Let Her Die Softly, Let The Seabed Take Her As If In A Dream.

I’m afraid I divvied away all intelligent thought ages ago, the way one wraps dinner in terry cloth for morning. Except morning has come and gone many times over, anything I had to say has long rotted now. Always waiting for the appropriate moment, afraid to upset my family, scare them away. I have starved them of knowing me in all my depth in exchange for the comfort of the shallow pond. I wonder if I will ever forgive myself.

If you want to know what someone wants, watch what they give away. Love, time, compliments. People think others yearn the same way they do, and they reveal themselves in these little interactions; the way daylight escapes blinds midday.

I often love men I know I have no future with. I build castles in the sand near rising tides, and I watch lovingly as they are eroded away by reality. I don’t know why I make things that don’t last. I’m afraid to have something that matters to me I think, that could hurt me more than I want it to.

That was when I met him. My undoing. He was like a father to me, but I was not like a daughter to him. He knew this. He knew what I saw when I looked into his eyes, and he did not look into mine, drawn into the gaps between my blouse’s buttons like black holes for morality. I was always to blame for his touches. I had always thought of myself as a girl, as a person, but really, I was a place. A place for innocence to die.

It is easy to be liked, far too easy. I have never been so liked as when I looked in the mirror and saw nothing.

I thought the world decayed as I grew old. My weary eyes grazed easily against its pointed cruelties, and I wondered how so much could fall so fast. But it was always that way. I was too young to see it as it was and now I am too old to see it as it can be.

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.

I’m like a child, the way my mind works. I want us to look at each other, but I keep covering my eyes.

I feel pressure to act not as a person, but as woman. To fill every void left by our absence, too little leaders of us, too little comedians of us, too little scientists of us; am I meant to choose what loss to make up for with just my one life?

She caressed her lover’s hair like a bird tending her nest; she saw only futures in the black tangles clinging to her fingers.