral before either, but I was crushed to find that Stefan was already reduced to a vessel of ashes at his service.

I wanted to touch him. I wanted to touch his sad beautiful face. Just one last time.

Instead, the ghosts of his flesh whisper to me between text messages and emails while I watch our story unfold wordlessly through art on a computer screen. The caress of rotting fingertips brands me with streaks of crimson as I swim through thousands of images of every sort.

If only I could drown into him.

PART TWO:

ART COLLECTION