Bunny

Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things?", my mother always asked me. "I don’t know", I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.

But I wasn't listening. I wasn't stopping. Because we were already running away again, me and my imagination.

I've never really not written, never not had another world of my own making to escape to, never known how to be in this world without most of my soul dreaming up and living in another.

Can I take your coat?” Cupcake offers. I turn to her. She’s looking at me so hopefully. So willing to take a coat I’m not wearing, I almost want to give her my skin.

The poets brace themselves for imminent, overeducated poverty.

She was a great girl-shaped forest. She was a thing on fire. Her hand was leaves and smoke and snow and flesh all at once.

Don’t trade one kind of blindness for another.

What do you think, Samantha?” Fosco asks me. That it’s a piece of pretentious shit. That it says nothing, gives nothing. That I don’t understand it, that probably no one does and no one ever will. That not being understood is a privilege I can’t afford. That I can’t believe this woman got paid to come here. That I think she should apologize to trees. Spend a whole day on her knees in the forest, looking up at the trembling aspens and oaks and whatever other trees paper is made of with tears in her languid eyes and say, I’m fucking sorry. I’m sorry that I think I’m so goddamned interesting when it is clear that I am not interesting. Here’s what I am: I’m a boring tree murderess. But I look at Vignette, at Creepy Doll, at Cupcake, the Duchess. All of them staring at me now with shy smiles. “I think I’d like to see more of the soup too,” I hear myself say.

How empty and emptied I felt walking away with all my words still on his floor. Wanting so badly to pick them back up. Take it all back. Wipe away the night, my dumb tears, my endless tumbling out of words. I never meant to give this to you.

They laugh. What’s so fucking funny? I want to say. But I don’t. I laugh with them. Ha. Haha. Hahaha.

You’re supposed to yell “fire,” though. Because no one comes when you yell “rape,” didn’t you know that, Bunny?

I look at all of my dreams and nightmares distilled into one man-shaped shape. All the love and hate I have in my heart plus one fucking bunny.

Behold the lavish tent under which the overeducated mingle, well versed in every art but the one of conversation.

Their cheeks are plump and pink and shining like they’ve been eating too much sugar, but actually it’s Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus.

We've read Jane Eyre too, you cunt, and we've read The Waves, and when we read it, you know, we wept for minutes. Then he stars weeping.

Read. Be a guest in other worlds.

Whenever I read one of Victoria’s vignettes, I always feel so dumb because I can hardly understand them at all. And then I blame myself. I think, Kira, this must be just too brilliant for you to grasp. Surely you must have missed something. Even though there’s always been this small voice inside of me that says, Um, what the fuck is this, please? This makes no sense. This is coy and this is willfully obscure and no one but Victoria will ever get this. I would in fact need to live inside Victoria’s spoiled, fragmented, lazy, pretentious little mind to get it. And who apart from us, apart from me, is going to be willing to do that? To work all night with a Victoria Decoder? Who would even care to? And then I feel like screaming JUST SAY IT. TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED. TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK THIS MEANS AND WHAT YOU DID WITH HIM EXACTLY.

The real world lady, it's out there. Do you even know that? You're going to have to get back to it sometime.

He called me dark, twisted, and mean.” “How sweet. He’s in love.

Our mothers always said to look hard at the things of this world that are owies on the eyes because they will put more colors in your inner rainbow.

The truth is, if you go to Warren, no matter what is going on in your personal life—hair trouble, existential malaise, ax murder—you do the reading.

A song I used to hate that I loved surround-sounds my soul. It is a song about nightmares dressed as daydreams, about trading your soul for a kiss. I think not this song, never this song, but my soul is already singing along, riding its swells like an ocean wave, shimmering.

It starts to rain. Hard. Because that’s the kind of weather that follows this kind of girl. She’s so slutty and dark she makes the clouds slutty and dark too. Pregnant with this dirty rain that starts to fall hard on both of us.

Then, Beowulf says wistfully, "Your beauty is nuanced and labyrinthine like a sentence by Proust.

Disorientation can be a very interesting space to occupy as a writer, Samantha. You should try it as an exercise over the holidays. It could be quite illuminating for you, I think.

I look at her lips shiny and thick with so much gloss. There’s a wavering quality to her voice, like a car swerving down a dangerous road.

Because you simply can't sit back and allow your best friend to date an animal man of your own creation and say nothing. You can't. And say nothing? That would be just wrong, on so many levels.

Close my eyes. Let the night become dawn. Let the snow outside fall and fall like it will bury us. Please bury us. It would be totally fine by me.

What's the lesson here, Smackie? Don't jump to conclusions? Never lower your gaze first.