Tonight I went to an apartment bathed in red light and drank unfamiliar punch from a red cup.

I had gotten ready hours before, in love all over again with the yearly opportunity to be someone else.

In my ribbons and scratchy dress and in that red light, for just a brief moment I felt what it is to be the way everyone else must be all the time--or at least, what I presume they are, from the vantage point of observation, from being close enough almost to touch them. I danced, laughed with my head thrown back, and someone told me I took their breath away. I felt the fullness of being free from myself.

Then the punch hit the bottom of my stomach, and I felt how empty it was, felt the sting of something acidic and unwanted hitting deep inside of me. My head swam in the heat of the red room, and I excused myself to find myself again.

Between cool air and familiar conversation, I regained my footing as best I could, feet numb in a pair of heels that pinched my toes but made me taller. I hobbled home across the cracked, unpredictable sidewalk.

Back at the house, between one stop on the adventure and another, I freed my feet from those heels and stretched my worn out toes. Around me, five of the people that I love most in the world were laughing, a little more drunk than I was, a little happier even when sober.

Just like that the spell broke. I looked down at the pair of sandals I was borrowing. They scratched my pinkie toes and made each step feel crooked and strange.

I was tired. I had been tired.

So I gave up on the fairytale, unreliable narrator and friend and guest and soul that I am, and made my way home in bare feet. I clutched my shoes in one hand, my ID card in another. In my head I drafted this piece of writing, what I've said already, and now the rest of it:

I guess I'm sorry for the weight of me, the dead weight, the way I am. I'm sorry that I can't be lighter, that I can't lose myself beneath the red lights. I'm sorry that I don't laugh more, cry less, do what I say that I'll do. I'm sorry that I didn't get in that car, grin and bear it and have an adventure that keeps me up all night. I'm sorry that I didn't want to do that, that I really and truly didn't.

I'm sorry that I said out loud what I was thinking in my head.

I'm sorry that I am not better, that I wrote this on the walk home with tears in my eyes, clutching my identity in my hands, instead of being somewhere, wherever I could've been, with you.

Of all the things we love anew only when they have left us, perhaps the greatest is this.

Strange, how we can hold something too closely, so that we know only the loss of it,

never the having. Breath slips in like an unknown traveler at an unlocked gate. We sing no praises to skeletons that do not ache, days without pain pass us without a greeting.

All of this, all of this, until something--poison, intruder, devil--slips in to steal away these unloved friends. Draped in black, aglow with mourning, we cry out for those we never loved. To any who will listen, we beg for their return, and into cloths we sing out a snorted call of sorrow.

I haven’t been alive very long but already I am tired of perhaps:

you’ll like it, you’ll make it, you’ll be happy.

What I yearn for, instead, is an at last.

Let me have an at last—

let me finally, at last, let me

rest my head on the shoulder

of the widower of my soul,

not in mourning but in knowing,

that some great and terrible trial is over,

and though the ache is with us,

we have survived it.

Because I have not been alive very long but already I am

wondering how much longer this part lasts,

until I reach at last.

There are paper butterflies hanging from the worn-out rafters.

Annabelle made them; Annabelle, who always loved beautiful things.

In the gray of the moment they are spots of light, shreds of popped balloons on the grass,

aftermath, memories.

The world has gone quiet, or maybe its just gone scared.

But our courage has survived. Courage and yellow raincoats—

so that we are aftermath, too.

We are memories.

I wish, I thought faintly, that I knew how to suffer.

Somewhere along the line, I had convinced myself that I knew pain. Only in that moment, faced with imminent death, did I realize how little experience I had with the world. I had been lying to myself.

Of course, I came from a long line of excellent liars. Excellent orators, too. The sort of traits that keep a family in power for centuries, but probably the same traits that make people want you dead. Or maybe it was the power itself that made me end up here.

What did it matter, really? What did I know of pain? Of fear, hunger, thirst, cold? I was going to die from my own naïveté, starved to death in the middle of nowhere.

The cold might kill me first, I thought. After all, the ice cold rain was biting into my skin. It had been pouring for hours, and even once it stopped...the desert would be cold at night. The thought filled me with a sort of dread. I did not fear the dark, but I feared what it might bring.

So maybe the world ends before you ever get to see beautiful things.

Perhaps this is it, unfinished. What do you do with it? You be until you cannot be, until you cease to be because time has run out.

And you cannot put it into words, oddly enough, why you need to put everything into words--you know only that it is for next time. We are human and so we destroy but so, too, do we create. So you record, you record for the next time--to give it meaning. To live in memory, to share something, to be known. To attain immortality.

Life is all just words on the blood-red backs of your eyelids.

And what of you, gilded woman of Byzantium,

enthroned in Ghent above the altar?

Do you gaze upon banished children,

or do your eyes, like mine, wander?

Hail, Holy Queen --

and here I have enthroned you, too.

You exist as an endless timeline

of iconography, that begins with a woman,

a memory that now murmurs,

"Do this in memory of me."

Hail Mary, full of grace...

do you remember me?

Adolescence hits like a snapped rubber band, and you are left reeling from the sting in a way that you did not expect.

You are architecture and art and timelessness, unshakeable, and yet a tiny stone has thrown you, left you chipped in a way that suggests ugliness and disfigurement, imperfection that shows up starkly against white marble faces, perfection. The curators do not like to see it, nor the patrons. They worry. You see the frown lines.

What of preservation? Unthinkeable. Preservation means hiding, means time lost. So you stay on your shelf. Cracks expand, time passes, and you do not lose it. And yet you lose all of it. Wasted.

Preservation, conservation. Repair. They do not come, they are not for you. With time you come to realize that ancient things cannot always be fixed.

Your ruins are eroded, and with time it all becomes a liveable sort of brokenness.

You are broken, you are quite evidently and visibly broken -- but the ruins are still there. Your ruins are still there, and people visit them.

She spent the whole damn summer waiting to get away from home.

Slow days. Cracked linoleum floors, free convenience store sodas at the end of a shift.

Ice melted on the ground.

Slow nights, fuzzy-hazy dream sequences, covers kicked off, loud music thumping outside into the wee hours.

Days that bled into weeks and still never went anywhere. It wasn’t monotonous--it was all very bright and loud and present.

Tie-dye party at a neighbor’s house.