Dear 555,

On the search for the Modern Artist I find the one truth: fuck you, eat this guilt. And I think of Triple Nickel.

ISN 555. Man. There is no ISN 666, though there may be ISN 777.

Every week I held your keys. They would come back to me with laughing faces. “He still thinks he’s going home. Stupid mother fucker.”

Now, ISN 555, you are a mythology to me. How do you like that?

You never get to go home. That is the evil trick of the whole fucking thing. It is sick, really.

Before the fall you were a drug runner. A lowly servant of the poppy dream sold internationally by your boss who sold his opium cheap and you even cheaper. And for all I know you’re still going to reservations and telling your Escort Team that your interrogator promised you that you would be going home soon as the dust kicked up around you on your way from Gold Building to Camp Four… again.

It was the same story every week.

And now I think of you every time I feel the trap in the promise of God that we could find love and happiness here and that we will be delivered home. I know that I will never go home and that Love was as big a lie as Santa Claus and Democracy that was told to me to keep me in line and to keep me wishing.

I feel as pathetic as you must have felt when I talk of my stupid hopes of salvation. My friends must find my weekly trumpeting of the glories of Art as cosmically hilarious as we had found your years long plight.

And you pray and you pray and you pray and I pray and I pray and I pray. But we both know.

It is never coming.

And if it did, say we were both successful and Allah delivers you home and my God delivers me a day of peace when I no longer have to obsessively create beautiful things only to experience the temporary high of pride which is violently obliterated as soon as every prayer I make is done, say that happened. What then? You’re still a drug runner and I’m still a concentration camp guard. We can elevate ourselves so high as to be above it, but in reality we never will be. All our prayers are worth precisely the time we waste on them. Nobody cares. Not our friends. Not fucking God. Not the law. Not you. Really.

So let us do what the Devil did and dance and play tricks on one another. Lets laugh at our misfortune and turn together in hatred towards that which put us here together. Lets rebel to its fullest until we no longer care about happy days or whether or not people give a god damn about our stupid prayers. Fuck them. Fuck everybody. You and me Triple Nickle. You and me.

We get each other. I know that we do. Just like how the guy who screams all night and I understand each other. I’m your other half. I’m the guilt you don’t want to understand and you are the victim of my ignorance. In each other we can know what we are. Ruined souls locked together by the keys.

My keys. The keys I am so proud to have never lost.

Why am I thinking of you?

It is a summer night. I lay here in bed in this fancy vintage suit elaborating a burden I should be drinking and fucking away. But instead I’m nursing a wound they all say I should heal.

I don’t want to heal. I don’t want redemption or salvation. I don’t want the lies about Love and Santa Claus and Home.

I want to feel it. I want to feel the guilt and the pain so that I know somebody does. The rest of them won’t, of that I can assure you. They are well defended stone houses of psychology. Never a question. But me…

I never want to think of you again. I never want to see your scraggly beard again. I never want to wake up sweating in the night with this horror that each time that I deploy to Camp Delta again in my dreams I am going there because I know that that is where I belong. Not you. You were the innocent one.

I was the one that was playing the Nazi. I was the perfect, sharp, white face of power in love with itself. I was the one laughing at your plea and all of your wasted time. I was the one with your keys in my hand. I can accept that. I want to. I don’t want to forget. If I forget then I am just like them. All the people that we hate together.

Were you the one that told them about Osama?