crooked as corkscrews

But don’t forget who you really are. And I’m not talking about your so-called real name. All names are made up by someone else, even the one your parents gave you. You know who you really are. When you’re alone at night, looking up at the stars, or maybe lying in bed in total darkness, you know that nameless person inside you.... Your muscles will toughen. So will your heart and soul. That’s necessary for survival. But don’t lose touch with that person deep inside you, or else you won’t really survive at all.

i.
my affection can really only be described as violent
and I’m sorry that you never asked for this.
I’m sorry that you didn’t willingly offer your chest
as a sacrifice to my devotion
and that I took scissors to it anyways.
like kids attempting to dig a tunnel through the earth in their backyard
I was trying to excavate a pathway to myself.

I can see now that
THIS PLACE DOESN’T EXIST IN YOU
but I’m selfish enough to continue searching for it anyways.

maybe-
maybe it’s better to forget all you’ve lost,
to just throw the boomerang and run away,
but that raises the assumption that displacements are meaningless
and I like to think that the missing pieces of my body
have scarred over and become invincible.
I refuse to believe that my healing
is anything less
than fearless.

ii.
I suppose that what I’m getting at is
it’s really terrible,
to be in love.
you’re always waiting
and you’re always hungry.
it’s a brave brazen heart
constantly aching
for more.

This is the story of how I never stopped running.
This is the story of how,
when the wolves knocked,
I met them at the door
and I became the beast, instead.

I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.

unbeingdead isn’t beingalive

Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses—I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole. I doubt that I’m the only one who feels this way. It’s the core of monster making, actually. Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable—your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers—and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you.

[…] Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper.

It’s a fitting punishment for a monster.
To want something so much—to hold it
in your arms—and know beyond a doubt
you will never deserve it.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.