so now: you've arrived at this place you've been calling success for the last three years of your life as you struggled through all the ******* that came along with getting that ****** degree and now that you have it, now that they have to call you "doctor" regardless of what they end up trying to prove about you, how much farther along on your journey toward actual success are you?--do you yet have a wife or a girlfriend or a woman who cares about you, has feelings of tenderness for you?--you definitely don't have any children to speak of and now that you've come to see just how selfish they've made you, and how much you don't want to be mistaken for your own child's grandfather, it really is too late for the family you sometimes found yourself wanting and sometimes found yourself being terrified of being shackled to for a lifetime--because, really, what if you did end up with two daughters who were even worse than your sister?--wouldn't you have wanted to disown them outright after awhile?--and that would've just ****** them up even more than you not telling them how much they disgusted you in the years where their personalities were still forming, where you were still trying to shape them into something other than the type of **** your sister was, for wants she just a composite of all the worst traits of your grandmother and your mother?--and what had those ******* been like?--the worst of the worst when it came to the hag, the parasite, the user and abuser women had been understood to be as regards those stereotypes which existed for a reason, and you had seen the minuscule truths in those reasons, you had lived through each of them, but it'd been your sister that concerned you most of all because she was your own age, she would go out and propagate and turn her own children into knock-offs of herself, and wouldn't that be a crying shame for the world of men and women, to have yet more people like her walking the earth?--but wasn't it even a greater indignity to you as you lived and breathed in this present moment to know that there'd be more people like her because she had made children and no more people like you because you hadn't?--there'd been phases when you'd been too frightened by the responsibility of a family, too spooked by what might be born of half your genes and half of someone else's "crazy" and so your time had now passed and even when people tried telling you that they knew of this or that couple where the father was ten years older than you and they'd still decided to have children, that just made you feel old and sad, as though your terrible choices really had finally caught up to you in body and in spirit--but then there'd been phases where you wanted to hold your sons in your arms, where you wanted to teach them how to tie their shoes, how to read, how to write, how to solve problems without using fists or angry words, how to make life work for them, how to get along with people, and just how were you going to teach them all these things when you were still learning how to do them yourself?--you'd learn together, that's what you'd come up with, and you'd become their teacher because they needed you to be, and if you had some more learning to do, then there was always the "on the job" training that all of life was every ******* day, but you'd be there for them and you wouldn't abandon them when they ****** up, you wouldn't make them feel like **** when they didn't perform up to your standards, but hopefully you'd be able to show them the path and they would take it and not take so long getting there as you had...but how long had those latter phases lasted where you had wanted children?--not long enough to warrant looking for a woman you actually wanted to have children with, and that hadn't been the woman you'd been married to, which was unfortunate because she'd wanted them with you...and for good reason: because she'd wanted to use them as a crutch to enslave you to being the breadwinner for the rest of her life--it'd all become part of her grand scheme that had gone bust when she realized you wouldn't play along with her, that you wouldn't give in, and if it cost you being with her, then that was fine with you, but you weren't going to surrender who you were and what you wanted...you weren't going to play mad ******* scientist with her and her ****** up genes with her family's notorious history of mental illness, and that was enough to put the both of you on each other's **** list for nearly six years, which means, yes, you were going to have to start all over again, and even worse than this: you had known six years before she divorced you that you were going to have to start all over again with someone else, maybe even with no one else because how were you ever going to build yourself up for a possible **** up like this again?--there you were halfway through your twelve-year term with her knowing that however long it lasted, that it was going to end because sooner or later, she would end up erasing her misgivings and wanting to be with someone who wasn't going to be hesitant about having children with her because of her genetic history and that person wasn't you: you both knew as much at that moment in the summer of '00, and yet you did nothing but nominally reconcile so that she could attempt to wear you down with pleas and begging and when these didn't work, indifference and threats until everything you'd loved about her was gone and she had become just as much of a stranger to you as you'd become to her...it was all of this that came crashing down around you over the course of ten years as you saw just how depressed, just how miserable you'd been with her those last six years until you started asking what that whisper had been inside you when you'd first met her and then it hit you like a sledgehammer: you had been warned by your instincts, by that weird "people sense" you had about you that she was someone who was spoiled, someone you'd even called in your head at first a "spoiled brat" and yet you went ahead and got her number anyway, you called her and met her even though you'd already had a relationship that was a failing and flailing relationship until she had let you between her legs where the other had not, and so your mind was made up that at least with this one, you could have some fun, at least with this one, she knew how to live, that *** wasn't a bad thing or something to be ashamed of, and so you ignored your instincts because you thought you were alive, you thought you were trying to make a life with her and who cared if you saw what her shortcomings were, everyone had them...but you had ignored your own warnings about her that here was someone who was always going to be selfish, who was always going to want you to live for her--didn't that sound like someone you'd grown up with, someone you had come to despise, someone you said you couldn't wait to get away from so you never had to see her again?--yes, she was just a different form of your sister, and in some bizarre oedipal twist, you had married an analogue of your own sister...no one's here to judge, though, just you and what had you decided other than you'd wasted twelve years of your life on her?--only that you could never allow yourself to go to sleep like that behind your eyes ever again, because somewhere within, you had known--you'd been too smart for your own good and it hadn't been good for you, all that wisdom, all that knowledge: you didn't know what to do with it, and so you ignored it because to act on it would've left you all alone again, and how would such an outcome have made you feel after working so hard to be anything but alone?--because by the time you'd figured all this out, you were out of college and away from all the foul-weathered friends you'd made there so that all you'd had was her, and when your finally moved out of your house and away from your family, what would breaking up have gotten you except a one-way ticket back to that **** house because you still weren't financially independent--life was taking too long to live, you were taking too long to get started with it, to get good and making it work for you, you were ******* up too much and somewhere along the way, at some point, you were going to have to pay: and so here it was, here was how you'd have to pay, with your time, with the precious years of your life you'd never get back...so that yes, you'd been in a prison, of sorts, but it'd been one partly of your own making and partly that of how you'd been raised to think--it had been deflating more than anything else to discover that no, you actually didn't need anyone--you'd wanted someone, sure: someone good, someone who'd be patient with you, who'd understand your moodiness, who'd get that sometimes you just needed to be held and stroked like some beast laying down to die in pain...but these were only wants, not needs--you stared up at the ceiling this morning knowing the meeting was tomorrow, that you might well be written up, but so ******* what?: in a sense you were dead already and in another sense you'd never die, and their ******* threats and paperwork wouldn't mean **** even as they were putting everything into place because you had all this reality unfolding within you so that you could see how you might've avoided all this beginning with this meeting and ending with the woman you'd should've been with, the one you'd always wanted to be the mother of your children, but now that was as impossible as everything else was as you readied and steadied yourself for what is yet to come--