I Am A Mimic That Sacrifices Her True Face To Embody Others, And I Fool Everyone But Myself.

Gorging herself, teeth once white steeped in hot and sticky redness, the siren suddenly felt wet coming from her eyes. She jolted backward.

What is this?

Tears. You really liked me didn’t you? The sailor lass muttered, blue eyes now hazed grey with blood loss.

What does that matter? You’re mine you know.

So I am. She said, head tilted back in the pooling sand like a mother’s lap. Something felt natural about this, an unbirth seemed gentler oddly enough, than plain death.

Do you always cry when you eat? She asked, her voice once proud and strong, tapering out

I, I don’t know. I normally do this underwater.

Am I special? To be eaten on the shore? She asked, eyes stuck upward toward a sky the sunset didn’t touch anymore. A cold rush of air carved through the coastline she reposed on, erasing her footprints.

Her heart stopped.

Yes, of course you were. The siren said to no one, her voice wavering for the first time. Of course you were. Tears dropped easier now, and she was certain no sea ever felt so warm, and so foreign to her as this one.

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?

I’m like a child, the way my mind works. I want us to look at each other, but I keep covering my eyes.

We see each other’s Instagram posts.

But we don’t talk much.

I know what he thinks of the current administration. He likewise knows what I think of it. We play music on the car radio and sing along, not saying the words aloud.

I hear the posts on his phone undulating like neon gelatin, sugary nothings calling to him. A mixed bag of nuts that instagram feed, one post is an ai cat driving a semi and the next a cry against the white identity under attack in America. They’re both for my father. The algorithm knows him better than I do, he listens to it more than his own daughter. Our conversations are rarely in words.

He has women up in his garage, I covered them with grumpy cat pictures when I was only a girl. Make it lighthearted, make it fun, my objection to his sexualization of women. Why am I so eager to cater? I am a woman now. He has maga hats now, Trump ornaments up when it isn’t even Christmas. On the other side of the ornament is a mirror. It’s poetic. I keep turning it around, putting Trump’s face toward the wall and the mirror toward my father begging him to look. He turns it back around. How can I look at someone when they cannot look at themselves? How can I speak to him when we never have?

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.

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.

The philosopher in my life, who speaks in thoughts and sits in inaction which he poses as an intellectual buffer. It is far easier to sit in living rooms and bore holes in the minds of grandparents with perpetual conversations than enact a plan. Set the bird free from the cage, and see if it flies, I say. But no, he sits and prunes the feathers of his ideas, endlessly and all the days on. For if he never sets his pondering in motion, he will never have to face that his bird is not living, and that which never lives never flies.

“Why do you eat men?” The sailor asked the siren.

“You ate us first,” she replied.

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.

We could have heaven on earth, if there were no other people here but you and I. We would be shepards of animals, bearers of seeds. We would take the river home, and let it sweep us with its long cold body to our doorstep.