The Honeys

by Ryan La Sala

Death isn’t the end of a life, but the division of it. When someone dies, their soul scatters into all the things they’ve ever given away. Love. Bruises. Gifts.

When I fear something, I study it. Caroline would dance about it or probably write a poem. Something dreamy and creative. But I’m our logical half. A killjoy, but smart. Our necessary evil—we used to joke growing up—as our joint fears pushed Caroline toward art, and me toward research. Toward data and science.

messiness. If I’m out of my own control, I’m within someone else’s—that’s what Mom used to tell us.

Heaven forbid there’s something more beneath the powder, the perfumes, the performance.

reminds me of something I read when I was researching grief. From a physicist’s perspective, a person is never really gone. They’ve just changed forms. The energy and particles that make them up have disorganized, merged back with the world, united with nature in cycles that are eternal.

I have never prayed until Caroline died, and now that she’s gone, I only have one prayer. Just one. Wherever you are, let it be bright. I hope it’s light that greets us, in the end, after everything. The alternative is unbearable.

“Bees only sting if they find a cause worth dying for. Don’t flatter yourself.

Death, twice, first the body and then the heart.

“Love has a weight,” Bria whispers.

“Better to drown as myself than to breathe the air of someone else’s life and drown all the same.”

I only stay put because a lifetime of training tells me exactly what to do, which is to pretend that nothing is the matter at all.

Like prey, I am immobilized by the inevitability of my own extermination.

Like her lips, all of her is poised to allure. It’s the sort of coy game she’s learned to play her whole life, without ever once knowing what it’ll win her. It’s what girls are expected to do, she knows. We know, too. We play the game. It’s less a game and more the choreography of survival. It just feels like a game in all its mysterious rules and mundane choreography. You sit, your legs together. You laugh, but not too loud. You speak, but only in answers. You reveal all things through subtext. You’re the closed flower, the lidded jar, the blanketed birdcage. Someday, usually as it’s happening, you realize that all along the thing you’ve been flirting with is your own destruction.

The true form of reality is not a loop and not a continuum; not a volley between the cause and effect of now and then; not the pleasant idiocy of a path between two predetermined points. It’s a lace, intricate and infinite, woven through all things.