Love Letters to a Serial Killer

I don’t really want to die, I wanted to clarify. I just don’t know how to continue to live.

It was painful than an accused serial killer wanted better for me than most of the people I knew.

There’s a spell that comes over us in our youth,” Dotty says. “We chase after things that we know aren’t good for us

Before long, I was back on the dating apps and talking to a new guy who was promising in his mediocrity.

William fucks like a man ready to kill, I wrote in the guilty column, but he hasn’t killed me yet.

Sometimes I think about what it would be like if you killed me. It’s about the mourning rather than the death itself, like my life would have more meaning to it in retrospect. Think about all the people that would confess their love for me if I were no longer around to hold them accountable.

I hope everyone remembers the names of your victims as much as they remember you.

Is it weird to say that I wish we could hug? Can you touch a woman without ending her life? -Hannah

Oftentimes, I found it easier to accept the bad things that happened to me than the good, if only because I struggled to find myself worthy of anything rewarding.

It's tricky being a man, isn't it? Liking things is always a confession.

Her father looked like a man who processed his emotions through shooting deer in a forest and didn’t know what to do with himself now he was the deer begging for the return of his child.

He's not wrong. There are ways in which the world has destroyed me and there are ways in which I have welcomed that destruction. As much as I want to deny it, there is a kind of pleasure that comes from being tied up with a knife against my throat.

The cruelty of the internet is that there is no lock. Even posts intended to be private can be found if someone wants to see them enough.

It’s hard to deny yourself small luxuries when you’re denied everything big.

An irrational kind of heartbreak, based more on the relationship I'd built inside my head than anything that had existed within the world. I was a widow, mourning the loss of a husband that never existed and who didn't have a grave.

As I would learn over the coming weeks, we all had our ways of coping with loving someone the world told us we weren't supposed to love. Some of us were just more honest with ourselves than others.

Talking with men was more like reading a script than confessions from the heart.

I wonder sometimes if anyone has ever really known me

It's unfair that the worst people on this earth get the most attention.

I'm not supposed to admit these things, but I can admit them to you because even the worst of my habits are nothing compared to yours. -hannah

It’s painful to think of all the things that I didn’t let myself love when I wanted to love them.

I read articles about politics (bad), about how the U.S. treated immigrants (bad), how it treated women (bad), and how it treated members of the LGBTQ community (bad).

The vision was romantic. The way that Bella in Twilight spent the entirety of the second book trying to throw herself off cliffs for the merest glimpse of Edward. It was possible that I had no idea what love was.

be able to go on a date again without thinking of you. Every moment I will wonder whether he wants to love me or murder me. What kind of relationship can come from that?

Sometimes the deepest betrayals were things that women did to one another.

I know what he’s looking at. It has become impossible to hide, not that I was ever trying to hide it to begin with. I wear it like a badge of honor, a mark of my almost death and the killer who wanted me. I put my hand on my belly, my uterus swollen with pregnancy.

The power of death lies in its inevitability combined with its unpredictability. We all know it’s coming; we just don’t know when and that makes it terrifying.

In times of tragedy, there were always some people who immediately turned to arts and crafts.