I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me

TO THOSE WHO FIND FREEDOM IN BECOMING A MONSTER WHEN DENIED THE SPACE TO BE HUMAN

I didn't see a world for me without my art in it, where I didn't live this beauty and torment every single day.

What is life but hunger and resilience? Persistent thriving no matter the conditions? What better kin to have?

Twelve years of feeding this dream, cutting down anyone else who stood in my path, only to have the one girl I spared turn around and bite me. And she had the audacity to be mediocre.

What if I told you I wanted to be my most monstrous self all the time? What if I wanted to be a god? Would you pray to me?

Even Chaos has rules. To receive, we must be willing to take. To win, you must be willing to fight. To drink in life itself, you must be willing to bleed.

Girl's like me weren't to get tired or fall apart. I was supposed to be exceptional, every time.

When the stage claimed my bones, I became an act of creation, soft steps to the tempo of breaths. We were a sea of the dead, the push and pull of the tide, the curling smoke in an opium den, and the rolling clouds over the Himalayas.

The fresh blood would keep flowing, the ballet would keep swallowing people, keep cleaving dancers in two like a knife. There wouldn’t ever be glory in a place determined to forget me, a place that only begrudgingly looked at me because I’d forced them.

As his gaze brushed my lips, I pictured him consecrating my blood to hungry roots in his garden. The moss in Elysium could make a home of my bones and I’d welcome it wholly just to feel permanent and part of something. The darkest part in me hungered for that brand of ruin.

I would learn to use the beast, its teeth and claws, instead of letting them use me.

I didn't see a world without my art in it, where I didn't live this beauty and torment every single day.

And everyone around me, the professionals and apprentices, all nodded, resolute like little soldiers. Everybody but me. Because we weren’t soldiers—we were ballerinas with careers like mayflies, gliding onstage in gossamer wings. The only enemies we knew were time and each other.

And though he looked the part, I was monster enough for both of us. . . What an awful pair we made. I took his face between my hands and blessed him with a kiss.

I was fragile, a mortal body stitched together with divine thread. We weren’t supposed to make a habit of swimming in the power of a god.

That was what I sought — for the proto-god to wash away my confusion and tell me where to go next.

. . . I had plunged into silence, swallowed by the void. It was everything I imagined it would be, a dancer finally put to rest, beholden to nothing and no one, no burning hunger to force my hand.

I held my pose until the violins in my head finished their cries and there was applause in my blood.

I was a monster succumbing to the hunt, a predator out for a kill. The world had let me starve for too long, and eventually, the hungry stop caring what we eat so long as we’re fed.

They sooner replaced me with someone unqualified than show me an ounce of grace when I needed it most.