Notice

by Heather Lewis

That's the thing you've probably always wanted. Someone's undivided attention. And you've wanted it so much and for so long that the form it takes no longer matters.

I always come at one end or the other for people, never in the middle.

Already, he had me thinking it'd be easier this way. That always running the game had begun tiring me, and so why not let him do it?

Seeing her again made all this harder and I feared if she touched me some of it would open. That the bleeding and seeping would turn to leaking.

And then I wondered how much anyone can know of the things they desire too much, these being the most frightening of all and sometimes with good reason.

Hard not to get caught up in someone telling you the things you've wanted to hear your whole life, and so does it matter if what they're saying is true? In that moment, I mean? Does it matter?

To keep myself especially far from love and even further from being loved because, of the whole lot of them, these were the only two that could actually kill you.

I thought this was always my job—to make people see something ugly inside. Take them to a place in themselves they didn't want to go, but had to. Let them do this through me and then let them discard me, discount me. Later on, making them pay me, never seeing how I paid for this too.