crash into my arms; i want you

Buenas noches. The other year you stopped eating meat because you said violence wasn't necessary for survival. The other day you asked to be choked during sex because you needed to feel loved more severely.  The other day you ignored the news because it was "too much for you." If you are safe can you even feel alive? In the end, What do we all deserve?

I used to think that a dead person's words die with them. Now I know that they scatter, looking for meaning to attach to like a scent. My mother used to collect orange blossoms in a small shallow bowl. I pass the tree each spring. I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn't know that it's not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves.

... I wonder if everyone's an imposter. What if beneath every lawyer's suit and every stay-at-home-parent's apron, everyone is just a baby who doesn't know what they're doing? I wonder if anyone really identifies as the adult they've morphed into. I remember being sixteen and feeling eleven. I remember thinking, how could I be a teenager? I remember finishing high school and thinking, am I grown now? Is this what it feels like? I feel the same as I did before.  I think I am an imposter. Twenty-seven years ago I was a baby. Before that I was a clump of cells. Before that I didn't exist. How could I be a bookstore clerk, or a Catholic, or a woman, or a person at all? I'm a life force contained in the deformed body of a baby. Of course I'm a fraud. The fact that I'm able to carry myself through life without being crushed beneath the psychological weight of being alive proves that I'm a con artist. Aren't we all con artists?

Being proper and sweet and nice and pleasing is a fucking nightmare. It's exhausting. As women, we get the message about how to be a good girl - how to be a good, pretty girl - from such an early age. Then, at the same time, we're told that well-behaved girls won't change the world or ever make a splash. So it's sort of like, well, what the fuck am I supposed to be? I'm supposed to be a really polite revolutionary? ... It's impossible.