Her Body and Other Parties

god should have made girls lethal
when he made monsters of men.

The stairs move away from me, and I rush to catch them

I pressed on my brake once, twice, and the dark road behind me flooded red. The light revealed a herd of deer moving liquidly over the pavement, eyes glinting with each tap.

no strange teenage girl sat next to me, stewing in her own nightmarish consciousness. (And isn’t that how you become tender, vulnerable? The tissue-softening marination of your own mind, the quicksand of mental indulgence?

is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of it?

What is worse: writing a trope or being one? What about being more than one?

What if you colonize your own mind and when you get inside, the furniture is attached to the ceiling? What if you step inside and when you touch the furniture, you realize it’s all just cardboard cutouts and it all collapses beneath the pressure of your finger? What if you get inside and there’s no furniture? What if you get inside and it’s just you in there, sitting in a chair, rolling figs and eggs around in the basket of your lap and humming a little tune? What if you get inside and there’s nothing there, and then the door hatch closes and locks?

the realm of sense and reason it seemed logical for something to make sense for no reason (natural order) or not make sense for some reason (the deliberate design of deception) but it seemed perverse to have things make no sense for no reason.

pulled my shaking body up to the vanity, glanced into the mirror, and for the first time, saw who I’d been looking for.

understood that knowledge was a dwarfing, obliterating, all-consuming thing, and to have it was to both be grateful and suffer greatly.

I took a step toward her. “It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,” I said. “It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt many things in my life, but shame is not among them.”