I’m not sure when I stopped being a girl and became a mausoleum for tenderness. Maybe it was the night I kissed the moonlight through the window pane and it bit back. Or maybe it was slower—like drowning in lace, like love that unwraps itself from your spine until your bones hum hollow and you start calling it poetry.

Dear bloody diary, they’ve bled me dry till all that’s left is a pallid corpse and a teddy bear, its clothes stained red with button eyes soulless, yet all-seeing, with a piece of me embedded into a barely living being sucking away the force of love that binds me to the very sheets I bleed in. The mattress moans beneath me like a haunted mouth,... See more