What Sort Of Torture Is It To Know What One Has Done Wrong And Know Deeper So That It Can Never Be Fixed?

Out of fear of being exposed, I crawl and grovel and claw at the shell of my old self, desperate for a morsel of comfort, of old. I find I’ve done nothing but destroy it’s memory and starve my newest iteration, in a form of betrayal only one as indecisive and stagnancy-drawn as I could pull off.

What happens to memories of broken places? Do they bleed too?

You killed my chicken.

Your digital chicken. It’s a game Heather.

You killed my chicken. And didn’t apologize.

It wasn’t on purpose.

You didn’t apologize.

It’s not a real chicken.

You didn’t apologize.

I’m not apologizing for killing a fake chicken in a fake world. It’s not real babe. It’s just a game, please stop acting crazy.

Don’t call me babe when you don’t care about my feelings. You killed my pet in the game and didn’t say sorry. Even when I’ve expressed it so openly that this matters to me.

It shouldn’t! That’s the whole point. This should not be a big deal it’s pixels on a screen!

You’re being disrespectful.

You’re being insane! Get over the bloody chicken!

I’m done.

Thank god.

With us. With this. You don’t take anything that I care about seriously. You’re so above it all.

You’re breaking up with me over a stupid fucking chicken?!?

I’m breaking up with you because you’re mean. If you killed it and said you were sorry, everything would be fine. You choose to act like a dickhead over so many little things like this and I’m tired of it. You try to convince me not to care about something instead of caring about it with me.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

This isn’t the first time you’ve done this. Remember the cat puzzle?

Oh how could I forget the stupid cat puzzle.

Even now you get so incredibly upset whenever I’m upset about something. You try to shut me down before I can express I’m unhappy. According to you, I’m not unhappy, I’m just crazy for no reason!

You said it, not me.

Oh, goodbye Dereck. Goodbye.

This won’t bring the chicken back! You’re such an idiot.

Right.

I thought I’d miss my pinky finger more dearly but I can’t seem to manage it. The way her eyes lit up as her teeth dug just beneath my knuckle, I’m tempted to let her eat something else.

—Diary of a Siren

Sometimes when I have a dream, I feel entirely refreshed of my old perspectives. I see everything brand new, as if I’m a different person. What relief. I know now why our minds wander in the fields of the twilight hours. To abandon the stagnant pond misery we wade in and remember possibility, endless as always.

On the Photos from Gaza

She screams, but her mother can't hear her. She's only inches away. But the soft, floral blanket caked with dust is heavier than the broken concrete that used to be home, than the missiles that stretch out cold metal arms to dismember and destroy, than the guns young men tote in old men's wars. It holds her mother's dead body in a vice-grip, but there is no grip tighter than the girl's on the blanket. She screams harder. She wants nothing else than to lift the veil, between life and death, between her and her mother, but it is too heavy. It is too heavy for a little girl who only wants to be with her mother.

I want to know peace for while, if that’s alright. If the world can spare it for someone like me.

Remembering him is like getting to know a shard of glass. I push my finger tip down gingerly into his jagged profile and draw tears; he is not whole anymore. He will never be whole again. I could sip tea at my window sill and watch the clouds roll on, but I prefer to live on the edges of his memory. I prefer to dwell in my scrapbooks and peak into his diaries, peeling back the brokenness of disappearance into the smoothness of understanding. Floating in the ether I am pricked again by the knowledge that no matter how deeply I learn of his soul, I cannot unplunge him from the river styx. And I am content to keep hurting, I am content to keep pressing my soft body into the recesses of his absence, if it will only bring me closer to his place in nothing. I am content in that.

I thought life would be easier than this. That opportunities would fall in my lap, that I would never make mistakes. Typing it out now the ideas seem so foolish, but I truly believed them. The invincibility of youth waxes and wanes like the moon, beautiful, but an illusion. A display of only crescent truths and half-honesties. Once in the blue, darkness disrobes the white lies, and I am reminded of my poor decisions and silly aspirations in their naked blackness. Phases of judgment are all that is left of me, my future self peering backward at everything I have done and haven't done. I wait only for sunrise.

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.