—HATE TO ADMIT IT, BUT IT MIGHT BE TRUE

 

THE YEAR OF THE MONSTER   /   Tara Stillions Whitehead            

 

The harder I become, the harder it is to not want greater emptiness.

 

You want to be alone. All addicts want to be alone.

 

She is afraid to look away from the screen. She is not ready to forget being touched.

 

The attic became a spaceship. A giant coffin for their marriage.

 

They were chess players walking away from each other.

 

“If I said I was soul-sick, what would you say?”

 

She doesn’t trust what she is feeling—awareness, accompaniment, hope—but it’s a form of vulnerability that proves she is still alive. 

 

She wants the man to be a cobweb she can shake off and forget.

 

For the first time in months, she can remember Micha’s smell. His relaxed breathing. How they didn’t choose to love one another. How it was instinctive.

 

She wants to use the truth to destroy her.

 

Please, God, someone see me. I need to be seen.

 

Dead boys can’t defend themselves or explain.

 

People hate when truth gets in the way of what they believe.

 

He was a hopeful kind of fiction.

 

Right now? You can’t stop thinking. And each thought is only half-materialized, so it’s like you’re shooting blanks at an enemy with no body.

 

She knows how to make you suffer. She knows the beauty of transgression. She knows that beneath the mechanical ballet you perform, there is a twinge of desire.

 

When you had your own daughter, you learned that parenthood was a slow and violent removal of the heart. You put bad things into the space left behind.

 

You can’t change the past, but the past still wants a stake in the present.

 

It isn’t until you depress the plunger that you realize you’ve been holding your breath, that exhaling feels good—probably too good.

 

The sound of forgetting. It’s trying to catch up with her.

 

She wanted to be seen and touched. By him. By the man who used to know her, her body.

 

MAN #1

Well? I won a fucking Emmy. No, three Emmys. What the hell has she done.

MAN #2

Killed herself.

 

You and I are gonna make some crazy good shit together.

 

I’ve grown afraid of silence and its absolution

 

Have I become okay with not being okay?