Futureless Moth, Eating Old Keepsakes. Nothing Else To Be Done In Locked Closets But Eat. Soothing Herself

They’ve taken her from me. And for that I’ll never forgive them.

Gorging herself, teeth once white steeped in hot and sticky redness, the siren suddenly felt wet coming from her eyes. She jolted backward.

What is this?

Tears. You really liked me didn’t you? The sailor lass muttered, blue eyes now hazed grey with blood loss.

What does that matter? You’re mine you know.

So I am. She said, head tilted back in the pooling sand like a mother’s lap. Something felt natural about this, an unbirth seemed gentler oddly enough, than plain death.

Do you always cry when you eat? She asked, her voice once proud and strong, tapering out

I, I don’t know. I normally do this underwater.

Am I special? To be eaten on the shore? She asked, eyes stuck upward toward a sky the sunset didn’t touch anymore. A cold rush of air carved through the coastline she reposed on, erasing her footprints.

Her heart stopped.

Yes, of course you were. The siren said to no one, her voice wavering for the first time. Of course you were. Tears dropped easier now, and she was certain no sea ever felt so warm, and so foreign to her as this one.

I need a new wardrobe—I’m running out of time to be young and beautiful. For people to see me and not just look at me out of some mundane politeness. I need to be everything I am right now in these fleeting moments, or it’s like they’ve already gone.

Hands wrapped around my neck squeeze tighter. I wonder if this is how I will die. My eyes bulge but I see nothing but black splotches and bright stars. Night has followed me into day, just as I dreaded it would. Just as I dreaded it would.

She tastes of blood and salt, the siren I kiss on the rocks. I do not know whose blood I taste, but I do not care.

-Diary of a Siren

The stars will not judge me. They knew me before I was an atom of an idea, and they brought me here to this moment now, in something I cannot imagine as anything else but an act of love.

Nostalgia is not a cradle, but a coffin.

Rest carefully in its lacey black box, and be sure to take care when you visit those no longer there, to not join them thinking all new happiness is lost.

If nothing else, I will always have my misery. Like a child that does not grow old but cries and cries in her cradle, only silencing in my arms. She is mine, and I am hers.

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.

Fires burn in the shape of mountains, mere miles from my porch step.

The vegetation cries in red and grey.

My feet in my front yard grass ground themselves there, against the peeking patches of dirt hiding beneath the stiff yellowing blades, as if nature itself is afraid to look at its destruction. I cannot look away.

Our dry seasons get drier, rain will become myth, and water legend. I wonder when it will be my turn to record the destruction, to tell others of what happened to me, and not hear of what happened to others. I wonder if that day will be today.