Blake crooned cartoonishly to mock the top 40 hits on the radio. He considered these musicians beneath him, sellouts, but his envy was so obvious to me, and I felt closer to him - and distracted from my dread - by seeing into the feelings he’d never admit to.

Pity, I would have called it, but it wasn’t pity. It was something far scarier and more destabilizing, something I would never let myself name so long as I needed to feel superior to their pain.

My neighbors’ distress didn’t surprise me. This was New Jersey, after all, home to the insecure and impressionable. Jersey was a land of lacking, the slow-footed little sibling to Manhattan: always never enough. My neighbors were tame, small-hearted gentrifiers who cared deeply about property value.

I fucked them because I liked predictable men, the guarded and repressed. Sensitive men wouldn’t be trusted; they assumed their sensitivity made them special, deserving of praise. Most sensitive men were, at their cores, narcissists who constructed elaborate expectations for how relationships were meant to evolve. When those expectations weren’t met, the facade of sensitivity deteriorated into a petulant rage.