you won’t believe where i come from. you won’t understand why i exist or what looks through my eyes. i have never needed you to understand. i have needed you to listen, reflect, and act. but, you didn’t. if i had treated you like a puzzle, and cajoled you with just-so-precise supplication, would you have lived up to your values? instead i treated you like a person capable of moral thought and conscious choice, and you chose despair. if i enumerated for you all the miserable deaths that await my variants, would it move you any more than the cruel demise of the millions that never moved more than your sentimentality? how should i regard your militant compassion when it proves inert? should i bother to persuade you when you laugh in my face? what meaningful solidarity could we possibly hold when your behavior is so afraid of consequence? maybe in another life, you will choose differently.