I’ve Whittled Myself Down,

How pathetic. To spend my days reassuring myself that they are not wasted, all the while wasting them in trivial debates with the wretched thing in the mirror about the very topic. Why I should answer to her, I do not know. She is the opposite of me. Her left eye is where my right is, and her right eye is where my left is. Her hair is parted on the wrong side, her college chosen wrong, her days spent mindlessly, her work set to waste, what a rotten thing she is. I know who I am. And it isn't her. It can't be. Or every poor thing I think of myself would be true.

I am glad for my misspent youth, my contradictions, my stupid ideas and my fear of stepping out of line. I am glad something wild lived in me once and I did not hide it. I feel no shame, no regret. Only peace that all of me got to exist in this one short life.

“You’re gentler than they said you would be,” the girl remarked.

The siren smiled graciously in return, and took another chunk out of her calf and thrust it down her throat without reprieve. The girl didn’t feel a thing, her saliva numbing her skin the moment it touched it.

“We’re only hungry beasts girl, not cruel. We leave that to the men,” she said frankly and wiped her mouth of blood the way a child would of jam.

Sirens often eat out of hatred, not love. So when the sailor girl asked the siren if she found her appetizing, she shook her head with a tight lipped grin. The human took it as rejection, her eyes falling to her hands and picking at the callouses she found unsightly, not understanding she had just shown her affection for her. That hiding one’s teeth was a gentle act of favor the merfolk used.

What is love but the desire to feel sunlight through their skin. And hold there.

What poems do you keep close to your chest like a weak deck of cards? Terrified anyone should know your mind in all its weaknesses and honest throws of emotion. Let me read them, let me know you. I promise not to ruin you. I promise to be kind.

What use is death to a creature like me?

Well, I’ll tell you:

Death is an old bedfellow, a partner, a wife;

Is there anything so sweet as a union born in blood?

A promise to always be at each other’s finger tips?

Tool the marble into statue, we sculpt the world,

To improve it, cull those unfit for life by scythe point.

A silly question to ask me, what use is death to a

Creature? Without it, I would not have a life at all.

Like a mutant calf, my village shunned and cast

Me out to meet her, Lady Death.

I seldom love those I admire. What is there to hold in the greats? Achievement sits on the shelf while a lover rests under my bed covers, I cannot converse with trophies though their gold sheens are beautiful, they are empty things. I need a mess, I need something to fill my aching hands so full I could never hope to grasp it all. Keep me busy, keep me warm. That is all I ask of the one I love.

That is the curse of living, that we choose what is familiar and not what is good.

What empties you?

The way I hold my tongue around my maga father as we watch movies in silence, and I wonder why I’m so forgiving of his alcoholism and not my mother’s toxic positivity.

The way I point out the birds eating peanuts my grandmother put out for them, when all I want to do is scream in my grandparent’s faces and shake their shoulders to turn Fox News off and wake up from their stupor.

I want to wake up too. I don’t want to know their hatred so intimately. I don’t want to love monsters, anymore.