Cam Girl

This is what they don’t tell you about losing someone: It doesn’t happen once. It happens every day, every moment they’re missing from. You lose them a hundred times between waking and sleep, and even sleep is no respite, because you lose them in your dreams, too.

You can fall in love again with someone you're already in love with. It's like waking from a dream within a dream and finding another layer, the colors more vivid, the light more lucid, the fantasy more real. Being in love is an endless loop of waking to reverie.

If two people could make each other smile and laugh and forget all the pain and darkness in the world for a moment, why should we feel ashamed of it?

I dream of you in colors that don't exist.

Maybe we needed to break a little, so we could put ourselves back together more beautifully than before.

Kintsugi is a pottery technique. When something breaks, like a vase, they glue it back together with melted gold. Instead of making the cracks invisible, they make them beautiful. To celebrate the history of the object. What it's been through. And I was just... Thinking of us like that. My heart full of gold veins, instead of cracks.

This world is so thick with ghosts it’s a wonder anyone can breathe.

My love is savage and rapacious. It isn’t content to touch. It wants to be inside, crawl into the marrow, caress each vein until the cells are all mixed up and there is no you and me anymore, no secrets or shadows sliding between our skin. Only this endless devouring of each other. The ouroboros we call us.

it’s easy to see other women as enemies. But we’re the only real allies we’ve got.

Hate is when you love someone but wish you didn't.

If there's a better definition of love than mutual benevolent insanity, I haven't heard it.

You know, rust is just oxidation. The same chemical process as fire. Oxygen interacts with steel, electrons drift from one element to the other. So really, rust is a slow fire. Isn't that weird? Water causes something to burn.

You fall in love with it a little. Depression. It’s an abusive romance. It hurts like hell but you don’t want it to stop, because at least hurt is a feeling. At least it reminds you you’re still alive.

If you tell a story enough times, it sounds like fiction. You don’t feel that visceral throb of resonance with the person who is you, who did the things you did.

Sometimes people set themselves up to be hurt by a situation, instead of hurting themselves directly. To absolve the blame.

Not a boy or a girl, not any binary, rigid definition of a person. Just my everything.

This is what happens when you lie. Lies grow thin and steely and hard and become bars. Bars become a cage.

Sometimes boys grew up to be women. And girls grew up to be men.

The world looks down on you, expects nothing from you because of the color of your skin and your mother’s family name. They don’t want you to fail. They want you to not even try. If you try, you will never disappoint me.

Was that what I’d have to do? Pry my ribs open and see whose hands fit, whose fingers were stained with the same red inside me?

We’d never know what was real and what wasn’t about each other. That was the beauty of our shared fiction.

Most people just want to pass quietly in society. No preconceptions, no prejudices.

I felt nothing. Do you know how much blood is soaked into every mile of asphalt, how many graves you drive over each morning on the way to work? This world is so thick with ghosts it’s a wonder anyone can breathe.

What a strange world where we pay people to listen to our problems, and pay them to fuck themselves while we watch, and pay them to save us.

Recklessness makes you act. Bravery is following through.

We don't always get closure. Sometimes we have to make our own.

Don’t lead people on. It’s cruel.

I slapped a big fake smile on my face like I did every day, as a cam girl, as a barista, as anything, because women are taught to smile, that smiling means men are less likely to hurt us.

I felt like an animal in a cage being stared at by other animals, all of us anonymous, mindless, interchangeable.

Simplify what you see until it’s only bones, essence, soul. That’s the only way to understand what something really is.

But every stroke of the brush, every lyric, every word whispered between human beings resulted from the pain of being alone. In our haunted heads, our imperfect bodies. Islands carved from clay and bone, our skulls like shells full of mist.

If there’s a better definition of love than mutual benevolent insanity, I haven’t heard it.

I rarely bought anything. The things I really wanted couldn’t be bought.

Part of loving someone is wanting them to be happy, even if it hurts you.