Now my foolish boat is leaning, broken love lost on your rocks.

FitzWilliam Darcy. Prince Charming. The lot of handsome gentlemanly protagonists. Why are they such fiction? And by such fiction I mean fiction of the most damaging kind. At least for me.
My mother lied to me. My beautiful fine-boned mother with green slanty witch eyes and long fingers told me these stories, read them to me in the cradle. It wasn't her fault, I don't think she knew when she was weaving them into me.
But I know she knows now. I see the shadows of regret clouding her eyes when she looks at me. I see her replay in her mind my beauty fading, my body expanding. That she loves me with quiet sadness cracks my heart. Just another brittle chip. Chip chip crack crack cracks, like a windshield of an old American car.

The cruelty of indifference is never explained to children.

When my vision goes white around the edges.

Do I taste like chemicals? Like corruption and rotten things? Because I taste it in my mouth, and smell it in my secretions.
It's like that song says, let me see you stripped down to the bone...

What am I made up of? Chemicals and meat, failed good intentions and shrinking shyness. I take my pills, I'm a good girl I am.

Corystes Cassivelaunus

I feel the effects of aging now. My bones feel hollow and soft, the spaces under my eyes tender and spidery delicate. Looking down at the lines in my hands and thinking of all of the years that carelessly slipped through my fingers. I wonder over and over again how I neglected to mark their passing with more care.

Wishing more than anything to be a child again, legs dangling and hair tangled, singing the wordless jubilant songs of youth that I used to make up, alone in the woods.
We would go the the ocean often. I remember distinctly digging in sand and finding white bony prehistoric creatures squirming in my palms. I shrieked in fear and delight, the most excellent combination of emotions I have as of yet to experience simultaneously.

It was a happy and ignorant time, a perfect frozen moment. I can see it so clearly, taste the salt from the spray and the grit of sand clinging to the backs of my knees. Before my father's shadow loomed so large. Before my mother looked so bent and broken.

Some kind of urban stranger...

Waves of heat coupled with fragments of sound are slipping through the cracks in my windows. It feels like a violation of my senses, grating on passive cavities. I traveled over molten walkways and shining sidewalks the other day, all trapped inside my head.
Summer stirs and the wind blows and as I walk past a dumpster I can smell flowers and rot in it. All I can think is FLESH.

I see the bike punk with his cut off ragged skinny jeans and a violin case and my mind is flooded with startling visions of him fucking me bent over the concrete bike structure, screaming Defiance Ohio in my ear.
I saw the curve of his clavicles, sun trickling down his lopsided hair and into his moss green eyes.
My daily routine shattered by a meaningless stranger whose inner music stirred me, my heart hammering in my chest.

And it felt like a small urban betrayal.