We Could Have Heaven On Earth, If There Were No Other People Here But You And I. We Would Be Shepards

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.

Is the joy of wearing anyone’s face, dawning any voice on command worth more to you than possessing your own? Then by all means act your life away. Express yourself in characters, distilled emotions and memories of yours, collect awards, applause, whatever it is you think will fix you, make you happy. And when the curtain is called and the limelight dims and you sit with your viewer of one and struggle to communicate to other people in real life without the hug of a facade, I want you to remember that you wanted this. You wanted to be shucked and hollowed out to be filled with the adoration of millions. Don’t step down now. There’s nothing worth returning to anyway.

-Diary of an actress

I can’t explain the joy I feel. And isn’t that so wonderful isn’t that so perfect to have a problem doppled in sugar and cherries with pits you suck on until they are bare in your mouth.

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.

I was 12 the first time I was catcalled. A middle school boy I’d never met found his eyes lingering on the hem of my school uniform’s skirt. I wish I’d worn the long navy blue pants instead. I wish I’d worn a cock and balls as well to keep more boy’s eyes far away from me. But there was no way for me to avoid the screaming missile of womanhood. All I could do was listen to my girlhood ripping itself out of my fingers; my fingers that used to hold dolls now holding my tongue. A brutal silence I wore as woolen armor to protect me, and enrage me all the same with its intrepid itch. I shouldn’t have had to be quiet in the face of boys lusting after me, so eager to pursue manhood that they mutilate my girlhood. It shouldn’t have been taken from me by someone who used to see me as a cooties carrier, or on good days, a friend. I can barely remember all that they said now, but I cannot shake the feeling their nasty words gave me. I shouldn’t have had to understand what it meant to be a woman before I bled. But the world is not kind to its creators. Every foul mouthed boy crawled his way out of a woman, only to seek another to whittle down into a Venus doll. The boy ogled me alongside my two friends. He too, was not alone. He asked his friend toddling alongside him with an audacious voice which of us they preferred. “I like the tall one,” he said as if choosing flowers to pick from the ground. An act of collection, of killing the thing you covet. My friend piped up and said, “we’re not objects on a shelf,” but I still felt their eyes burning into our backsides. The boy and his friends spat words at us under their breath that I cannot remember, and we walked into the middle school gates feeling heavier than before. Unwillingly we were no longer school girls, but vessels of sexuality tempting men and exciting boys. I felt my crotch turn from a place I peed from to an open wound. I felt my skin tighten, I was trapped in a budding teen girl’s body when I yearned to keep my childhood just a little bit longer. I was 12 the day before. But in a matter of sentences I was dragged into womanhood, and I lamented having known girlhood at all.

-diary of a former girl

'Sunrise Water Nymphs' by Arthur Prince Spear, (1879 - 1959).

What use is death to a creature like me?

Well, I’ll tell you:

Death is an old bedfellow, a partner, a wife;

Is there anything so sweet as a union born in blood?

A promise to always be at each other’s finger tips?

Tool the marble into statue, we sculpt the world,

To improve it, cull those unfit for life by scythe point.

A silly question to ask me, what use is death to a

Creature? Without it, I would not have a life at all.

Like a mutant calf, my village shunned and cast

Me out to meet her, Lady Death.

If you want to know what someone wants, watch what they give away. Love, time, compliments. People think others yearn the same way they do, and they reveal themselves in these little interactions; the way daylight escapes blinds midday.

When the vine burst through cooked earth, and curved to and fro toward the sun, I knew growth was not linear, nor was it impossible to come back from the dead.

I never knew nothing could be so heavy as it is now. Air rests in my hands like handlebars on a bike to nowhere. Chain links of silence drill their fingers into my ears, it is all I can hear now. My muscles weary from carrying do not rest now that he is gone. They anticipate the next departure. They cling to routine, clutching, clutching, unable to let go. All they’ve ever known is hanging on, just another day. What is there left for them now but emptiness, slopping down like wet concrete. Frozen in time.