I Wished

‘If the garbage in their voices could be scraped away, maybe they're intelligent or draw less stupid pictures or are prettier or something great that some vindictive, lesser mortals have so teased or criticized into seclusion that they're only true when fighting one another for attention with a font's cache of modifiers as their weaponry.

Maybe when they're not online, they shadow colleges' or high schools' walls. Maybe they're goths or emos who have gussied up life's hellishness into a daily Halloween. Maybe their trendiness solved people's meanness into an issue of conflicting tastes in fashion, which hurts less but makes it extremely difficult for them to make close friends.

Maybe they write poetry about their feelings and read that to one another while imagining their listeners are attachés or scouts from lyrically impaired but otherwise amazing bands. Maybe no one actually listens, they just wait their turn to read, and vice versa, so they don't know why they feel comfortable yet miserably alone when they're together.

Maybe they grew bold enough one day to post their poems on websites set aside for gloomy, unsophisticated artists and admirers of incompetent, cathartic art. Maybe they grew confident enough to stop pretending their scribbles were poetry instead of suicidal scrawls they might have chickened out and torn in shreds were not the Internet a wildly more rewarding trash can.

Maybe someone loved them once or twice, or said they did, which they no more believed than actors buy the love of fans that only know them when their feelings are impersonations. So, love got lost, and now that they're so doomed, or wish they were, they know that mutual addiction will have to do, and they're trying to addict someone right now.'

this was unlike everything I've read before. it is somehow a collection of memories, a chaotic surrealist piece of autofiction, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. it was hard to follow Cooper's writing, sometimes, but, nonetheless, I think he did a great job capturing love, and, more than that, the obsession to be loved by someone we do love. and also what it feels to spend a whole existence trying to make sense of your feelings for someone and knowing that probably no one will see beyond that person's flaws and very perturbed behaviour. it felt desperate. by the end, Cooper says that he is writing only for George and that we are his witnesses or the admirers of this whole story. I think one can feel that, indeed, that the book is entirely for the man he had loved his entire life, and not to serve other literary purposes. it's a heart-breaking and dark eulogy.