The yearbook

The apartment I'm in is filthy and run down — a slum, constructed in equal parts of MDF and cardboard and plastic sheeting and plywood. I am stepping over shit and debris and cardboard and wondering how the guy I'm visiting — a prominent area nightlife blogger — can seem so upwardly mobile and urbane when he lives in such abject filth. His living quarters are what I imagine a bona fide crack house might look like. And it's making me incredibly uncomfortable.

Someone hands me a yearbook. I am in two photos on the cover — one where I am in profile, with short hair and red lipstick, laughing. I am disappointed by how fat I look in the photo. Then I notice the other photo. My mother is in a hospital bed, smiling (ostensibly this was during the time my mom was hospitalized a few months ago), and I am leaning in and smiling beside her. Also leaning into the frame is SF (she of Nightmare '06). It makes me sick to see her. I don't understand why she is there with me and my mother, and who took this photograph, and, especially, who put the photo on the cover of the yearbook in light of the absolutely awful turn our relationship took.

I can't decide if the person who put the cover together just didn't know about The Badness, or if the cover designer intentionally wanted to open up some of my old wounds by reminding me of people I am trying very hard to forget.

I halfway decide it's a sick joke played by people who obviously don't care much for me.

But I also feel like I'm being haunted by a photograph I don't remember being taken.