There are situations we all live through that become compelling specifically because they never resolve. Situations that remain open sores. When I met Becky Hilliker for the first time in 2004, it was casual. It stayed casual, too, for the years I knew her. Yet there was always an underlying sense of unease, because I either knew, or thought I knew, that we had more business together than our shared surface suggested. When I wrote Becky Grace for Beams in the mid-Aughts, I was poking gentle fun at Becky being a Boston Brahmin princess. In retrospect, the moment, in the autumn of 2005, she sent me Catch and I placed it on a then-fledgling P.F.S. Post, a beneath-the-surface monster was created which began its appointed task of lumbering around looking for prey later. My life in 2005 was moving too rapidly, and I was still too young, to understand the full import, and potentiality, of Catch in the world. If the whole scenario makes me think of My Bloody Valentine, it's because I will always have had the suspicion that beneath the Brahmin-ite surface, Becky was torn apart, when she wrote Catch, by internal conflicts and internal imperatives not being fulfilled. Her life, thus, was not any easier than anyone else's. The whole Loveless scenario, in all its goriness, is also a Boston one too.
