December 15, 2019:
Through the park, largely random, sometimes down the street thoughtfully named for my then-best story, across the tracks, past the medical center, across Market to 15th, to her sister's apartment where I found spaghetti, beer, friendship, sometimes tears, always the sweetness of a very kind girl.
She loved me but I loved her sister and it would have been so unfair, yet probably so good for me, probably the most meaningful of the opportunities I declined before going entirely dormant.
What did I just say? Of course it would not have been good for me. She'd have been miserable, knowing my heart was not merely elsewhere but with her domineering, abusive older sister, her hero, the gravitational center of her every motion in life. That vindictive horror of a sibling who'd have made her pay and pay and pay. For her it would have been nightmare and her pain would inevitably have been mine, too.
She was the prototype of all the kind and beautiful women I declined in that period. The girls I could have had, and would have torn apart, in my anger and loneliness and destructiveness.