If I Have Learned Anything Of Those Who Are Advanced And Civilized, It Is This:

The sailor girl slides down her boat’s rope the hour after sunset and awaits her black haired siren on the far end of the beach. She fusses with her hair. Tries to part it differently, and then differently again to no avail. She kneels on the shore to get a glimpse of herself under the budding moonlight on the still ocean water. A pair of eyes stays on her, gently raking over her battered, poorly patched clothes. She never was one for sewing. The sea called her. It always called her, to what she didn’t know. Suddenly, the pair of big black eyes in the water rose like fishing bobbins in her reflection, and startled her.

“How long have you been there?” She asked.

The siren smiled coyly, and held a finger up, telling her to hold on a moment.

She disappeared under the water and bobbed back up with something in her hand.

“What’s that?”

The siren rubbed the sand off of it with her thumbs, and held it up. A small abalone hair brush.

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.

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

“You ate us first,” she replied.

Spun silk from out my ear, divine ideation risen from a splintered mind.

Envelope your flesh with damnation and dance with me this night.

Her cupids bow dips to her bottom lip, drawn constantly, words seldom loosed. I tease laughter from her with my foolishness, and every time her mouth opens another of love’s arrows is fired at me, and if I am a soldier, I am one who so longs to be struck down, I am one who would never raise a shield against her.

—Diary of a Siren

Taken by the wind’s sweet pressure on my face, I am swept to the little church on the hill. Sugar atomized in the air; footsteps bringing life to the silent cedar floorboards, nothing felt simpler than there. My eyes are sealed as I soak in the feeling, finding a smile in the blustery darkness.

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.

It took three. The first killed her parents, in the home they used to share. The second took her legs, leaving only her arms to hold her. The third took her life. It took three bombs for Israel to murder a little girl. But it only takes the death of one child to devastate a world.

There is a kinder world within all of us, but we must agree to be as kind as it is to see it.

The truth is I have nothing worth writing about in me. I don’t connect with other people and that’s where good writing happens. I’m often in other people’s arms, I’m enwrapped in their laughter, but I don’t let them anywhere near me. I want so desparately to be loved as the mangled creature that I am but I’m too ashamed to show anybody my real face. So I hide it. And I make people laugh, I make them laugh so hard their sides hurt. And I feel the closest thing to love that someone like me can have. And I hope it is enough, because I don’t know how to have more than that and still feel safe. Maybe there isn’t a way. Maybe truly being loved is supposed to be scary. And I’m just a coward.