He watched her peacefully sleeping face for what felt like a blissful eternity. When her eyes finally opened, bleary and welcoming, he couldn’t stop himself smiling, and a heat spread through him as she smiled in return, quick and easy. His arm felt heavy around her waist, but she leaned into his touch.

I wonder how nice it would be to be your doll, Your lover, your perfect girl, your imperfect boy, your soul mate, Or your wife or your husband or your king, Or whatever you want me to be.

So from your earliest memories to the moment you breathed your dying breath, every night you would sit up, nestled on your father’s lap while he pretended to be alive, and you listened to the evening news. And you would lean in and close your eyes and you would listen to the glorious sound of words, the only words, the only voice, you ever heard. Other people were ghosts, shadows of existence, their voices cracked and hollow and full of lies, but the man on the radio had no such voice, even if he were the most ghostly figure of all.

With a cracking smile, she pressed the bandage against Lir’s elbow and pressed her lips to his sweaty forehead, hoping that would give her enough time to regain her composure. When she pulled away, all traces of tension were gone and she smiled easily and without restraint. Tears still stained his cheeks, cutting rivers through the streaks of dirt on his face. She wiped them away with gentle fingers, wiping the tears into his shoulders. One hand cupped his injury gently.

It smells sharp and blank. It smells like cold, but not the cold of frost, or of ice, or of snow, or of rain, but of the cold you get in your mouth when there’s nothing to taste.

Hunger is fuzzy black and grey surrounded by a ring of white tinged with red and yellow. The black is the void, the gaping hole inside your gut that devours you when you refuse to devour. The grey is the fading of your energy and your life as you plod towards your next meal or your next glass of water. Red is the urgency, dull and tempting, trying to lure you into the false security of a next meal, but also telling you that it’s not that bad, that you will best it anyway, or maybe just that it’s not time yet. The yellow is the pain, and it is in the center or in the rings. That depends on how long it’s been, but it’s always the same pain, sharp and deep and not all in one place, but reaching like thick tendrils wrapping around your inside.

It is a day when you give gifts to people you cherish, romantically most of all, and engage in shows of affection and adoration and sexual flirtation and fervor as a celebration of romance and the commercial devotion of society.

I read love scenes over and over again, trying to see the intimacy, the closeness in my mind. I try to memorize the words, to parrot them, but also to make them my own. It gives me a thrill to do it, to take someone’s imagined sex life and save it in my mind. I get an illicit chill doing it, and I’m not even sure why, since no one really cares what I read.

e shoved the door aside, his vision black. He saw nothing until he caught a sight of grey and all of a sudden he was snatched violently back into clarity at the sight of her body, broken but breathing on the ground. His fingers froze and his lungs stopped in place and his heart went cold as ice as her eyes roamed over his and up and left feverish. He tried to tell his body to drop his weapon, to go to her, to hold her, to protect her, to kiss her hair and her lips and her closed eyelids. He did none of those things. He took a deep breath and on the exhale he began to weep.

There is a story in my mind of a young prince who has a companion who helps him out of his bandages at night and rubs the marks away and massages his breasts and tells him it makes him no less of a man and they go on a quest to find a dragon who has the power to make him a man in a man’s body.

He kissed me over and over again, as if he didn’t care about anything else in the world. Or maybe he was too asleep to do anything else. There were times for my doubts, times for my mistakes, times for me to despair and fall deeply in hate with myself, but for now I can only lose myself to his kisses and hope I am a good kisser and hope I am warm enough for him and pray that when he wakes up all the way, he still loves me as much as he does in this half-state.

She strums her guitar and she looks up at me and she gives me that little smirk that I hope is just for me. It would be so nice for it to be like a story, for her to have a smile just for me. She sings for everyone, but she smiles for me. Isn’t it romantic?

I can imagine love, but I cannot imagine someone loving me.

I want to swing a sword or lift a hammer or see a dragon. I want to feel grass hugging my legs and fresh air filling my lungs and I want to fly. I want to have an epic adventure, and I want to feel the bitter pain of the end to remind myself that I am alive. I want to have an adventure with magicians and tricks and companionship and eating strange foods beside the fire I built myself. I want to live, I don’t want to live here. I want to see a dragon.

I imagine I’ll still sleep without my shirt so that when he or she sleeps with me, they will have access to my heart and my skin and I will be able to warm them and they will warm me and I will feel the brittle glass of another human’s skin on mine.