We Had to Remove This Post

by Hanna Bervoets

People act like it’s a perfectly normal question, but how normal is a question when you’re expecting the answer to be gruesome?

Maybe that’s not so strange—maybe questions don’t stem from interest in the other person so much as curiosity about the lives we might have led

I began to realize it wasn’t me that was the problem. It was the beauty standards society imposed on us, self-loathing and abandonment issues going back to childhood, yada yada, the stuff of women’s magazines, but I still felt responsible

And maybe they’re also just a way to prove how tough we are, how resilient, to ourselves and to each other:

It was Kyo, the baby of the group, who used the word “friend” for the first time. It happened after an incident in late January.

In the heat of the battle, love had been smoked out of its hideout, or something like that.

I had a job and I had friends and I was holding a beautiful woman and that was more than I’d ever dared dream of because, you know, many summers before I’d also spent my lunch breaks hanging around in a parking lot.

Sure, the work we did was fucking awful but we could handle it, because we, Sigrid, the guys, and me, we were a team, and we’d get each other through it somehow. Yes, that’s what I believed, that summer.

I’ve always felt protected by the dark, like it swallows up the monsters instead of hiding them.