You Would Sit By And Watch The World Burn If You Could Sit Comfortably While You Did It. That Is The

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

I can’t have children, I’d have too much love for them. I’d bring them up scared of the world like I am. Scared of nothing and everything at the same time.

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.

Isn’t it cruel that true recognition demands separation? That we cannot have night and day without the horizon keeping them forever apart, that I cannot join souls with you without losing you and myself in the process.

Life asked Death:

Have you ever been loved?

She responded:

Unfortunately. Flickering moments of love for me in forlorn men are common. Though they always end the same. In my arms, thinking only of you.

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

I’ve whittled myself down,

Suckled myself to nothing like a cough drop in a cheek,

And all I have to show for this betrayal, is a familiar flavor in my mouth to mull over as the adults speak.

The Wolf

Most are familiar with the story of the wolf in sheep’s clothing: The sly predator posing as prey to descend on the flock and eat them as they are none the wiser. But the story is remembered all wrong, the wolf didn’t have to wear sheep’s clothes at all. He stood before them as a wolf, with claws pointed, canines jutted, and eyes round in their deep, black middles, and simply said, “You are wolves, too. Wolves are better than sheep. Stronger than sheep. You are not sheep.”

Foolishly, they agreed. “I am better than the others, so I must be a wolf,” they thought. And so the wolf ate the sheep, one by one. Where normally they herded together and protected each other, they stood idly, wrongfully unafraid. They had forgotten that what hurts one of them, hurts all of them. They preferred to be better, to think they were wolves, and wolves don’t eat other wolves—only the less than, only the sheep.

And what do you think happened, as the last sheep stood in the glade, and the wolf approached him with grin bloodied and eager? “My brother,” the sheep said smugly, a moment before he was eaten alive.

The truth is I have nothing worth writing about in me. I don’t connect with other people and that’s where good writing happens. I’m often in other people’s arms, I’m enwrapped in their laughter, but I don’t let them anywhere near me. I want so desparately to be loved as the mangled creature that I am but I’m too ashamed to show anybody my real face. So I hide it. And I make people laugh, I make them laugh so hard their sides hurt. And I feel the closest thing to love that someone like me can have. And I hope it is enough, because I don’t know how to have more than that and still feel safe. Maybe there isn’t a way. Maybe truly being loved is supposed to be scary. And I’m just a coward.

Ode to the Red Boy

I see a red boy winking, perpetually still. His right eye is closed, his left open, unmoving. He wears pajamas, the Spiderman kind my brother used to wear when he was small. The red boy is on the floor of a hospital in Gaza, his blood caked on his face with soot and ash. His chest does not rise and fall, his eyes do not blink, but he holds his wink. One eye shut, the other open. A playful gesture, as if he's playing a trick on me. As if soon he would awaken and wash the red from his face like strawberry jam, and go play with his spider-man figurine in the sunlight. But he does not move, the red boy. The fluorescent light holds him still. His swollen eyelid does not so much as twitch. He is determined to fool me, and I am happy to be fooled. If it means he will one day wake up, I am happy to be fooled.