What Softness Could I Find For Myself, If I Allowed It. I Feel A Tightness In My Chest Every Time I Love

When I think on 18, and the years that have passed since then, I realize how many little deaths I’ve had in my one life. How many versions of me had to abandon my flesh for ephemerality for me to exist, fettering away. Do they watch me, the way runner up pageant girls watch the winner be crowned with sparkling tears gliding down her cheeks to match her sparkling tiara? Do they envy me? Or do they watch in glum acceptance, the way a parent would as their child draws in spontaneous sharpie all over their orderly white walls. Do they think they know better? Worst of all, do they watch in horror, the way the drug addicted’s partner would as the one they love most spirals down deeper and darker paths? Do they pity me?

Do they think of me at all? How lonely it would be to exist in this world as only one version of me.

Life asked Death:

Have you ever been loved?

She responded:

Unfortunately. Flickering moments of love for me in forlorn men are common. Though they always end the same. In my arms, thinking only of you.

I reel back from the sunlight every time it caresses my cold skin, cooing in vein for me to love it back. Nothing can bring me to it. I have been burned before. I have been honest and I have been present and I have walked in the damnation of the daylight and I will not make that mistake again.

I will make it again. I will make it again. If only to see the sky, I will make the awful trek from hidden to known, again.

Facism rises, having not been put down. Like hot air in feverish men’s chests, pounding their rib cage with the old adage, me before all, me before all.

I want so badly to be great but I don’t know how.

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.

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

Share with me your shame, distill your weakness so that I may drink it like wine. Your secrets are precious to me, nothing shocks a man like me.

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

Hope lives in the eyes of children. I can see that now that it has left mine.