Hold Me Under

by Riley Nash

‘do gay penguins know they’re gay’. (Answer: inconclusive.)

The edges of our broken parts just happened to fit together, slide into place in a way we both needed, and she became part of my family.

Alcohol is a trip on an empty stomach with no sleep.

I wish, as I disappear into the darkness, that I didn’t live in a world where the only way not to hurt was to shut everything out and live among your dreams.

I hate that I look for him whenever he’s not here. I hate the relief when he appears, like all the bad ways he makes me feel are the only anchor I have.

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.

maybe we’re just a bunch of helpless, mindless pinballs set loose in a machine the size of the planet. Collisions happen. Ones we never saw coming. Ones that send us spinning out of control.

We were high on the freedom of not being in love. Love has borders, limitations. A million movies and a billion books have charted its course. We chase it because we already know how it makes us feel, and once you’re in love, your only choice is to fall back out of it again.

Hate is intimate, endless, obsessive. Addictively co-dependent. You can’t disappoint someone who believes in the worst possible version of you. You can only memorize them, every hope to break, every vulnerability to tear open, until they’re your everything and you’re their shield against the nightmares that you made for them.

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.

Then I tilt my head back and study the stars. They’re faint here, pale freckles across the face of the sky, but there are so many of them.

You tore me open and put me back together but you kept something for yourself. You won’t give it back, and now I belong to you.

Powerful people don’t have to be afraid of things that they can get rid of with money.

Sometimes, when you open the door of a cage after so many years, the wild thing inside is more afraid to be free than it was to be caged. All I can do is sit next to the door and wait.

He’s all the things that drive me crazy and all the things that lead me home.

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.