On Friendship:

Why can’t you let me have anything? Why can’t you let me have anything? I ask the mirror.

The girl in it is too busy weeping to answer.

I’ve a pin with a ball end pinched between my index and thumb. Ego inflating like boils in me, I pop every idea that I am something good, worthwhile. I wonder if a harsh inner critic is a blessing or a curse as she darts pushpins in my spirit, and punches holes in my identity until I am paper thin and hollow. Light as a feather taken by the slightest idea of greener grass; convinced going anywhere is better than here.

Sorry I don’t write to you anymore. I’ve been meaning to, surely. But I just haven’t gotten around to it. Every time I try I see the blood dripping down your face, from your hair slick to your forehead. It didn’t even look blonde that day, you barely looked like yourself shambling toward my car like that. A part of me hoped so badly that it wasn’t you, or that you didn’t recognize me through your haze. But it was, the voice croaking in its throat was coarse but it was yours. The creature on fifth street was my best friend.

I know you don’t remember much now, and letters like these are probably meaningless to you. Who bothers to read and write when they’re.. becoming what you’re becoming. Maybe you’re finished becoming..I hope not. I hope there’s still time.

Do you remember before all this? It’s all I can think about. Things were so normal then; I didn’t appreciate that enough. I didn’t know I was going to lose it all to the awful man who did this to you.

It hurts to watch my father split in two each night.

Right down the middle of his face, one half hops to bed and the other to the garage to yell.

The sleeping half is kind, and has never touched a drop of alcohol, and makes big pancake breakfasts on Sunday mornings.

The waking half is cruel, and has fascist memorabilia on his walls, and drills screws in pictures of the opposition to hang.

I can only love half of him, but I cannot stop even that. His image bleeds in my mind, I cannot grapple with the fact that they are the same man after all—that Nazi’s have daughters, too.

In defense of the comic, whose characters are foolish but whose mind is not. I see her brilliance in the whites of the audience’s smiles, in the wit and the quickness of her responses. I know many serious men with the mask of intelligence hiding a simple and plain nature. I find the opposite quite riveting.

-Confessions of a Ticket Sales Clerk

His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, in love with the way his own ideas tasted.

Unable to find love on land, and told she was unappetizing by her siren of the sea, the sailor girl sought out a lake to mope around in. In the water she so loved and away from the aching salty tide at her ankles, she found respite. But another dwelled in the muck of the lake’s bottom, and rose to meet her. A fresh water siren. Friendly as spit, with water’s wake that tasted of sugar and blood, she invited the sailor girl in. Her hair was red and curled, like a devil’s smile. White freckles sat on her face frankly, like table salt.

She reached out to the girl, and began to braid her long blonde hair, dragging her deeper into the water as she did, with a smile full of teeth.

My innocence was taken by hands no bigger than my own, another child who’s eyes swam blue with cold apathy. She couldn’t have known what she was doing was wrong, for I recognize now, the same things were being done to her. How can I raise my fists to the one who hurt me when she had no innocence to begin with, and I had something to lose. She was damned from the start.

When you wear masks like you take breaths, you don’t notice that the act is killing you. You don’t see the bags under your eyes, the redness invading your scleras. The undying tug on the corners of your thin pursed lips. You see only the delighted faces of those so pleased to see not your face, but the faces you adorn for them. Catered to them. For some, the mask you wear is a mirror, for they want nothing more than to see themselves in you. For others, black as night to obscure anything akin to their likeness. But you are so enraptured with their happiness, you neglect your own. For there is a worse fate than being unloved.

It is being loved as something you’re not.

Futureless moth, eating old keepsakes. Nothing else to be done in locked closets but eat. Soothing herself on the past, indulgently gorging on memorabilia, unbothered by the holes her little mouth leaves. No better meal than childhood. No better place to die than in wools, and silks, and cottons, refusing to batter oneself against the closet door.