The Quiet Tenant

You don’t forget your first. You never forget the boy who taught you how to survive as a stranger in your own body.

It’s embedded in you, once you’ve been a girl. You pass them on the street. You hear their laughs. You feel their pain. You want to lift them into your arms and carry them over to the end point, sparing their feet from the thorns that drew blood from your own. Every girl in the world is a little bit me, and every girl in the world is a little bit mine.

...when a lot of sad stuff happens in a pretty short time, you reach a point where you can’t cry anymore.

You never expect evil to smell nice. What kind of devil wears cologne?

Every girl in the world is a little bit me, and every girl in the world is a little bit mine. Even yours. Even the one that's half you.

What the stories never said: at the end of the day, if a man wants to kill you, he kills you. It’s not on you to convince him not to.

Rule number one of staying alive in the shed: He always wins. For five years, you have made sure of it.

The truth is I want someone to laugh at my jokes, especially the stupid ones, and I want someone who will see me and not run the other way.

I’m sorry,” you tell him. You are so sorry, all the time. You are sorry his wife is dead. You are sorry, truly so, about the injustices of the world, the way they’ve befallen him. You are sorry he’s stuck with you, such a needy woman, always hungry and thirsty and cold, and so nosy at that. Rule number two of staying alive in the shed: he’s always right, and you’re always sorry.

You learn to hate the sound of your own voice at an early age, when you’re a girl.

People told you to say no. They never said how. They made it very clear that the world wouldn’t stop for you and that it was your responsibility to make it slow down, but no one ever gave instructions beyond that. No one told you how to look into the eyes of the person you love and say you want to stop.

Now you know. The photos confirm it. For days before, he trailed you. Studied you. Picked you. Prepared for you.

People say friendship but they mean love. It’s all love at the end of the day.

This is the story I tell myself. No one’s around to tell me it doesn’t make sense. It starts out as a tribute and ends in selfishness. It isn’t about her. Not really. It’s about me and the parts of my life that find me in the dark. It’s about me and my younger self and the way she looks at me, the way she keeps calling out to me, demanding answers I don’t have.

No one waits for their dead to come back to life. Eventually, people will stop looking for you. They will stop showing your picture. They will let you fade away. They will stop telling your story, until one day you're the only one left to remember it.

Look at it,” I say. “Surveying his domain. Hunting for prey. He’s so beautiful.

People told you to say no. They never said how.

You start suspecting that bad things might, one day, happen to you. Somewhere in a corner of your heart, you hope to be exempt.

You start running, even though you know that it will, over time, ruin your body. Split your bones, stiffen your muscles, gnaw on your tendons. You learn to like it, the fire in your rib cage, your lungs a conduit for the storm raging inside of you. You run, because you only know how to destroy yourself in healthy ways.

Bottom line is, people don’t answer texts sometimes and it doesn’t mean anything’s wrong. Life just happens.

What he doesn’t realize: that you know, now, that the world isn’t just a place where things happen to you. That you can happen to the world too.

You cannot imagine a world where he knows how to love without destroying.

I know they think I’m some jerk who can’t do anything right, but she’s my kid. I raised her.

I felt like I should have been crying, too, but a lot of sad stuff had happened in a pretty short time, and when a lot of sad stuff happens in a pretty short time, you reach a point where you can’t cry anymore.

I found you,” he says. “You were lost. I gave you a roof. I keep you alive.” He points to the empty Tupperware. “Know what you’d be, without me? Nothing. You’d be dead.

What he doesn't realize: That you know, now, that the world isn't just a place where things happen to you. You can happen to the world too.

That you know, now, that the world isn’t just a place where things happen to you. That you can happen to the world too.

can’t look at him for too long. There was the question of whether to wear his scarf. I didn’t want to be too obvious. Then again, he gave it to me. And it’s a good scarf. The kind that actually keeps you warm. I figured if I wore it, people would see. They might recognize it, his scarf around my neck, and connect some dots.

That at the end of the day, the only person you can truly count on is yourself.