Teach the Torches to Burn

by Caleb Roehrig

After all, as my father likes to say: If you can’t find someone else to blame, you are not trying hard enough.

Benvolio talks about girls the way I try to talk to him about sunlight—how magical it is, how undefinable, how exquisitely beautiful in all its permutations; at any given time, he is pursuing multiple paramours, and each one is uniquely alluring, uniquely irresistible. But I have never felt that way about any girl. Why have I never felt that way?

“I guess that’s the thing about masks … you wear one long enough, you eventually forget it isn’t your real face.”

I’ve never felt anything like this; it’s like the first time I drank too much wine, the first time I lost my footing on a patch of ice, and the first time I was so excited I couldn’t sleep, all rolled into one overwhelming moment.

“Fortune may favor us, but catastrophe likes us even more.”

All you can do is run or hide, and all I can do is split the minutes into seconds, pretending it lengthens the dwindling hours I have left before I must marry a man who despises me.”

This feeling is not like love, I realize; it is love. My heart would not be breaking this way if it were not.