There’s a particular spot I like to drive to near the Valley. I won’t tell you exactly where it is, but if you turn right at a certain traffic light and keep driving straight you’ll end up in a private area full of expensive apartments overlooking the river. I like it because of the view, and I like it because of the silence, and I like it because the magnificently designed apartments remind me that one day I will have the ability to buy my way into a better life.

After dinner I took Carol to this spot of mine, and as we walked by the apartments and the view she took my hand and asked me, “What do you want to do this weekend?”

I shrugged.

“I was thinking about something,” she said.

“About what?”

“About honesty.”

“I hate honesty.”

Carol tucked some hair behind her ear. “I’ve been thinking like, you know what? I think we already know everything.”

“What the hell are you on about?”

“We know everything. We know how to live. But everyone else’s thoughts, the books we read, our own laziness – it buries what we know and how we truly feel deep inside. When can you honestly say you’ve spent time just trying to find the truth not from the outside world, but from inside yourself? It’s all there. We go and spend all this time and money on finding out the truth but really,” she touched her chest, “it’s all in here, I think.”

“And what truth have you found in yourself?”

She kept quiet for a while, tapping her lip with her index finger. “I don’t know what to ask myself yet.”

We reached a railing. She smiled at me and I smiled back and she put her arms around my waist. She leant her head into my shoulder and whispered, “Everything is perfect. Why don’t you want to be with me?”

“I do…”

“You don’t.”

And I thought about her vagina, and I thought about the way she kissed me, and I thought about our arguments, and I thought about her face without makeup, and I thought about the things she’d say. I stared at an apartment in the distance.

_

Graphic novel I’m reading: The Descender