I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself

by Marisa Crane

What I mean is, it never once occurred to me that you, too, were mortal.

My face, although pink and puffy, looks younger than it has in years, as if relieved that all that worrying had been justified all along.

It’s true: if given the chance, I would trade her for you.

Pop Quiz: Q: What do you know about distance? A: I know that I feel it everywhere.

Of course, shadows cannot exist without a light source. And the presence of two shadows implies two light sources. Who, then, is my main enemy: the sun or the state?

If I had to choose, I would say the moment between when you decided to kiss me and when we actually kissed, that is where I wish to live forever. Inside my anticipation, dying to receive you.

Reality testing is the ability to assess a situation for what it is, rather than the way we fear it to be.

the kid and I look like a couple of outlaws. It’s kind of romantic if you can forget the danger of it.

I showed up to school and, seeing the shame in my eyes, one of my troubled kids pulled me aside and said, Old news, right, Miss? and I started crying on the spot.

Post-sex, when I used to lay my head on your chest and listen to your heart, I felt smug, as if I’d created you.

whiteness meant we could remove our otherness like a sweater if we wanted. We could walk five feet apart and temporarily become gal pals.

They were the same people who thought that everyone’s horrific circumstances were a direct result of their behaviors, that you could manifest a better life, if only you’d try harder, you lazy piece of shit.

“The human brain is nature’s biggest mistake. An honest mistake, but a mistake, nonetheless. Nothing that has happened should have happened.”

We called you Velcro. Sometimes I wonder where you stick now.”

There isn’t a day that I don’t wake up and wonder whether I deserve even the simplest of joys.

And to think, we thought the prison system was corrupt, but the reality is, it was just preparation for what came next.

Who decides who gets longevity and who doesn’t?”

Pop Quiz: Q: What is the difference between nice and kind? A: Only one is a result of fear.

It comforts me that she has no solution either.

He nods like I should know what to do with this revelation.

“I just can’t do this anymore,” she says. “All this loss is going to kill me. And for what? So a couple of creeps can spy on me?”

I’m afraid he would have grabbed his paint brush and climbed inside our lives all the same. What do you do with a love like that?

Pop Quiz: Q: Is a person no more than the sum of their actions? A: He didn’t mean to kill her, he didn’t mean to kill her, he didn’t mean to kill her. He didn’t mean to.

I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty.

That living is time travel, too.

I find myself thinking of Mischief. If she were here, I would ask her to hold my paw.

Blood isn’t what bonds people, it’s what traps them.

the more in love with someone you are, the sooner the sadness settles in.

if you’re feeling compelled to destroy something, that means it is good.

We were both bitter about biology and all of its limitations, about the sameness of our bodies and how nature forbid us from reveling in that sameness.

If one wanted to catalogue my toxic traits, one might start with my inability to understand how people’s lives keep going, even when I am not looking.

For a moment, I consider hiding your urn from the kid. What does that make me?

I’ve never been afraid of anything more than I’ve been afraid of my own happiness.

I can see why the other parents did it. The transference of energy.

“There was Beau, and then there was everybody else.”

“If you can’t resurrect them, you might as well date their favorite ex.”

Beau, I don’t feel you anymore.

I only ever wanted to survive. No, survive isn’t quite the right word. I just wanted to make it through without too much pain.

Sometimes, parents & children become the most common strangers. Eventually, a street appears where they can meet again.

But I feel no grief—my grief is gone; it’s a horrible, beautiful realization. I’m now grieving the loss of my grief.

Do we pass on the way in which we move throughout the world?

As if his bad parts could ever cancel out his good parts.

“I still want them to think of me as a little kid. Like I’m not capable of what we’re about to do.”