Hold Me Under

by Riley Nash

makes me cruel, like a toxic cloud rotting away the good and leaving only the worst.

Maybe fate is recursive—the mention of fate can, itself, be fate, signposting the steps our unlikely journeys take through the universe. Or maybe fate is a word people invoke to manipulate those who are desperate for meaning.

I’m starting to think the universe is just a pinball machine with eight billion balls going at once, flying around at random, hurting and being hurt with no reason and no purpose.

I don’t have names for feelings, just good and bad, pain and not pain, and none of those describes the way my chest cracks apart whenever he looks at me.

I don’t like thinking about the past. They’re all dead. For someone who wants to die, I’m awfully afraid of being dead.

I want to understand the shape of love, not because I think it might be better than hate but because sometimes I wonder, just for a second, if it might be another name for the same feeling.

And sometimes we say I love you, and sometimes we say I hate you, and sometimes we just exist together without a name, two stars in the universe, and it doesn’t matter because they’re all different names for the same thing, something that will never belong to anyone but us.