Last Night I Sang to the Monster

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

In a monstrous time, the heart breaks and breaks And lives in the breaking. —Stanley Kunitz

This is the way I see it: if you get to know yourself really well, you might discover that deep down inside you’re just a dirty, disgusting, and selfish piece of shit. What if my heart is all rotted out and corrupted? What about that? What am I supposed to do with that information? Just tell me that.

” And Rafael read: I can hear the warning, the whisper: there’s a monster in the room. The whisper becomes a scream. The world is full of madmen. I have evidence. I can prove it. I look around. The room is as empty as my heart. It used to be full, my heart, but that’s another story. No one is here. Maybe not even me. I can prove there are madmen—but I can’t prove the monster exists. Who was it that whispered the warning? Listen close, the sky is falling. Maybe the monster is outside just waiting for me to step out the door. Maybe he’s already swallowed up the sky. What does he want with me anyway? Is he trying to scare me? Is that it? I was born scared—I don’t need a monster for that. Maybe the monster lives in the books I’m reading. One of books is about the genocide in Rwanda and the other book is about a little boy who gets raped. Who needs monsters?

we were laughing because there was all these feelings inside us and we didn’t always know what to do with all the feelings that were like knots that needed to be untied, so sometimes we just, well, we laughed. That’s how we untied the knots.

“I’ve been hurting most of my life. I tried to pretend I wasn’t. I even believed my own lie. I’ve lived my entire life trying to avoid pain, Zach. That’s a terrible way to live. I don’t care any more if it hurts.” “Will it ever stop hurting?” “I don’t think so, Zach. If I’m working on a painting, and it doesn’t hurt, then the painting won’t matter. And if it doesn’t matter, then it isn’t real—then I’m not real.” “But why does it have to hurt?” “I don’t know.” And then he got this look and I knew he was thinking and so I waited for him to stop thinking because I knew he wanted to tell me something. “I have a new theory,” he said, “and the theory is this: if I develop a great capacity for feeling pain, then I am also developing a great capacity for feeling happiness.”

sometimes we fall in love with our monsters.”

” I am not okay. I do not know what it means to be okay. I have never known and maybe I will never know. Okay is just a word I use so I won’t have to talk about what’s inside. Okay is a word that means I am going to keep my secrets. There is something inside me that is killing me. There is something inside me that wants to let whatever is killing me do its job.

Sometimes having someone’s voice inside you is like having a bullet lodged in your brain or in your heart. Take your pick. Either way, it feels like you just might bleed to death.

This is what I’m telling myself right now: This is you. Rafael, this is you. I’m trying to tell myself who I am. I lost myself somewhere. And that’s a very sad thing. Losing yourself is sad and heartbreaking. Fucking sad and fucking heartbreaking. Losing yourself isn’t like losing a key to your house. It isn’t like losing an expensive pair of sunglasses or even the only copy of the greatest screenplay you’ve ever written. I’ve been talking to myself a lot lately. That doesn’t bother me much. I have a feeling I’m trying to talk myself into existence. I’m trying to listen. It’s time I start listening to my own voice. Sometimes I find myself laughing. Sometimes I find myself crying.

“Have you ever been in a summer storm in the desert, Zach?” “Yeah,” I said. “They just come up on you—the wind and the thunder and the lightning and the rain begins to pound. And you think that the world is going to end. It’s this overwhelming apocalyptic moment. And then, just like that, it’s over. And the world is calm again. And the air smells clean and new. And smelling it, you want to be alive again.” “Yeah, it’s like that,” I said. “That’s how I feel, Zach. Like the desert after a storm.”

I wondered what it was like to feel whole, to not feel torn up or stunned out or wigged out or any of those things. I wondered what it was like to walk around the world looking up at the sky instead of searching the ground, eye to eye with things that crawled.

I’m thinking that if I can touch other people’s hurt and they can touch mine, then something might happen. Something really beautiful. I don’t mean that the hurt would disappear. I just mean that it might be possible to continue on the road toward a place called home.

People don’t think that there’s anything in the desert. People think that it’s just this waterless and dead place, but that’s not true. It’s like a forest really. I mean, there aren’t any trees, but there’s all kinds of things growing there. It’s amazing really.

But avoiding pain, Zach, isn’t possible. Just because life has hurt me or you or all the people that are here doesn’t mean we have to live in pain all the time. I lived in pain because I chose to live in pain. Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with the idea of tragedy, the idea that I was destined to live a tragic life. I had this romantic idea about the life of a writer and what he was supposed to suffer. I was Rafael, the artist, the superior being who created beauty out of his own misery. Somehow, I made my own pain a kind of god. I worshipped that god with all that I was. As Sharkey would say, That is so fucked up, dude. Inexplicably, though, and this is the part that really is inexplicable, I somehow avoided the real pain—the pain that was killing me. I avoided it altogether. I think you’re like me, Zach. I think you live in pain even as you don’t want to feel. You’re beautiful and brilliant and in love with words and yet, like me, you remain in an inarticulate space where words are stuck somewhere between your heart and your throat.

it’s one thing to be sad and it’s another thing to be sad once you’ve been happy. Being sad after you’ve been happy is the worst thing in the world.

What a strange thing—to fall in love with Rafael’s words. To fall in love with storms. To fall in love with your own life.