⁽ ˢʷᵒʳᵈ ⁾ o̶f̶ ̶g̶o̶d̶

You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.

You are going to break your promise. I understand.

You’re lonely too.

It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be.

I am a demanding creature. I am selfish and cruel and extremely unreasonable.

I am your servant.

I crawl at your feet; for before your love, your kisses, I am debased.

For you alone I will be weak.

I belong here, and you will not deny me.

I say these things, and the world listens.

I do not tolerate a world emptied of you. I have tried.

In the dark, I have pored over the loss of you like pale gold.

I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories.

I moved the earth and the water for you.

You will always run away with her.

You will always lose her.

You will always be a fool.

You will always be dead, in a city of ice, snow falling into your ear.

You have already done all of this and will do it again.

No one should be judged for loving more than they ought, only for loving not enough.

We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying.

What we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape.

There need never be any rules between us.

Let us be greedy together; let us hoard.

Do not leave me, swear that you will never leave me.

I am selfish. I am cruel. My mate cannot be less than I.

Sleep with fists closed and shoot straight.

I can’t abide a poor liar.

You look like a winter’s night. I could sleep inside the cold of you.

Oh, quit that. Blushing is for virgins and Christians.

Scold me; deny me. Tell me you want what you want and damn me forever. But don’t leave me.

Bad luck relies on absolutely perfect timing.

In his own country, Death can be kind.

What is the world but a boxing ring where fools and devils put up their fists?

Men die. It’s practically what they’re for.

I am no one; I am nothing.

Nothing in me was not made by you.

A revelation is always the end of something. It might even be cause for grief.

Just tell yourself a story that’ll satisfy you and pretend he told it.

Forever isn’t bright; it isn’t like that. Forever is cold and hard and final.

I savor bitterness - it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived.

If you want to kill yourself, do not use us as your knife.

What did I do wrong? Was I boring? Did I ignore you?

Don’t you dare speak to me like that.

I have worn nothing but blood and death for years.

I have fought all your battles for you, just as you asked me.

I have learned not to cry when I strangle a man.

I have learned to watch everything die.

I am not a little girl anymore, dazzled by your magic. It is my magic, now, too.

Are we not devils?

No one is now what they were before the war.

I have not seen you without your skin on.

Close up your head; your brain is getting loose.

We obsess. It’s in our nature.

I’ve a devil of a habit for being right.

In war you must always choose sides.

If you try to be a bridge laid down between them, they will tear you in half.

We are all dead. All equal. Broken and aimless and believing we are alive.

My old bones will follow yours soon enough.

It is better to be strong and cruel than to be fair.

I will see him with his skin off before I agree to fall in love.

After love, no one is what they were before.

I have survived, but I have not been spared.

In the space of one heartbeat to another I loved you and I was lost to you.

Frighten me, make me cry, only come back.

It’s not so bad, my darling. Being dead. It’s like being alive, only colder.

You’ll think it’s love, while he dines on your heart.

You will be so beautiful when you are old.

I cannot keep you and I cannot let you go.

You will live as you live in any world…with difficulty, and grief.

I look at you and it is like my throat being cut.

She said you’d come and I swore to eat your heart.

I still want to kiss you.

My heart is being cut in two. I cannot bear it.

What happens to anything beautiful?

twice is coincidence. three times is enemy action.

killing gets easier with practice, in mechanics and technique. having killed never does.

you know — just as i’ve known, since our eyes met — that we have unfinished business.

it’s been so long since i last started a new conversation.

we knew one another as one knows a childhood dream.

our glorious crystal future shines so bright i gotta wear shades, as the prophets say.

i’d walk a swath of rot through your verdancy, no matter how light i tried to step.

it grieves me to think you’d make a boring poker player. but then i imagine you’d cheat, and that’s a comfort.

let me tell you what you have told me, speaking plain: you could have killed me, but didn’t.

tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all.

there’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there?

do i have you still? do i address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass?

if we’re to be at war, we might as well entertain each other.

that’s what we treasure. that’s us, always: the volcano and the wave.

hunger, ___ — to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth — is this a thing you, singly, know?

have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? sometimes i think that’s what i have instead of friends.

this is a place i love, and hate myself for loving.

i was the only person on that tiny rock, and i made the world go dark.

i wanted to be seen. that need dug into the heart of me.

i was light, hollowed, hungry.

have you been lonely?

you place each stone expecting it may do many things. a confession is also a dare is also a compulsion.

i have observed friendship as one observes high holy days.

harvest is not a word for swiftness; the future harvests us, stomps us into wine, and we grow stronger and more potent together.

what i return to, the me-ness that i know as pure, inescapable self… is hunger.

i love cities. to be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what i see and what i am.

shit. i’m sorry. i can’t keep up the joke. and it’s wrong to call you enemy.

i am more sensitive to your footsteps, i think, than anyone alive.

this letter is a knife at my neck, if cutting’s what you want.

i see you as a wave, as a bird, as a wolf. i try not to think of you the same way twice.

i have built a you within me, or you have. i wonder what of me there is in you.

you’ve whetted me like a stone.

i remember bright light, and then — hunger. hunger that was turning me inside out, hunger in the most primal way imaginable, hunger that obliterated every other thing.

i was only my own body, only my own senses, only a girl whose parents were running to her because she had a bad dream.

this feels like teetering on the brink of something that will unmake me. but i trust you.

there was, i am sure, a time i did not know you. or did i dream that me, as i’ve so often dreamed of you?

i want to be a body for you.

i sought loneliness when i was young. but when i think of you, i want to be alone together.

i want to be a context for you, and you for me.

i love you, and i love you, and i want to find out what that means together.

this is me, the truth of me: broken open, in the palm of your hand, dying.

you must feel it — the difference? we’re on the brink of something.

i would rather break the world than lose you.

i’ll be all the poets. i’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written it will be to you.

how could you die like this? how could you die at all?