Chunk in Resident Evil Requiem is chomping through drywall wishing it were my liver, and I still feel sorry for him. This is how my life has always gone – a weird stranger tells me the ways he wants my flesh, or he follows me around silently until I vomit my soul from fear, and yet a part of me is sad for him. I think, He must be lonely, and, You know, I've been lonely.

I even think this as I'm looking at the goddamn Chunk twins, the insatiable mutants I battle individually as Requiem heroes Grace and Leon. Their eyes bulge from the sockets like pimples in the midst of popping, and their skin looks like bread mold. They're not normal guys. But they're man enough to trigger the socialization skills TikTok pundits warn against. Women are documented to apologize more often than men, and we tend to score more highly on empathy tests. The numbers have a point. Like, right now I'm worrying about bald Chunks with gray rhinoceros skin, whose bloated cheeks get stuck in the doorways at Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center while they hiss, "Don't... fuck...with me…"

But I've also felt sorry for my father, ex-boyfriends, professors, online stalkers, and famous serial killers after I read their Wikipedia pages. This is a perverted problem of mine, some friends say. I whisper it to myself, uncomfortable, like sliding someone a drink they didn't ask for. I get a burning feeling in my chest when I forgive too quickly, like spiders weaving around my rib cage. But I was raised to ignore the warning signs. 

My mother encouraged me to be deferential to men who mistreat me, saying things like, "That's your father, you love him," even when our nice plates were broken on the ground, and Mommy’s nose was bleeding. When I tell new friends stories from my childhood now, they gently ask, "And they're still together…?" I try not to look too embarrassed when I say, "Yes." But the embarrassment is always ballet dancing with learned defensiveness: Yes, she'll never leave, but isn't it unusually selfless of us women to stay?  

I'm reminded again of this needly, porcupine dissonance when I read that Jeffrey Dahmer related deeply to Palpatine in The Empire Strikes Back. It's a childish impulse, thinking that you've found a good guidebook for being a person by observing a Star Wars senator, but a part of me understands. When I was little, I looked to none other than Batman on how to cope with difficult feelings. I spent so much time feeling like I was in a padded cell while everyone else was really alive, riding horses in Central Park. Batman, I thought, was like me in that his excessive eyeliner revealed he was mentally deranged. Dahmer probably felt something like that each time he rewatched The Empire Strikes Back. Except, he usually did that before he dismembered people.

If he didn't, my life would be easier. I wouldn't feel so tortured about understanding him — just a little chunk of him. "I made a model of you, / A man in black with a Meinkampf look," Sylvia Plath says in the poem "Daddy." I think I do this too, I keep dusty monuments in my mind of men that terrify me. It's obviously a form of self-indulgence. If the boogeyman is always around, then I can always be a victim. If I'm always a victim, then I'm never wrong. Oh, you'd be pretty rude to say that I'm wrong! 

(Pause – I'm folding up the yellow socks from Mount Sinai on 5th Ave).

There's another part of it. When you blame a man for ruining your life, that's like signing a marriage contract. The guys I see as terrorists are as much a part of me as Adam's rib, and I want to understand myself with a level of self-reflection heretofore unseen. I have no choice, then, but to sympathize with the Unabomber – whose ideas about the industry are really pretty good. He wrote in his manifesto, "It is not possible to make a lasting compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force," and watching cruelty flourish on Bluesky makes me think that's true.

The Unabomber also threatened to blow up an airplane, which I don't even think would have helped prove his point. Many of the men I both cower from and connect myself to are irredeemable in this way, sharp mustaches. They are "inhuman," that word people say when they want to forget any of us can cause a rampage. 

It is important, however, to acknowledge that it wasn't us who mailed the bomb. It was the men. The men didn't listen when someone told them "no." They avoided help. They thought sharing their problems was a less effective strategy than filling the world with moonlight sadness – and everyone else proves them right once they take to Twitter and loudly decide any level of social transgression, regardless of repentance, regardless of circumstance, should result in your humanity being revoked. Then it's time to fry in Hell. 

I just can't agree with that. We are all barefoot, being led by the leash of living; Delusions, disappointment, wanting to lock the door. But the same chains are threaded with responsibility, hope, and they rattle from the geyser of love I think all living things contain. 

