The Sea of Tranquility

by Katja Millay

The only thing I’ve learned to do well is avoid, but everyone would rather believe it’s all good.

never gave two shits about normal. I wanted extraordinary.

It seems like the more my body healed, the more fractured my mind became, and there aren’t enough wires and screws to fix the breaks in it.

The feeling only lasts a moment. It’s not real. It’s just a knee-jerk reaction; an echo of a feeling that used to exist.

It doesn’t matter if you do everything right, if you dress the right way and act the right way and follow all the rules, because evil will find you anyway.

They tell you it was random to make you feel blameless. But all I hear them telling me is that I have no control, and if I have no control, then I’m powerless. I would have preferred being blamed.

let their current steer me, let it smooth and shape me like a stone pushed along the sand until I was perfect. And as soon as I was, I was ripped out of the water and thrown and smashed into a thousand pieces that I can’t put back together. I don’t know where they go. And there are so many missing that the ones that are left don’t fit together anymore.

First you count it in minutes, then in hours. You count in days, then weeks, then months. Then one day you realize that you aren’t counting anymore, and you don’t even know when you stopped. That’s the moment they’re gone.

People like to say love is unconditional, but it’s not, and even if it was unconditional, it’s still never free. There’s always an expectation attached. They always want something in return. Like they want you to be happy or whatever, and that makes you automatically responsible for their happiness because they won’t be happy unless you are.