We were supposed to be something to each other, I thought, looking at it. You said I was exactly like you. You were supposed to show me how to do this. You made it.

But she was gone.

And so—I was more alone in the world than ever.

*  *  *

Creatively, Carey’s suicide opened up the floodgates. The paintings that had smoldered in my studio for three years, now nearly half a foot deep in paint, were finished inside of six months. There were eight of them, all of them at least fourteen feet across and ten feet high. I titled the show The Distance Between Our Moral Imaginations. It sold out opening week.

Shortly thereafter, riding high on my own momentum, I changed galleries from (reputable but not sterling) Parker Projects to the fully blue-chip Galerie Milot, a big-dick New York / London / Paris / Hong Kong / Rio ballbuster of a gallery helmed by an actual member of the French aristocracy. It wasn’t the Venice Biennale, and it wasn’t a solo show at the Palais de Tokyo, but it was the first brass ring I would need to follow the remaining four members of Pine City to the top.

So after that—after over a decade of working and waiting and working and waiting—you’ll forgive me for feeling after The Distance Between Our Moral Imaginations as though I’d made it. I paid my student loans in full, which felt even better than I’d anticipated, and bought some extremely expensive equipment—a hydraulic lift and scaffold that allowed me to work horizontally—and got into high-end materials, imported small-batch milled pigments and exotic ingredients like shark urine and uncut rubies. For the first time in my life, I had buckets of money, and I put every cent into Rich Ugly Old Maids, the show that I was making for Milot.