I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself

In this world, you learn to hold the good days and bad days together in your lungs, and you don’t dare breathe out, for fear that in releasing the bad days, you’ll also lose the good ones. On the walk home, I think, this has been a good day.

If I had to choose, I would say the moment between when you decided to kiss me and when we actually kissed, that is where I wish to live forever. Inside my anticipation, dying to receive you.

Every boring slice of domesticity, the grocery shopping, the endless errands and chores, the accusations—Did you move my . . .?—these moments made up our life, and I’d wished them gone. I hadn’t understood the tenderness of climbing into bed with you after a stretched-thin day. Of pulling the comforter down and sliding in beside you. Of falling into a dream before we could properly kiss goodnight, but knowing the kiss was still there, hovering between us.

I never feel like I know how to live in the world. Only on top of it, hanging on as it spins madly.

I know I am growing obsessive, but I don’t know any other way to grow.

I’ve heard it said that love is choosing to listen to how someone’s day went at least thirty thousand times. Love is saying, I am here, I am paying attention, and I care about that fight you had with your coworker. Beau, sometimes listening to you scream Fuck today, let’s go on a date was the only thing keeping me alive.

I've never been afraid of anything more than I've been afraid of my own happiness. But I want it, oh I want it. Something tells me it isn't happiness without fear.

We is the most tender word I know.

My head feels the way watercolor looks when it bleeds.

The first stage of grief, I realize, isn’t denial—it’s clinging.

Have you ever considered taking a red pen to your life?

Oh, to be in love and want to practice polyamory with a ghost.

I didn't want to reckon with what it meant to be traumatized in a world that would not hold me.

Remembering is a courageous act.

Maybe we wanted another person to join us while we watched the world burn.

My parents must have sensed my queerness, possibly as young as three, but instead of sitting me down and saying, We love you, we love you. Here’s what you need to know about the people who won’t, my father ignored me, and my mother redirected me toward princess crowns and pink frilly dresses.

I know that I’ve spent my entire life convinced I wasn’t real unless I was loving someone with everything I had.

What I mean is, it never once occurred to me that you, too, were mortal.

For the record, you had no business coming into my life just to turn around and leave.

I worry I will lose it all at any moment, but I keep my exoskeletons to myself.

We’ve done the research. The shadows are an evidence-based practice. People behave better when they are reminded of their mistakes, said the president, as he was making a very big mistake.

Years before I met you, a friend introduced me to kink. She showed me shibari models online, and I thought I would very much like to feel the sharp of my teeth against their flesh. I wanted someone both to tie up and to tie me up. Then I met a woman who was a live-in sub for a dom couple. Her name was Lily—she was a switch. Every fall, she went to a leather and kink festival. I don’t know what I’m doing, I said. It’s okay, I’ll show you, she said. We hung the set of rules in her bedroom and recited them into each other’s mouths. It was a beautiful initiation. Every time we went out to the bar, her goal was to make me jealous with other women; my goal was to hide my jealousy, to avoid interfering with her flirtations. If I pulled her away from a conversation, to kiss her, to bite her, to mark my territory, I would be punished later, which I frequently was. I lived for the sting of the flogger, the rip from and return to my body. I felt good as long as I knew what was expected of me. Within the realm of kink, I felt unstoppable and invincible, like a teenager drag racing on an icy road. Outside of it, though, responsibility felt wrong, heavy—something I couldn’t wait to dispose

I can’t help but think that if this is isolation, then it is beautiful.

Like catharsis in reverse, I feel like I am finally gathering all the emotions I’ve dropped since your death. And it feels nice.

Tomorrow, I decide, will be better. Tomorrow, I will recover from today.

We is the longest word I know.

I would say the moment between when you decided to kiss me and when we actually kissed, that is where I wish to live forever. Inside my anticipation, dying to receive you.

Here I was thinking my tears might move her enough to forgive me for not turning my body into a home.

This is how waves work: they build like a cry, then crash,