I Don’t Want To Die Knowing Sadness Last. I Want To Die In A Happy Moment. I Want To Die On The Beach

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.

I thought life would be easier than this. That opportunities would fall in my lap, that I would never make mistakes. Typing it out now the ideas seem so foolish, but I truly believed them. The invincibility of youth waxes and wanes like the moon, beautiful, but an illusion. A display of only crescent truths and half-honesties. Once in the blue, darkness disrobes the white lies, and I am reminded of my poor decisions and silly aspirations in their naked blackness. Phases of judgment are all that is left of me, my future self peering backward at everything I have done and haven't done. I wait only for sunrise.

I want to live a thousand childhoods. I want to know how cold the water gets in the backyard rivers of country houses. I want to feel the texture of marble on kitchen counter tops and eat everything the private chef prepares. I want to run in grass miles and miles long with my sisters. I want to know how young feels in every skin there is.

Why do the ones I love keep being taken from me? What have I done to deserve shards of their memory pricking my fingertips like spindles every time I scroll on my phone and see a face that has stolen a piece of them? Their eyes on someone else’s head, their smile creasing someone else’s cheeks, their ginger hair curling around someone else’s ears that don’t fucking look right! I hate that I see you everywhere. I hate more that it’s never you.

Is that why people write? Because no one will listen?

Why is love not enough to keep someone here,

but enough to take them away?

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

Splinter my dream into a web of cracks and gaps.

Take what little splash of anticipation I have pestering my rancorous mind and freeze it, immobilize me.

Take me where you want to go.

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.

If I have learned anything of those who are advanced and civilized, it is this:

New technology is praised even as it wrecks the earth and is manufactured by children’s hands,

Rich men can kill millions so long as they do it sitting in a board room in a suit and tie, but let a poor man kill one rich man and he is quick to die,

Advancements in medicine are available only to those who can afford them, all the brilliance in the world distilled behind a paywall,

In the heat of all their innovation and progress, they have forgotten empathy. And that renders their advancements useless and backward, their intelligence only lets them be more unique in their cruelty.