I want a pocketful of punctuation marks to end the thoughts he’s forced into my head.
Because in the end it is our emotions that make us weak, not our actions.
I’m here for you kid. That’s what friends are for.
He leans into my ear. Lowers his voice. “Ignite, my love. Ignite.
It’s like I’ve been stuffed full of twigs and all I have to do is bend and my body will break. All the guilt, the anger, the frustration, the pent-up aggression inside of me has found an outlet and now it can’t be controlled.
I want to convince you to design a smile just for me.
Very well then, Ms. Ferrars. Good luck, and godspeed. Our world is in your hands.
There is nothing to fear. Nothing to worry about. Grieve nothing in this transitory world,” he says softly.
You are magnificent. You are extraordinary.
I need air. I need a new brain. I need to jump out a window and catch a ride with a dragon to a world far from here.
We were two sad people stuck together.
Good morning sweetheart.
The drawers in my mind are rattling to break open. Memories. Theories. Whispers and sensations. I shove them off a cliff.
Words are like seeds, I think, planted into our hearts at a tender age.
No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh.
But time is beyond our finite comprehension. It’s endless, it exists outside of us; we cannot run out of it or lose track of it or find a way to hold on to it. Time goes on even when we do not.
These are my soldiers. Standing single-file line in their assembly uniforms. Black shirts, black pants, black boots. No guns. Left fist pressed against their hearts.
That’s how I knew, for example, that Private Seamus Fletcher, 45B-76423, was beating his wife and children every night.
I close the world away. Lock it up. Turn the key so tight. Blackness buries me in its folds.
Stop touching me with your eyes.