—

“What movement even exists anymore?”

“There’s plenty out there. It never ended. You just—“

Say it. I left. I bowed out.

“—you just haven’t been around it in a while.”

We both know what you mean and it’s not this. And you’re right: refusing to drown in a sinking ship, I swam to the shore. I denied myself a noble death—drinking myself to death in a woodland cabin hunched over my vials of herbs, or blowing my brains out in the basement of some former squat now abandoned to bleakness and ruin, or being gradually ground to dust by generation after generation of thumotic young activists who loathe my presence and deny the relevance of my knowledge—and chose instead to chase after this elusive thing called “truth.”

Maybe, though, this was always my real movement—and it’s the other one that, in the end, left me.