With So Many Before Me And So Many After Me, I Feel I Owe Humanity Something. Something I Don’t Know

That is what they don’t understand. They think some external pressure is destroying me but it has always been myself. Only my finger tips know where on my belly is tender and bruised enough to burrow into.

I seldom feel the words he says, I’ve steeled myself to any emotion he may try and peel off of me like loose flakes of skin. It is too tough now, calloused to the point of no return. Even his softness though, is lost on me, I feel no warmth or cold. He has forced me to this numb state. He has taught me that feeling leads only to pain.

It hurts me, the rust. The moving water is both a curse and a blessing, I know it rusts my chainmail further but my skin is dying for the tips of its rushing fingers. My leg has been shattered beneath this fountain statue for nearly seven days. I cannot stand, I cannot move but inches left and right in its basin. How horrible a way to die in war, by a stone man, in an iron casket. Though if a living man had struck me down, I’d say the very same.

—a solider named Feo

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

Why are people so cruel to you when you just want to make them laugh? Can’t you see that I love you, that I want nothing but light things floated your way? What have I done to warrant your biting criticisms when all I ever wanted was your attention?

-Confessions of a Jester

How to Kill a Crooked Ward

Though nothing can haunt a crooked ward, her neck often cracks and turns rapidly as if she fears something coming. As if eyes leech onto her rigid and bark-like back, and their hunger for her image alarms her, or the echoes left of her fallen mind. Nothing can hurt a corrupted spirit, but perhaps the past. She fears not a hunter, but a walking memory, pulling her back to her former self. How wicked a deed to dredge a dead woman's mind back to her rotting body, to convince her only to die.

One day I’ll be old, and teenagers will record me doing mundane tasks with my wife in public, and post it somewhere, on an app with a name I don’t know, appreciating #humans being humans. Appreciating how adorable old people are like we’re rabbits in a wooded glade or something, never thinking they’ll be me, holding the hand of their partner, helping her step from the street to the sidewalk with weary bones and wrinkled faces. One day I was them, and one day they will be me. Though I’ll never know their names or faces, they will have taken a moment of my life as their own as a relic of humanity, though for me, it is just a slice of my morning commute. I wonder if I’ll feel the camera on my back then. I wonder if I’ll wish I was the recorder and not the recorded. I wonder how many likes the essence of my self and my life would get, as a moment of my life is turned into an online commodity by a stranger.

Everything is fine.

Do you actually believe that or do you just want to believe it?

Is there a difference?

What is there to do but wait for everything to come crashing down in a sudden cold splendor, and remove the sand from beneath my feet.

Loving cruel people doesn’t change who they are. It’s like holding a morning star to your chest hoping it’ll become smooth. It just leaves you bleeding.