The thought of you makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Like I’m about to lose my lunch. Your image creates a noose around my throat and throws my heart at my feet.

The thought of you feels red and wet with rage in a bathtub surrounded by red and red and red. In red I scream. In red I feign silence. In red I am dead to you. You are dead to me.

— Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses, "Little Crazy Love Song"

Yan Wei

{Words by Anaïs Nin, from The Diary Of Anais Nin, Vol. 4 (1944-1947) / Cynthia Cruz from diagnosis,The glimmering room}

There is no love in silence, where ignorance is most easily disguised as hope. Delusion pulls you deeper and the silence only gets louder and louder in your gentle ears, it feels like he’s yelling at the top of his lungs how much he loves you and can’t wait to hold you again. There’s absolutely nothing there. Who even is this person you pray to hear scream your name with a raw throat? You didn’t get to know him, he wouldn’t give you the chance, if only in tiny glimpses of vulnerability where you tenderized him enough to make him feel somewhat safe. He was hardly a person. He didn’t live long enough to become a person to you. But he was immortalized as an idea, a wretched feeling of agony, a betrayal in the fiercest form to push you past where you felt your limit might be. You still claw your way to every sunrise, though, when the silent nights are suffocating.

WRAPPED BOUQUET OF ROSES

CHRISTO 1969

You deserve only the ground that holds you in your shallow grave. Let only the rain kiss your bones in a muddy haze. Never again should you feel any warmth but the dull bludgeoning of my weapon, let the blood penetrate your soiled resting place.

You never had someone make you eggs the morning after. I never had someone touch me like that before. I thought we were there to make each other eggs, you thought we were there to touch with empty stomachs.

Is This Living? Meka Tome

I wonder how long it will take you to rot. It won’t be long before your saccharine skin darkens under my warm gaze, warmer than I could ever let you believe, enough to hold you down and melt you into syrup. I’ve never welcomed something so sweet into my home, for the fact that every bit of fruit I place on my countertop eventually buzzes with flies and fluffs with mold after too soon, before I can dig in.

He feels like a juicy peach by the sea, where I sit alone with a sticky chin while the wind whips sand at me and the sun reddens the tops of my feet. When I’m finished I bury his heart with the blood drying around my mouth, and I go for a walk to find broken glass washed up on shore.

HOPE YOU’RE WELL. PLEASE DON’T READ THIS.

A red fox snacking on a plum.

FREDERIC DESMETTE / BIOSPHOTO / MINDEN PICTURES

⚰️.

(x)

The Crucible by Arthur Miller