The Honeys

by Ryan La Sala

Caroline is dead. My sister is dead. There are no pieces, no parts, that can be assembled to make sense of the absence my sister has become. There is just a sudden, shocking emptiness where her life used to be.

Like all things with my family, the funeral is a careful performance of obfuscation.

I secretly think Mom and Dad planned the funeral around the chandelier’s delivery, and not the other way around.

put together too late that she was hoping I’d go. Vanish, like I usually do.

I wanted Caroline to hate what was happening to her, but there was no room for hate among those girls. Just a sisterhood I resented, envied, adored, and despised all at once.

It walked around in her skin, a doom clothed as my sister.

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. A mess, basically. And not even a hot one. Just a mess.

It is up to you to demand people see you as you, or they will almost always decide you are someone else.

It feels almost like an obligation, to bear witness to what happened to her.

Boys become Hunters, girls become Amazons. And those in between? In between, on the map, are miles of eerie, unnavigable woods. “How fitting,” I mutter.

Trying, at a distance, to pry my secrets right off my body.

If anything feels impossible, it’s living the rest of my life like this.

I forgot how much guys love to just touch one another.

It’s like they can see the voids in my life, the portions that have been punched out by her death, and they ask around them.

What did I expect? I left Aspen for so many reasons. Why am I surprised they’re all still here, waiting for me?

I don’t want more silence surrounding Caroline. I’m going to be crushed by it,

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.

From beneath the black mesh, their laughter contorts to sneering so quickly, like sportsmanship and bloodlust share a subtle seam.

The boys fling themselves at one another, crash, and break apart as though they can’t be hurt, and I wonder what it must be like to walk through life with the assumption that you are indestructible.

“You’re a little bitch,” he says. “Actually,” I say, “I’m a huge bitch.”

That there’s nothing more to them than the acceptable amount of bored sadism society likes to read into the inscrutable rituals of girly girls. Heaven forbid there’s something more beneath the powder, the perfumes, the performance.

“We don’t ask each other for help,” she goes on. “Because we help each other without asking. Do you get what I mean, Mars? We don’t make people ask if we know what they need. We just give it.”

“I’m used to it.” “You shouldn’t have to be.”

“I exist. And they don’t like that.

The eulogy replaces the person; the story told takes the place of the life lived.

His whole world sits atop nostalgia for a place that never existed for me.

“Having people try to burn you like a witch kinda ruins the whole summer camp thing, Wyatt.”

“The way you have to think just to survive. It’s messed up, Mars.”

Clout like that is fragile. Masculinity is, too, I guess.

For the first time in weeks, I’m looking at me. The way I see me and the way I want to be seen.

I feel collected, like all that had broken off and scattered has been magnetized back together. It’s how I used to feel, I realize, before I got here. It’s nothing more than the euphoria of feeling like myself.

“Wyatt, that’s not being chill. That’s performative heterosexuality.”

But it’s not drifting around in the middle that makes me tired. It’s staying too long on either shore.

it feels like all people are wet clay, all the shapes that define us self-imposed. I realize this fits into the way I’ve always seen myself, which is: art, attempted, though often spoiled by the demands of another’s taste.

What if our world is just the light and shadow of some higher dimension’s design? And if only we could comprehend it, we could change it? Well, physics tells us that just might be true. But we can’t grasp it, so we can’t change it,

The world will never run out of predators worth turning to prey.

All I have suffered flows backward from this moment, from this thing that wears my father’s skin. Greed. The ravenous hunger that sees all things as consumable. People, lives, love. All of it just honey, all of it for the taking.