I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself

by Marisa Crane

we thought we’d made a mistake marrying for love when there were things like fear and loneliness to bind you.

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

As I got older and gayer, I heard a lot of talk about chosen family, but I didn’t understand why something so beautiful had to be compared to family. Why couldn’t it just be its own good thing?

Do we really want to bring a child into this mess of a world?

Maybe we wanted another person to join us while we watched the world burn.

I disliked the word troubled, but that was the word the school assigned to any student with a lick of personality.

I hadn’t understood the tenderness of climbing into bed with you after a stretched-thin day. Of pulling the comforter down and sliding in beside you. Of falling into a dream before we could properly kiss goodnight, but knowing the kiss was still there, hovering between us.

It actually made me feel worse, as if I had to double the blame to make up for your understanding. If I was the only one blaming me, the guilt had no outlet, nothing to do but grow its own vascular system and circulate through my body.

How do you define freedom without ever having felt fully free?

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.

Can there be help without hurt? Can I trust the impulse I have to help others?

Pop Quiz: Q: Is it smart to categorize people as either good or bad? A: Of course it isn’t.

I finally understand what all the fuss is about: a tiny someone is predisposed to trust you and you have the chance to prove them right.

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

Be the first player to teach her about cruelty, how it rides on the back of cowardice and calls itself bravery. No one tells you this, but the game is rigged from the start.

Had she been paying attention, she would have known it hadn’t happened overnight, that it took a million tiny stabs to bleed democracy dry.

Many people in the United States find it ____ to ____ about _____ until it _____ to them.

“Well. How come everything that’s important isn’t good? And everything that’s good isn’t important?”

“It’s like, it’s so important to grown-ups to have power, but usually when they get it, they just do bad stuff with it,” she says.

That living is time travel, too.

I don’t want to be one of those delusional parents who promises their child that they can do anything they set their mind to—I know the state of the world, how by the time the kid is a teen, the world will have swallowed her and spit her out several times already, but I also know change is possible.

It’s blurry in the way that forced intimate spaces tend to be.

I didn’t want to reckon with what it meant to be traumatized in a world that would not hold me.

Q: Which is more important: the object or the light that illuminates the object? A: I know that I’ve spent my entire life convinced I wasn’t real unless I was loving someone with everything I had.

What does it mean when you say I love you because you so desperately want to hear it back?

Not deciding is deciding, too.

Love is not a finite thing.

Your story was never just your story.

Pleasure can exist on its own, without the int...

You were right: remembering is a co...

Where in your body do you store your regrets? How will you release them?

Who are you when no one is looking, not even your shadows?

There is a reason devotion sounds like motion.