The Atmospherians

I was angry at them. And I wanted to hurt them. I believed seeing them hurting might free me of my anger, as if justice were some kind of cosmic seesaw in which bringing them down might lift my spirits. This is not justice, however. This is revenge. And there is no end to revenge. That's the point of it.

Your pain won’t impress anyone. The people your pain does impress aren’t worth impressing.

There are consequences for treating forgiveness like a rare and finite resource.

We longed for ennui and weariness, but what we felt was a deep, gullible passion for anywhere else splashing inside us like a puppy in a pool.

What better aspiration for men? To cede power, the spotlight, to let others speak, let the action continue without them.

I told them a story. It's not my fault they believed it.

I fucked them because I liked predictable men, the guarded and repressed. Sensitive men wouldn’t be trusted; they assumed their sensitivity made them special, deserving of praise. Most sensitive men were, at their cores, narcissists who constructed elaborate expectations for how relationships were meant to evolve. When those expectations weren’t met, the facade of sensitivity deteriorated into a petulant rage.

There's nothing cruel about a statement of fact.

I didn't become a cult leader to be kind," I said.

Pity, I would have called it, but it wasn’t pity. It was something far scarier and more destabilizing, something I would never let myself name so long as I needed to feel superior to their pain.

Blake crooned cartoonishly to mock the top 40 hits on the radio. He considered these musicians beneath him, sellouts, but his envy was so obvious to me, and I felt closer to him - and distracted from my dread - by seeing into the feelings he’d never admit to.

My neighbors’ distress didn’t surprise me. This was New Jersey, after all, home to the insecure and impressionable. Jersey was a land of lacking, the slow-footed little sibling to Manhattan: always never enough. My neighbors were tame, small-hearted gentrifiers who cared deeply about property value.