Someone comments on my Instagram, nothing is that complicated. I might be fascinated by the macabre only so I can find another reason — better than Batman — for feeling out of place among the living. I've always thought it was nicer to walk between gravestones, after all, and the fairies who drink water there… 

You know, the fairies are known for their bloodthirsty nature and moral corruption, too. The Irish only used to call them "good people" out of fear of incurring their wrath. 

(Pause: fold the nylon stockings. I pick at the hole a bit on that old pair I don't even know why I have. I'm craving a cigarette again even though I don't smoke. 

10 years ago, I remember, there was another blue sunset like this. I was next to him at the river while he exhaled gray clouds. They were the shape of frowns, spooling out and down with the wind. I thought, I'd still love him if he held my face under the lilypads, and I continue to believe that).

"Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may not be as strong and as capable as men," the Unabomber says. I'm astounded he was able to form such clearheaded analysis at a time when he was also sending bombs to innocent grad students. I do have this fear that Ted Kaczynski describes. 

I think part of me hopes that, if I strive to feel sorry for bad guys, they'll stop hurting me and other people. And, if I just accept them as they are and associate with them, then their untouchable nature could rub off on me. I could protect myself in loathsome armor. There is an ego-less feeling to this idea that makes me feel peaceful, like a nun. There's another, more tarry part of it where I want everyone to be blameless so if — on the off chance I say, think, or do the wrong thing — I can be blameless, too. Because I'm a woman, and I panic about social graces. Because of my mother, because I like the contrariness of it, and because of my OCD, a misunderstood thing. 

The short of the illness is, you get unwanted, intrusive thoughts about any "theme" that causes anxiety, and you feel like the only way to stop your worst fears from happening is by performing some meaningless behavior, a ritualistic compulsion. 

(Listen: I'm putting the psych ward socks beneath the expensive undies I bought from that place on 2nd a few years ago. I don't know what I was thinking. This will give me strength from within? It didn't work).

I often get my ankle stuck in that trap. During my worst seasons with OCD, everything looks like big game taxidermy – danger frozen in place. The kid coughing onto my lap on the subway might have given me an incurable flu strain. Thinking the number "six" might damn my soul and get my tits ripped off in Hell. Standing next to a nice lady at the crosswalk might make a knife appear in my hand and kill her. 

It sounds like the definition of crazy, and the often taboo nature of OCD thoughts make it isolating, too. I was born with my head in a blender, and though I know it's not my fault, I'm in a constant state of guilt, and it feels wrong to relate to anyone who isn't a little morally gray. 

Do you think Palpatine missed Anakin as he fell to the ground, or did he just fucking die? What effect should the answer have on me? At the moment, it makes no difference.

I bet I've earned a fairy's ire. It chases me into my room and turns on Resident Evil Requiem. 

Chunk 1 whines at Grace, "Stop…lauughiiing!," and another piece of my glass heart breaks. Like I said, I can't help it. But I'm also repelled by the way he groans, "Eat… shiiit!" into the stale air, the inchworm of ass crack he flaunts as he waddles through Rhodes Hill. 

Here come the patient forms I find scattered throughout Requiem, twisting the knife. They remind me that the Chunks, if an angel were to come down and cure them of their soiled underwear and raging T-virus, are human beings indistinguishable from anyone else sitting down at the diner, spilling a little raw sugar into their tea. 

I think about how someone once cared for the Chunks enough to bestow the sweetly tacky names Thomas K. Jackson and Timothy B. Jackson, how they were known before they turned into Chunks. 

"(the laundry is dirty in order to be washed),” French philosopher Roland Barthes reminds me in his lecture on the Neutral in reference to Marquis de Sade. That's another guy I think, in my most forbidden twilight dreams, I could have a souffle with every once in a while. 

But I never fall in love with the Chunks, or any of the scary men they remind me of. The pity I feel for them can't outweigh my sense of justice. And since the Chunk twins refuse to leave Grace or Leon alone, I stab one with a hemolytic injector and shotgun blast the other. They both turn into steaming piles of grease and bone – what we all become, with enough time.