Lie. Pretend that you fell in love with someone with a name that starts with an R, S, or T, call them (        ). Then after naming this “faceless” person write ten poems about them. Give those poems titles based on the Before Trilogy so that at least someone knows how much you love them and how much love means to you. After you’ve fallen in love with (        ), write a manifesto about how much you hate them because emotions, especially love, are so fleeting. You now say love is not real and I just wish for my cathexis to be conquered, so that you now sound like a pretentious asshole that reads and “adores” bell hooks, although you’ve only read her work after she died. You say things like “that take is filled with biocentrism” or “hegemonic masculinity is so ubiquitous” just because you feel like that everyone needs to know how much you read and how intelligent you are because that is so important. Start reading Lolita and talk about how no one truly understands it to its entirety even though you secretly hate it. You annotate four copies of Simone de Beauvior’s The Feminine Mystique for your friends just so that they know you really read nonfiction. You say you wish you were Sylvia Plath so that you can write your deepest traumatic experience—a $70,000 boarding school—in a way that is incomprehensibly beautiful. Also, I recommend you have a book review account because how could you not publicize the fact that you read 67 books in the year of 2022. You become androphobic because that’s something that is seemingly popular—meaning you hate men that read murakami and wear tote bags—not the actual systems of oppression that are at play. You become a Marxist and swear that no one actually understands Marx the way you do because who could possibly not understand what “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” means (The Communist Manifesto). You listen to Tyler, the Creator and also say that no singular person understands the depth of his work and only listens to him because he’s popular and is pseudo-indie even though that’s the only reason why you started listening to him. You now use the words subversive, esoteric, and hedonist to describe yourself and miss a week and a half of school to go to the Venice Biennale because attending your Foundation to Art class is now beneath you. You deactivate your Snapchat account and main Instagram account because how could you be the next Thoreau if people know you. Anonymity means everything to you now… but not enough because everyone needs to know that you’re trying to be Thoreau—you have never read Thoreau. You practice sodomy—only because Oscar Wilde did it—not because you’re gay. You say Audre Lorde is MOTHER but so is Julia Fox. You take art classes instead of a sport even though you’re artistically challenged. You befriend your lesbian English teacher, she now listens to Mitski because of you. You call all your slightly problematic “feats” eras and pretend to watch video essays. Because that is how writing was introduced to you and that is possible the only way you will ever be considered a writer.