To Be Devoured

by Sara Tantlinger

Do not dwell in graveyards.

“You’re a virus. You have all this rot inside you and you fill up on it until you pollute everyone around you. Then you wonder why you’re alone at the end of the day with your fucking sadness and dead moths.

An unseen mass weighs within my chest and maybe that is the virus, the rot she mentioned. My own poison decaying my body from the inside out. All the angry bile souring the nectar of my heart and soul. The way death follows me, the way hostility rests inside me like a bomb coming to take comfort before detonating.

I found my freedom even if it comes at the cost of such a suffocating, vehement end.

But at least it is my ending, my bitter devouring. At least it is something they cannot take from me.