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by Rivers Solomon

How pleasing it is when I can become this best self.

I’ll have an hour, two hours, sometimes even three, of cheery productivity, before this version of me, flighty and unrealized, leaves me again.

Every day, everyone is a hundred different people: who they are when they are alone and feeling fuckable, who they are when they are alone and feeling unfuckable, who they are when they are grief wrecked, when they are joy smacked.

I am something no one wants to fall down.

I want to fuck him. I always want to fuck people who aren’t immediately available to me.

he’ll show up like a sorry sinner to my door, begging for my love, but I’ll be long gone because I’m not interested in people once the spark of newness has faded. Maybe if he says something violent like wanting to kill me, the novelty will be restored and I’ll go for it.

People like me, people who are nothing, people who are empty shells, balloons—any old thing can carry us away. It takes a forceful hand to pull us back to earth.

He’s this cop. A piece-of-shit cop. That’s redundant.

Okay, but like, what of anyone’s father. Goodness, we can’t be disappointed by men we never once believed in.

My life is a dark woods with a slasher in the midst.

Emotions are little curses, spells. They come over us and take us away, outside ourselves. There is no predictability. At times, one spell trumps another, or multiple spells war at once, and the body becomes a shell in those moments, a shell that does not belong to you.

They punish and punish, we fight and fight, or we cease to exist. Period.”