History of Roberts

144 words

Self portrait of Robert Cornelius.

I arrived in Los Angeles under duress and the taxi driver’s name was Robert, which would have been my name if I’d been born a boy and would have been my uncle’s name if he had lived past childhood and I have a tattoo that acknowledges the death of another Robert, but not the Robert I fell in love with when I was eighteen, a wild love that I now look back upon with suspicion as that Robert seemed to have entered total psychosis and called me, fifteen years later, to accuse me of plagiarizing the novel he’d been writing in high school and publishing it online under a pseudonym, raking in millions, and though I’ve never used a pseudonym if I did I might chose Robert.

I thought of all this in the backseat as Robert drove me somewhere, my history of Roberts.

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The above essay is 144 words, a part of a series explained over here.