If Nothing Else, I Will Always Have My Misery. Like A Child That Does Not Grow Old But Cries And Cries

Let her die softly, let the seabed take her as if in a dream.

“Why do you eat men?” The sailor asked the siren.

“You ate us first,” she replied.

My cat didn’t like me much. I saved his life when he wasn’t more than two days old, but I never was his favorite person. He’d meow at me all angry like whenever I got near him, so I left him be. He’d let me pet him once in a blue moon and I treasured that. But he got sick. The sort of sick you don’t get better from. And even though he avoided me most of his life, and I respected his wishes, deep down he remembered what I did for him. His last days alive he came and sat with me. Maybe asking me again, save me. I know you can. You did it before. And with everything in me I wish I could have. I would have saved him a thousand times over even if it meant he stayed in rooms I wasn’t in, and preferred people other than me. I would give everything for him to dislike me a lifetime’s worth. But I only got four years.

When I was a child I’d only known depression through medicine commercials, where the depressed person was a porcelain wind up doll that had to be wound over and over again to walk. I didn’t really understand it then, tucked away neatly in my television set. Why wouldn’t they want to keep going, always? Why would they need to be wound? And now as I look down at my porcelain foot, I wonder why it isn’t shuffling in front of the other.

There are versions of me you’ve never met. I carry so much hatred you never see. It’s like an ornate blade, you could mistake it’s hilt for jewelry on my neck. But it’s there, in the slit where words come out, to silence any iteration of me that could offend you. Any glimpse of a possibility that I could hurt you, I instead hurt myself. I’d suppress and push down and erase and lie a thousand times over if it meant you were pristine. If you could leave this world untarnished on my filth, leave me filthy. Leave me nothing but your memory.

There is something so magical about the bus boy’s dish cart. Coffee cups with cold wet sugar resting on their rims, plates with forks neatly splayed out on their porcelain cheeks, saucers holding old tea bags like newborn babes. Such a security in knowing the meal is done, and carried away, and nobody can take the conversations over your dinner table with them.

Why do I crave love so much that I lie to get it. I dawn facades to taste sugar with a tongue that is not mine. Is it still sweet? Is anything truly my own?

These teeth of mine, that I press my tongue against, will outlast my soul. I taste death, how when I die, my crooked jaw will linger here on this earth without me. It haunts me to smile and see a glimpse of what will remain.

Is everyone on the verge of completing and utterly losing it?

Or am I here on this cliffside alone?

I had abandoned all intelligence seeing as it got the world nowhere. Maybe in a good world, with good people, advancements would forward us and make us more humane, lessen suffering, feed the hungry, clothe the naked and so on.

But put knowledge in the hands of a brute and he grows ever crueler.