I Reel Back From The Sunlight Every Time It Caresses My Cold Skin, Cooing In Vein For Me To Love It Back.

Before she swims to me, I catch her scent in the water. Like bath pearls popping in the laps of purple water against the yellow sand, I inhale euphoria, and I am intoxicated, immovable from the shoreline. I melt into the mud, and I am eaten alive, transfixed, infatuated with the shape of teeth boring holes in my skin.

-Diary of a Siren

Though yellow grass grows

She wanders barefooted, on dry and cutting blades

Something has died here, in the glades of her old memories

Its terrain water-hungry, fertile with long-lost mistakes

Sweet aroma of morning dew has forsaken this place.

But she returns, like sunken ship to lighthouse unmanned,

though only yellow grass grows in her past.

My sister drops her head underwater and I follow shortly after. I close my eyes as tight as I can and with cheeks full as balloons, I hold my breath. We both breach the ocean surface and look for each other. And we’re right where we left one another, of course. I miss that feeling of certainty, of knowing who I’m swimming with. Now we are grown and childhood is a twinkle in my eye. I see broken pieces of it if I look hard enough, disappointed at friends that don’t keep their pinky promises, at my husband for leaving the chores to me when she never would. She hated the dishes, the dirty refried beans dad would let soak in the sink and float into patches of dark pinkish slime. But she didn’t let me do them alone. I sit at the beach with my legs long and in the sun. I am warm but not complete. I look around at the flurry of faces, the assortment of multicolored swimsuits striped and polka dotted. It’s charming, but I don’t think I’d know where to look if I put my head under like I used to.

Oh, I was happy. I was so happy, until I looked down at my reflection and saw I wasn’t me at all.

I cling to the anchor because I think the ship will drown me.

I crave the familiarity of the salt water over the cold whipping of the air.

Because I would rather drown than change, I would rather stay stuck in the same place for the rest of my life than breath the air of tomorrow.

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.

The Girl who Cried Wolf

Was never met with hurried steps coming to her aid in the dead of night. The first night she watched for the beast, his golden eyes burned from a breath beyond the treeline. She shouted out for pitchforks, torches, and only felt wind and moonlight rushing to her side. Nobody believed her the first time.

She tastes of blood and salt, the siren I kiss on the rocks. I do not know whose blood I taste, but I do not care.

-Diary of a Siren

I need a new wardrobe—I’m running out of time to be young and beautiful. For people to see me and not just look at me out of some mundane politeness. I need to be everything I am right now in these fleeting moments, or it’s like they’ve already gone.

I will be myself, and if the world rejects that then I will reject the world, and make my own place. I will not be lonely there, because I know there are others just like me, struggling to reconcile the desire to belong and the desire to be.