# the letters between you back in the day after college one desperately penned slice of terminally useless emotional anguish sent per week for little over a year that first letter was from old brighton they tell you they're desperately short of cash and have started two jobs in order to pay outrageous local rent your on the dole at the moment living barely with the volks it's sheer extra heck but bearable in the sense you can still shut your bedroom door and sleep off your depression that is psychological abuse for up to fourteen hours at a stretch you travel down to ancient brighton every chance you get with bags of food taken from the cupboard mother dearest starts getting suspicious stop eating so much they say oh horrible pinched faced mother if only you knew we're hungry like a lone burning smoke wolf of heavily oxidized iron continually raining from a ruined megastructural bridge once in brighton you give your love the rest of your dole money they're in difficulty but their course is going well and they're starting to make a lot of new friends one major surprise you find out your old lost pal juicy lucy is their flatmate and shares the rent juice is decidedly emotionless when they see you idly saying oh hi swanson and that's it about as welcoming as an accidental shut in down at the local morgue so much for old unlit flames your favorite humalien gently takes you back to their room for an intense play session despite feeling better there's no way they're ever going to get back together with you so you guess the quick complementary was for old times sake oh researcher last time you saw them you acted such idiot you squirm every time you remember it you went down there to visit again ate an awesome chili burger from a great vegetarian takeout by sea you hung around for hours playing neat crap video arcade playspaces old brighton is a depressing undead hole when your in unrequited throes and firmly out of love's warm soapy bath you brought them a silver ring and a fancy hat from a small dark goth shop in town which they adored yet soon enough after a few unadvised drinks together you start crying pleading with them to take you back by this point swanson's heart is already in two distinct torn sections they immediately chuck you out super annoyed back at the lab years later henry reconsiders the past and says to themselves: yeah thanks for also brazenly screwing that stir dreck stan behind our back we found out you'd willfully moved down to old brighton where the trekkie happened to live despite freely taking all our money time and food if your new special trekkie beau was so kind and supportive why didn't you just ask them for help instead of raiding our wallet for months desperate thing is even if we'd known you were two timing us we'd still have given you everything all we wanted that dark soul night was a hug and a kind word certainly not a blindly obvious admission of your back stabbing guilt badly disguised as a sudden angry and callous inability to deal with our bs student pain you no longer loved us ok fair enough yet you never really knew us we were just another convenient escape from your parents well also fair enough yet you deliberately used us as a cheap wallet and mobile support network in fact it was your plan all along to do exactly as you liked with that trekkie worm without genuine regard for the feelings of others yet how you conveniently develop the sudden audacity to get angry about us crying tell you what back in the day hoo boy my feelings for you were serious your both lucky your little lover with their tiny plastic phazer pistol didn't mysteriously wash up face down on the dirty shoreline of a brighton morning covered in sewage seaweed used condoms and infected hypos swanson's ex love had enough of their useless snot and tears and literally marched them by the arm right out of their flat and all way down road to a line of waiting taxi cabs they opened the back door and said to the cabbie drop this thing off at the station this thing they say this thing like spitting they handed the driver some of your dole money and slammed the taxi door shut it banged hard against your knee and you cried out but they didn't care goodbye to old rubbish eh there's a blandsome starship captain waiting back at home it's over it's over certain life events are so over with it ain't even funny as the mighty hank says a dead star that's collapsed into a white dwarf of pain this also happened to be in the middle of the damn night and it turns out the station had already closed so swanson had to spend hours standing outside alone in the pitch emotional darkness and freezing acid rain they bawled themselves silly almost puking with grief possession by sarah mclachlan almost started to play in the cinematic background well more like a long abandoned cheap movie set a couple days after getting back home it seems swanson experienced a mild nervous breakdown they didn't step out of house for three months they didn't say shed to nobody just lay on a cold bed trying unsuccessfully to remember the exact details of their sweet love's dear face a couple of months later swanson finds themselves at university having barely made the grade first day there immediately after checking in they march outside with lighter fluid and a box of matches from a local corner shop they burn everything all those letters their love had written all their old pictures dragged them outside into the ballardian car park at 08:30 sbt on an overcast ruby tuesday dragged them outside into the cold like they had done to him threw everything down on dusty bare concrete covered it with lighter fluid and casually yet with willful deliberation threw an emotionless match a quiet voosh sound and some dirty orange flame and it was all over ashes ashes drifting away in the slow stale mindless northern wind attempted new beginnings by our bold antihero or some utter nonsense they still regret doing something so unnecessary and spanner dumb but mainly in a semi positive glad that's all over with kinda way it's never over however because memory remains to faintly haunt and hurt swanson was in hospital a few weeks later with an unrelated lung infection severe depression is scientifically known to negatively impact one's immune system it was real serious for about twelve hours and they spent time in a cool oxygen filled plastic tent sixty thousand feet high in a pilotless sentient jet plane to the near psychedelic future nurses put tubes in both their arms what sounds like neroli by brian eno seems to play in the ambient hospital background occasionally drifting into the foreground swanson dredged up the courage and called their ex love to tell them where they were they sounded genuinely worried and said they'd come up to visit but never arrived in fact they later said swanson was a liar turns out the hospital didn't have record of any henry swanson entering the emergency ward broody useless national unhealth service though many thanks for saving our life their off white hospital ward was credibly misery inducing some poor basket next to swanson had a foot high tube of glass full to the brim with neon canary yellow phlegm they didn't seem to notice much however and was in fact dead by morning orderlies came and carted their tiny bird body away and despite occasionally wondering what they up to now swanson never saw them again // [[republic of bob contents | imaginary pastime republic of bob]]