Castration is for everybody

On Twitter forever ago, I saw a friend retweet the guy who won Jeopardy and kept hanging around with weird trans girls getting into the etymology of the word 'bad'. I remember quote tweeting it with 'Man, remember this one? How are you doing? Are we happy yet?'
The friend I saw the guy's post from in the first place retweeted that one too, my take on it. My voice or whatever. She had always been harassed by angry fascist phobe nerds and somewhere in that her abusive ex-girlfriend set herself on fire outside of a courthouse, was transmuted in a flash of flame from a messy living bitch into a subject of discourse, folk punk songs and conspiratorial posts by influencers. That friend of mine, Rani, spent years grappling with the memory, having to be the public center of the discourse about this auto-incinerator and privately mourn the pain she had caused her.
She never really got over it. Ate her from the inside out years gone by and what came next was paperwork. I don't know what got her in the end, suicide, misadventure, long tail of anorexia and societal neglect. So many people had died on me by that point I stopped being able to understand any of them. The last I saw of her, year and change before the event, I was palming her estradiol and wishing her luck, and we were saying, you know, we gotta hang out more, it's been so long, we're trying to be social, we're trying to live again. There's gotta be something more to all of it. We gotta find a way to be happy.

Anyway, here's a book of poetry.