ICE-9

Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love.  How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get.  The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in catalogs with words like "sunset" and "Paris." Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus.

But even the surprise of harmless others in the house disturbed me. I didn't want my inner rot on display, even accidentally.  Living alone was frightening in that way.  No one to police the spill of yourself, the ways you betrayed your primitive desires. Like a cocoon built around you, made of your own naked proclivities and never tidied into patterns of actual human life.