Is The Joy Of Wearing Anyone’s Face, Dawning Any Voice On Command Worth More To You Than Possessing

I often love men I know I have no future with. I build castles in the sand near rising tides, and I watch lovingly as they are eroded away by reality. I don’t know why I make things that don’t last. I’m afraid to have something that matters to me I think, that could hurt me more than I want it to.

There is no wound so healed that the body does not remember its shape.

What is all this?

It’s bioluminescence. You never seen it before?

No, I haven’t.

It’s little tiny creatures, every time something moves through the water they light up like itty bitty stars.

Do you eat them?

Do I-? No! They’re beautiful!

You don’t eat beautiful things?

You’re still here aren’t you?

-conversations with a siren

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?

Oh, I feel warm. I feel warm like the sun even in the darkest of rooms. I am me again.

How on earth did you find me?

Oh sweet siren, every inch of water you touch tastes of sugar. I couldn’t lose you if I tried.

Well you ought to at least try.

Bite your tongue lass.

Or what?

Or I’ll do it for you.

Rotten sailor. I’ve no desire to play with you anymore. Leave me be.

How can you lure me off my ship and not even finish me? What am I to do now, drown?

You’d better not. I’d snap your neck myself and let the ocean have you but she retches at the taste of pork.

I’m no pig you finned whore!

Then why’s your nose look like that? Go to shore and dry off before your wife finds you wet, piglet.

—Diary of a Siren

Remembering him is like biting glass. I don’t know why I do it, why I keep hurting myself on the sharp details of his shattered memory. His eyes, such a pale blue, had a depth to them you wouldn’t expect like stagnant ocean water. My mouth bleeds as I masticate his face, the way words would leave his mouth; his voice is like rows of pins in my tongue. I can’t help myself but to recall him, over and over again, no matter the pain. I think that’s what draws me to recollection actually, feeling anything again. It’s the numbness that lets you drift into autopilot, living while asleep, that ruins you so much more deeply. Losing a loved one, and yourself along with them.

One day I’ll be old, and teenagers will record me doing mundane tasks with my wife in public, and post it somewhere, on an app with a name I don’t know, appreciating #humans being humans. Appreciating how adorable old people are like we’re rabbits in a wooded glade or something, never thinking they’ll be me, holding the hand of their partner, helping her step from the street to the sidewalk with weary bones and wrinkled faces. One day I was them, and one day they will be me. Though I’ll never know their names or faces, they will have taken a moment of my life as their own as a relic of humanity, though for me, it is just a slice of my morning commute. I wonder if I’ll feel the camera on my back then. I wonder if I’ll wish I was the recorder and not the recorded. I wonder how many likes the essence of my self and my life would get, as a moment of my life is turned into an online commodity by a stranger.

A letter to my father,

I behave youthfully around you, happy go lucky and thoughtless at times. This isn’t because I am those things, but because you let me be. You have never been a parent to me, but a friend. And as your friend, I must tell you:

I behave as if there is nothing the matter, to keep the peace, and not ruin what bond we have, but I have been lying to you, and to myself, that our differing politics needn’t ever intersect. In fact, they intersect every time I look at you and remember the hat you hang in your garage. The red one, with the white letters. I remember you voted against my interests for your own, which foolishly you did, as you will not get your way in the end.

And seeing as I cannot have my father and honesty at once, it seems neither will I.

I thought if I could redeem something in him I could redeem something in me, too. But I failed us both. He is not a project, and I cannot be healed vicariously. The only path we can take here, is forward.

With glass in our soles, tearing us apart and revealing us at the same time. Forward.