Why Do They Call My Brother A Genius, When He Cannot Comprehend Kindness? When His Tongue Is Tied In

Would you burn the olive trees if you grew them, if you felt their bark wind under your fingertips like locks of hair? Would you poison the water if it quenched your thirst, if you let the river stones touch your sole? You claim the land is yours, and you’re owed every grain of its sand but someone who loves the land would not demolish its beauty so recklessly. If that is how you treat what is yours, I dread the fate of those you call others.

Art by Jason Scheier

What would she know about me? Me and the outsiders never spoken but a few words to each other.

She knows enough to ask for you by name. Your real name.

Who is this girl anyway?

She didn’t say. Just go talk to her and get her out of here. I don’t like her sniffing around the den like this.

If you don’t know her name can you at least tell me what she looks like?

She was a mousy little fuck, insisting I don’t take a message and she talk directly to you. Brown ratty hair, looked sick. Real puffy face.

Oh my god.

What?

It’s the girl from last week. The one I, almost robbed.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

I’ll take care of it.

Take care of it.

I just said that I would!

I mean it. I do not want to see her here again.

You won’t!

It is relieving to write what I think. I hadn't realized how ravenous and independent thoughts can be when left to their own endeavors. They can swarm behind the eyes so fiercely that they may pop out. And perhaps that would be a good thing, for a dangling eye can see oneself from an outside perspective, and not one manufactured and manhandled by pesky buzzing thoughts.

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.

When you wear masks like you take breaths, you don’t notice that the act is killing you. You don’t see the bags under your eyes, the redness invading your scleras. The undying tug on the corners of your thin pursed lips. You see only the delighted faces of those so pleased to see not your face, but the faces you adorn for them. Catered to them. For some, the mask you wear is a mirror, for they want nothing more than to see themselves in you. For others, black as night to obscure anything akin to their likeness. But you are so enraptured with their happiness, you neglect your own. For there is a worse fate than being unloved.

It is being loved as something you’re not.

I adored living as a shell of myself. I held echoes in my chest where my heart used to be, and laughed in tickles as the words of others caroused my rib bones. Nothing at all was serious, nothing mattered the littlest bit to me. Until someone I knew recognized me. A girl I went to elementary school with, with sharp blue eyes and now dyed brown hair; she used to be blonde. I used to be too. Everything feather heavy caught weight on me, my skin was saddlebags, my heart beat for the first time in eight long years. It was a rapid hurried thing my heartbeat, like it had just woken up from a bad dream. The girl, well, a woman now, ogled at me with a sort of cold consternation—she looked sorry for me. My hair sort of tangled, my outfit worn since last night must’ve been so starkly different from the neat hand-raised-in-the-air-eager-to-answer-a-question girl that used to sit next to her in Mrs. Jones class. It hit me then that something did still matter to me, not present me, but to my childhood self. Little me was still alive, she still cared about what Jasmine thought of us. She used to cheat off of our math quizzes for god’s sake and she’s sorry for me? How could I ever be something I’m not in peace when there are lingering living memories trooping about, forcing me to remember who I was, and acknowledge what I’ve become. I adored living as a shell of myself. Nothing hurt so badly as it does now that I don’t anymore.

Facism rises, having not been put down. Like hot air in feverish men’s chests, pounding their rib cage with the old adage, me before all, me before all.

My skin prickles with heat,

Dropping doves on laundry lines

My heart leaps hard against my ribs,

Shelving sonograms in my mind,

Oh dear. I am in love.

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

Or am I here on this cliffside alone?