Sincerity Is The Blood Held In By The Knife In Your Chest. It Feels Too Much Like Dying To Be Honest.

Why do they call my brother a genius, when he cannot comprehend kindness? When his tongue is tied in any conversation but his own?

Why is the emotional intellect of the women in the room discarded? So often shamed out of me any desire to share myself, my thoughts, upsetting my family feels like embers landing on every inch of skin searing me to silence. The boy gets to be a boy his entire life. The girl has to be a woman the moment he enters the room.

That is what they don’t understand. They think some external pressure is destroying me but it has always been myself. Only my finger tips know where on my belly is tender and bruised enough to burrow into.

I feel pressure to act not as a person, but as woman. To fill every void left by our absence, too little leaders of us, too little comedians of us, too little scientists of us; am I meant to choose what loss to make up for with just my one life?

My age is, youngish, oldish? Depending on who you ask. I have time, and I don’t. The future is so far away and right outside my doorstep, and I’m just sort of here. Waiting for something to happen. Waiting to become my future self and grow out of all this childish shit. I have trouble discerning bad habits and personality traits, what grows from me isn’t all me after all. I have to take care with what I cull and what I cradle. I could become a walking quirk from middle school that I misidentified as wildly important to my sense of self and not just a random cultural reflex. What makes me myself? And how did it get there? What is genuinely me and what is grimly biding it’s time until I figure out it’s a stranger’s voice and not mine?

A mermaid is born when a heart is buried, deep in the trenches of the blue sea. A mermaid coveting motherhood need only snatch a sailor’s heart and offer it to the seabed, and within hours, her baby girl will rise from the sand and into her arms. What happens, though, when a mermaid steals the heart of another mermaid? How will the others forgive a murder, even if it is done out of love?

-Diary of a Siren

I would let her put rods in my fingers and tie thin golden ropes around my wrists if it meant she’d smile at me. I’d make a good puppet, a very good puppet. And I don’t mind forgoing being her daughter, she never liked me very much that way. I make a much better puppet.

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

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

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.

Nostalgia is not a cradle, but a coffin.

Rest carefully in its lacey black box, and be sure to take care when you visit those no longer there, to not join them thinking all new happiness is lost.

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