I wouldn't say lying is second nature to me.

It's my first, my only nature.

So if anything arises from these shenanigans with Gareth and Helen it's that I haven't told or even considered telling, a decent lie to explain my recent misanthropy. In the current climate I'd very likely barter a diagnosis of 'depression' but my mood is always light, my faculties grossly intact, and yet rather than devise my own I appear to have settled for Helen's saving lie. All of which points toward no place but her breast.

I rang my father.

In forty years of chatting with my dad, we've never risen from the first circle of hell. The air between every word we ever speak is heavy with dead meat. Of course, in my twenties I did enough training and transpersonal work to imagine myself over it, and him. And yet, as I call him now and find, each day, my own politics silently morphing with his, I find myself returning to nothing else but love. I told him about my fleas.

You have to break the life-cycle.

You what, dad? What do you mean?

What do you mean, dad?