This is not generated fiction.

When I was 21, I diplomatised love, turned words against themselves, discovered half-truths taste half as sweet which staved off the risk of diabetes of the heart, flowed my floodlike qi, like in my introductory Chinese philosophy classes. My will washing like water, does no harm. But the Puritans were right: lying witches sink, and six inches of water is enough to make a boy drown. (I'm pretty sure most of it was my fault.)

When I was 16, I discovered love, or something coloured like it, springing forth from inside myself; if I held that precious thing then others must have had, too, and the world was as good a place as it had always been. We saw each other for six months, though we never kissed, much less held hands. When I fell out of love, the transitiveness broke, and I didn't speak to her for a year. The love-coloured-thing inside me told me it was my fault. (At least hurt was still transitive, a lesson I took too long to forget.)

When I was 14, I didn't know that actions could speak louder than raw violence so I pushed a bully down onto a classroom floor and kicked his fingers till they bled. It was a simpler time, and I was a smaller boy. Fault was an easy thing to assign on either end of a clenched fist. In the grand tradition of masculine solidarity, nothing came of it and everyone lived happily ever after. (I wonder if he still has a scar.)

When I was 12, I drew comics of a fatter child dying in horrible ways. The other children laughed at them, because they laughed at him too, and among them I fancied myself a kind of propagandist, a regime bureaucrat, any kind of cool adult word with many syllables that promised efficiency and inclusion into a group larger than myself. How large the world seemed then! How sweet violence was when it came to those who deserved it, simply because they were born too large; when the class of 2009 was called before the discipline master in a row, I think some of us cried. (I don't think the question of fault ever crossed our minds.)

When I was 8, I let my hamster bite my finger. It drew blood. My parents rushed me to a clinic at 9 p.m. where an uncle in a white coat explained patiently to us that no, hamsters did not have rabies, and honestly it's just a skin wound, I can sterilise it for you with some alcohol swabs. My mother scolded me, "What were you thinking?", and to be honest I entirely did not know, it was my fault, I wanted the hamster to bite me. I stuck my finger in and rattled its cage a little and then it reached out and bit me. It hurt a little, and then it was okay. (Pneumonia killed the hamster two weeks later.)

I'm not sure if there is a moral to any of this. Maybe there will be a tribune in my afterlife, and angels wearing the faces of my exes will shake their heads disapprovingly and two boys will glare at me with angry eyes, one sucking his thumb. Maybe my dead hamster will sign my afterdeath warrant with his tiny hamster paws. Or maybe it casts the neutral vote that stays my fate, and silly human things like 'hurt' and 'fault' won't mean a lot to it after all.