They don’t want anything real, people, and that’s where I come in.

Janine was real but he didn’t want the real Janine he wanted the Janine in his head.

Then he thought he was supposed to love himself and that the way to do that was to become himself as he was in his mind, so he stopped eating and wasted away until he became like a thought or a whisper of a person. He would have disappeared altogether if it hadn’t been for that doctor.

On and off, for years, we flirted, but it wasn’t me he loved. It was the feeling I gave him when he’d suck on my neck, emptying me in slow, measured gulps until he couldn’t see straight. It was the way I made the world look imaginary, and I painted him king. But I was too real, in the end, and my falsifications weren’t always what he wanted.