Midnight Is the Darkest Hour

by Ashley Winstead

This is Southern Baptist country, and people are prone to unease, apocalyptic and overly associative, seeing holy warnings in the smallest of things, like the pattern sugar makes when spilled across a counter.

The flames of Hell have finally reached me like my father always warned.

That’s the upside of being the pastor’s daughter and the Devil’s son, two outcasts who became friends the way we did. From the start, nothing has been off-limits.

We call it the Medusa, because long ago, Everett and I decided we would give our love to villains. We know all too well how easy it is to become one when you’re misunderstood. Our love is a corrective measure.

“Every teenage girl I’ve met has been the scariest creature on the planet,”

My father and she were fire and ice—and like Robert Frost said, when it came to destruction, either was nice and would suffice.

Something about this area made it a haven for the outlandish and eerie. The truly heretical.”

Though I know this history, it still pains me to remember how deeply our soil is soaked in blood.

It was the brightest, clearest day of summer—so naturally, Everett and I were spending it reading.

I knew in that moment that what he’d done had been right, that what was lawful and what was just had been two different things today, and we’d chosen correctly.

I want the vines to swallow me like the trees swallowed nymphs in Greek myths. I want to be green and inhuman and at peace.

What is it about Louisiana that gives so many men delusions of grandeur? Is it the swampland, the primordial landscape sparking primal urges?

Why did we fall in love like lit matches dropped in kerosene?

The answer came to me easy as anything. And if I could’ve been honest with my mother, I would’ve said we loved like this, with an all-consuming passion, because our hearts had awakened to the truth of what we wanted for ourselves. The awakening itself was a miracle for those of us who had no map for love, who’d never once felt an emotion directed at ourselves as strong as the ones we gave to others.

All these three-dimensional, living girls flattened into tales whispered by mothers to daughters. What did it feel like to become a warning? I imagined a great hand pressing me until I was paper thin, like Christ’s wafer body at communion.

The truth was, I longed to kiss people like Edward Cullen, vampires and heartbreakers who could hurt me, kill me, men who walked the knife’s edge of life, because what I really wanted—what I’d wanted from fourteen, even before I had the language to describe it—was to suck the marrow out of them and carry it myself.

Forget puberty, forget growing up into a woman. I wanted to drink their threat, hold that volatile substance in my chest. Swallow their danger and become the danger myself. Vampire, viper; all that power, mine.

WOW

Love so violent it was a threat, a maelstrom—maybe that could do it. Maybe after it burned through me and I was transfigured, the world would look at me and be afraid. Wouldn’t that be something? The prayer of every teenage girl.

Laws, religion, civil society—they were just veneers, constructions put in place by the powerful to tame us animals, impose control.

As the storm rages, as the trees shake, I learn, over and over, what my beastly body can do.

If there is a God, some higher power, it’s here in these woods.

Listen to me, Barry, and listen well: I am the one you aren’t safe from. You better hurry up and run from me.”

What is it about us teenage girls that claws so deeply under people’s skin? We’re reviled and desired in equal measure; cringed at, laughed at, then lunged at. The sheer effort people like my father and my teachers have spent trying to control us. So many dress codes and rigid rules and unspoken ones we have taken on the mantel of policing ourselves, looking in the mirror and wincing at our reflections, drawing our own blood first, before others can.

!!!!!!!!!!

I think you want me to feel bad about that because you have a teenage girl inside you, too, and you’re embarrassed. Everything you hate—my hunger, my softness, my need—you can’t look me without seeing those parts of yourself, and you’re terrified they make you weak. But I know they’re strengths. I’m choosing to be proud. Which means you can’t control me anymore.”

I finally understand the greatest pain of all. It’s the moment you realize the family who raised you—the people who witnessed you in every moment of tender vulnerability growing up, who saw your small scraped knees, your spilled tears, your young eyes wide in wonder—don’t love you back.

At least not the same way. Your love is, and will always be, unrequited. Maybe I’d been a masochist for holding on to hope for so long, or maybe it was only human, the resilience of that tiny flicker in my heart.

“Don’t thank me. Loving you’s easy.”