Serena discovers her column on his desktop, having unraveled the morning's entire mystery, and Assistant Hairdo comes in just as she's about to publish it. Who knew you could get this much narrative mileage out of clicking. So they tussle, and Dark Phoenix Serena grabs a little of that hairdo in one fist while publishing the piece with the other. I'll leave it to the Internet to transcribe the piece in its entirety, but it's pretty awesome actually.

Ever since I was fourteen, Gossip Girl has been reporting my every waking move. She tells the world when I buy a bra at Barney's... For a twenty year old, it's daunting.

[...co]nstant series of threesomes...

...We can even go to Brooklyn with the snark! And no one is calling him Lonely Boy... It's refreshing. It makes me feel light and airy.

Actually, if you think about this in terms of the fact that the entire thing is a lie and she knows it's a lie, this becomes really neat. Because she's Serena, she lives in this remotely objective fishbowl of her own self-perception -- this has always been true -- where she needs somebody reporting back to her about what is real and not real. It's what determined her love for Dan in the first place, the fact that he was this observer who judged her environment and only condemned her for it when she needed the reminder.

So now you've got the pretend relationship happening that she really wants to be real, and that's not happening for Dair reasons that we're not even allowed to think about or consider in any way, so how do you hold up the back end of that fantasy? Make it real enough? Publicize it. Use the image to make it real enough, in the world, that she can believe it's real privately. I mean, this is genius. This is the most Serena Serena story we've seen in years. I love this. I XOXO this:

...I can be myself with this man and show him the real Serena van der Woodsen. The one that I always wanted to be but couldn't since the spotlight was constantly on me.

And what makes it even sadder is that she's doing this having had him explicitly ask her not to do this thing, because the story of Serena is more important than the story of Dan Humphrey. More important than Serena herself is the story of Serena. S by S. You could literally sit down and draw a line from the first Georgina story to here, and it would actually connect. I cannot tell you what this is doing to me. Honestly I can't tell what this is doing for me. You may have noticed over the years that I take this specific part of this show very, very seriously; in fact I would say it's the central meaning of the show, for me personally, for reasons that at this point should be pretty fucking obvious.