“I’m going to MIT,” said Dustin.

“I’m jumping off a cliff,” thought Drake.

But instead he said, “I’m going around the world. I’m taking Trish.”

The emptiness of everything that could possibly exist descended on him then, there in the workroom with all the papier mache and the easels and clay. It was all unfinished, the whole dream of the world. It was just a rough idea God had and he had dropped Drake into it before it was ready and it was never going to be anything either of them wanted, just some bullshit, some expectations. America was crapping out and all the Baby Boomers were crapping out and there wasn’t even going to be any good music anymore.

“There’s something very dark and horrifying inside of me and it’s going to drive me forward until it hits something,” he said.

“Good luck,” said Graylyn and it destroyed him. In that instant she went from being the friend he had known through all of school to a grown woman he barely knew, embarking on her voyage through the world without him, living in other cities, making love to people he’d never know, a vision for the world. Written about and admired, leading a whole other life without him. Some invisible part of her he had once possessed now dissolved and he had never known her. He had been fucking around and blown it. He could have made himself into something, but he had wasted it. He had wasted her. Feelings he didn’t know he had were dissolving and his whole life until that point had been a lie. There was no literature, no life, no beauty, just this ugly, dead gray and brown room of harsh unfinished emptiness that could go nowhere and be nowhere.