Matthew Buckmaster’s Reviews > Hollywood, Ending > Status Update

I think about how she told me once that after men have you, they don't want you anymore. I don't want to be that kind of man, but I'm terrified I'm going to be. I always recoil in the face of actual intimacy. It is so easy to say I love you, and so hard to let myself feel it.

I say that of course you bring your full self to a role, but I didn't learn anything from abuse that I couldn't have learned somewhere else, somewhere easier. Whether this answer is true is almost irrelevant to the experience of saying the words; all I know is that the answer, practiced dozens of times now, allows me to feel safe and sane.

I used to think, Someday she'll get sober. Someday we'll have a real relationship. She'll ask for my forgiveness, and she'll atone, and I'll forgive her, and we'll be able to have a real relationship. But now that's impossible, you know? Because she's dead now.

Someone told me once that when your mother is dead, you are living both lives—your life and hers. I live my mother‘s life even when she was alive

….

I do not want to want to be loved by strangers, but I do not want to want most of what I want.

So what.