I Do Everything I'm Told

by Megan Fernandes

But we never tire of them, do we? We wish to worship more than just each other.

What we tire of is that we never tire of it. How it guts us. How it fails, then reappears.

To want the same things as you age is not always a failure of growth.

You can walk off most anything.

Pay attention to what disgusts you. Some of the most interesting people have no legacy.

And in the absence of recovery, some ritual. In the absence of love? Ritual. Understand that ritual is a kind of patience, an awaiting and waiting. Keep waiting, kitten. You will be surprised what you can come back from.

See, the logic of a couple is like a Beckett play. Facing the end, you don’t want someone with you for comfort. You want someone with you to blame.

and examine my life and the impossibility of you and I and how I is a mirror and you is nothing but a projection of I and I did try, honestly.

But home is not two suns. There is no home and nothing to return to, just a series of shadows, partial signs of presence: a flickering.

I say things and then unsay them. It was love. It was not love. It is raining. It is not raining. Contradictions are a sign we are from god. We fall. We don’t always get to ask why.

given the state of this world, and how is everyone not ill, not overdosing on the night? Because the nukes are coming. Our optimism is not enough to make it not so. Our optimism is all we have. Well, that and beauty.

I believe poems can give form to the formless, that one can resurrect roads not taken in a line and give it a name.

It’s a novel by Virginia Woolf, I’d say and rattle on and he’d wave me off but maybe read it one day in college and think about his young mother who wanted to be a writer and what she might have had to give up in order to raise him at twenty-three. He’d write me a song. He’d title it with my name.

Only way is to fuck like you’re stalling the body’s departure from doing what bodies will do: end.

I fuck like a last request. Like I’m saying, maybe reconsider your departure?

I have two cats in New York and not so much loneliness. Still, I prepare for their deaths, but who knows, I may go first.

How boring to accumulate love only to test it.

You are young and nothing is sacred yet.

We like Miami but prefer Manhattan. She’s more dramatic.

We plunge into all that is restless. We’re too fast. Faster than time.

Sometimes we got so angry at our moms. They would just shrug and sigh. Say: My darling, nobody told me how to raise a dark child.

And it was over fast because you knew you were an experiment. I am your goddamn slum experiment, you laughed. Your criminal. No. Just the cruelest person I have loved.

In love, the rules are meant to be broken. You are young and nothing is sacred yet.

You are old and everything matters. In love, there are no rules to begin with.

The first person we love is just that: first.

What’s your thing with smut, I ask. You say it’s not smut, it’s a love story.

There are songs I can’t listen to anymore. I say it’s because of the war. Or the plague. Easier to blame the world falling apart than to say it’s you.

There are things that are not forgivable like when someone big hurts someone small. That’s the only rule of nature I believe in. For that, you should burn. For that, nothing can save you.

put on a playlist called I do everything I’m told, and can’t tell what is kink or worship or both.

We say soon, soon, soon something will be revealed. We fool no one and are no one’s fool,

I want to call you and say that crisis clarifies everything, but it hasn’t. The world has gone milky and endangered and I’m swallowing. I’m swallowing it all.

She knows that not everything holy has to hurt or cohere.

The truth is that he could, like all of us, be hard to love sometimes. But he wasn’t that night.

The truth is I am most exquisite on the east coast, meaning I am in rhythm. I do not track the world by beauty but joy.

Yes. It was joy, wasn’t it? Even if it was ugly, it was joy.