What Secrets I Would Tell You If It Would Not Take You Drowning To Hear Them

When I was a child I’d only known depression through medicine commercials, where the depressed person was a porcelain wind up doll that had to be wound over and over again to walk. I didn’t really understand it then, tucked away neatly in my television set. Why wouldn’t they want to keep going, always? Why would they need to be wound? And now as I look down at my porcelain foot, I wonder why it isn’t shuffling in front of the other.

They say a burnt child loves the fire; a drowned woman, too, loves the sea. And even more so the siren that dragged her to the bottom of it.

I don’t feel anything anymore. I don’t know if I miss it or not. It can be nice being withdrawn from the world, until is isn’t.

You can run away from reality, and shield yourself from introspection, but in the corner of your eye your life is always happening.

I thought life would be easier than this. That opportunities would fall in my lap, that I would never make mistakes. Typing it out now the ideas seem so foolish, but I truly believed them. The invincibility of youth waxes and wanes like the moon, beautiful, but an illusion. A display of only crescent truths and half-honesties. Once in the blue, darkness disrobes the white lies, and I am reminded of my poor decisions and silly aspirations in their naked blackness. Phases of judgment are all that is left of me, my future self peering backward at everything I have done and haven't done. I wait only for sunrise.

Is everyone on the verge of completing and utterly losing it?

Or am I here on this cliffside alone?

Living in an anxious mind, I know fear intimately, I know nervousness like a favorite cousin-always sitting by me at dinner, insisting we stay in to watch movies instead of go out for dessert because when we go out I don’t enjoy myself at all. Too worried about the drive home, where I’ll park, all the trivial details that make it so I can’t taste the ice cream anyways. And don’t mistake me, I favor my fear just as much as it favors me. It keeps me comfortable, and how I love to be comfortable, though it’s a shaking uneasy kind of comfort. The sort a doomed man has on death row.

What is left for me, impaled on the hills I’ve chosen to die on.

Building empires on falling sand, when we sink it is by design. Pinnacles dull, golden eras dust as they live on in old men’s memory and no where else.

If only she understood that I ate her with love, and not hunger.

-diaries of a Siren

The Girl who Cried Wolf

Was never met with hurried steps coming to her aid in the dead of night. The first night she watched for the beast, his golden eyes burned from a breath beyond the treeline. She shouted out for pitchforks, torches, and only felt wind and moonlight rushing to her side. Nobody believed her the first time.