Dear fellow graduates,

I can fux with quinoa. I can get down with your reusable water receptacles, fashioned out of discarded salsa jars that you replenish with the sweet elixir of collected rainwater. I have, along side of you, studied and been reviled at the injustices of corporately endorsed soy monocultures, feared for our oceans—every year another unit on whales. Every semester another essay submitted on the reverberations of the soil depletive agricultural practices that led to the dustbowl.

Aesthetically, I know that we’ve had our differences. I don’t know when cutting your own bangs became a statement on ecological sustainability but fine, okay. And I just assumed that the not wearing shoes thing is some sort of masochistic purging ritual for your earth crimes against Gaia, or something equally rational.

So for four years we have both suckled at the same grass fed teat: collaborated on the same stop motion awareness videos, gone to each other’s quirky ukulele international development open mic nights, and ran our hands through each other’s dreadlocks.

Nothing has ever made me want the taste of blood more. Whale blood.

I want to destroy. I want to devastate what we have built together. I want to shotgun skinny vanilla lattes until they dribble down the front of the flirty blazer I wear to my job in P.R., crushing the paper cup against my skull, letting it fall to the ground, never to decompose, the abrasive chemical dyes oozing into the soil. I want to exfoliate my face with the sludge refuse of a Land Rover’s exhaust pipe and then make snow angels in fields of drying shark fins while I rail lines of high fructose corn syrup through the tusk of a narwhal. Hallelujah.

I want to watch as this quaint East Coast town burns. Begin with the local craft fairs; stoke the fire with tempeh steaks and reclaimed driftwood and watch the blaze grow like an algal bloom across the surface of a freshwater pond with an excess of fertilizer phosphates. Then one by one, I’m going to drop my hemp friendship bracelets into the blaze and listen as they crackle.

— Claire