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. You struggle to piece together what’s left—even the things that hurt—just to feel haunted.

I know people think being queer is, like, very fabulous and full of witty repartee and all that, but sometimes it’s also crying in the bathroom of an Applebee’s somewhere near Margaretville, New York, while Rihanna’s “S&M” plays on the speakers for the early-bird crowd.

My tears never fall, because that’s when the fear finally blooms.

grief, I have learned, cracks us into pieces that make all sorts of strange, alarming shapes

Long ago I had to learn that my body isn’t who I am; who I am is how I feel.

I consider throwing myself in the lake but decide to save the histrionics for when a lifeguard is on duty.

I would like to toss my statued body into the lake and stay down there until everyone watching this interaction has been dead for hundreds of years, and only then will I rise.

I want to scream, but the thing about screaming is you have to let yourself breathe first. And I won’t. The air will taste like warm skin.

I leave the lip gloss on. Bright things in nature are often poisonous. Let that be my defense, then. Let Aspen watch, and predators prowl, and all the waiting jaws yawn wider. I will be a ruin to consume.

I have known this literally my whole life. People decide they know everything about me the second they see me, and then reward themselves when I prove them wrong.

that’s not being chill. That’s performative heterosexuality.”

“You don’t get tired?” “I don’t,” I say. “Or I guess I do. But it’s not drifting around in the middle that makes me tired. It’s staying too long on either shore. People have these specific ideas of what a boy is, or a girl is, and it’s so exhausting to play along. People make themselves so unhappy trying to get it right. But it’s not even real. So I reject all of it. I’d rather be happy and adrift.”

Contentedness is a party I leave early every time. It’s not often that I feel invited to begin with, and even rarer that I feel welcomed enough to stay. I’ve learned to never test any group’s hospitality. Patience like that is finite for someone like me, and it’s dangerous to indulge in it.