How to Be Eaten

by Maria Adelmann

I wanted to be alone forever, and I never wanted to be alone again.

Nobody listens to what they don’t want to hear. Nobody.

“I’m saying that if you can’t trust the world to behave how you thought it would—if the impossible becomes possible—then you’re open to believing so much more,”

With him, it was all horror and headaches and blow jobs.

“You just look, I don’t know, like a rabbit or something, mischievous and scared, like you’re waiting for something violent to happen, and when it does, you’re gonna love it, you’re gonna love being torn apart.”

“Yeah, what’s that one? Mom lets the kid wander off alone? Girl refuses to follow directions? Girl gets distracted? Girl is easy, flirts with wolf? Girl gets what she deserves?”

What if makeup and reality TV and weddings are all just a trick of the light?

As if it mattered what you looked like. As if you could tell from a picture or even a person what was hidden beneath. As if everyone weren’t impossible once you got to know them. As if people were possible to get to know.

Love and protect? I kept thinking. I already did that. I already did that.

treat bookstores like Saks Fifth Avenue: perusing but rarely buying. I am a connoisseur of bargain bins, libraries, used bookstores. But still, guiltily, I’ll slink into a new bookstore from time to time, let my fingers glide across the spines, sleek and shining as if glazed.

To want is to be bewitched, I’ve long thought. If it’s beautiful or sweet, it will ruin you.

“Tragedy isn’t capital,” says Gretel. “It doesn’t buy you anything. It doesn’t automatically make you a better

She has an interest in halves, in how people divide, how one part of yourself can separate from the other so completely, so definitively, that the division is impossible to repair.

Some people stay together forever whether they should be together or not. Some people stay together for reasons more practical than love.

“Society defines the terms of payment,” says Ruby, “then gets pissed at you for how you pay.

But, of course, time always ticks forward, no matter the perceived rate; it can’t be stopped; next always happens; it’s happening now; it’s the only thing you can count on.

You can’t change the past, but it’s infinitely reframeable. You can tell the same story over and over a hundred different ways, and every version is a little right and every version is a little wrong.