First Runner-Up - The Saragull, by Sarah Melendez

The Saragull

I’m flying over their expectations. My Bachelor’s degree, the possibility of law school, the need for a job, 500 more pages of Portrait of a Lady and three papers this weekend, choosing a major, choosing a career… they’re all under me, polluting my planet like buildings and CEOs. I look down and my little stomach is a stone. Since I am only a seagull, the anxiety is followed by a sudden release, someone curses below me (don’t they know its good luck?), and I’m back to all animal no mineral. The altitude reminds me that they can’t bother me because I don’t even speak their language, and they don’t expect me to. They don’t expect me to understand that what I just did was unacceptable. Up here they only expect me to do one thing: shit on the world. And I can do that much; apologies to the man below me. Then again, what was he doing philandering through their expectations anyway?

Waking up in my cage, uneasy with reality, I try to fit everything together.

We were in Sunday school. She told us we could be anything we wanted to be when we grew up. Then she told us to draw whatever it was we wanted to be. It was good-old-fashioned busy work and most of the children passed with flying colors. My best friend Tami was drawing the five- year-old version of a veterinarian in her clinic. On my other side, Nathaniel was an astronaut or a computer programmer or a fireman or something. Marianella was a housewife, which made our teacher (her aunt, the pastor’s wife) very happy. I guess I was about five (though that seems rather young to be deciding on a future) and my drawing skills were not up to par with my peers on top of the fact that I’ve always hated coloring assignments. Thankfully, my abuela had taught me how to draw these ambiguous McDonald’s “M” birds that didn’t even require any coloring. It was the first big decision of my life. I was going to grow up to be a seagull, screw the doctors and lawyers.

“¿Sarita, que estas dibujando?”[1] Ligia was about to break my soul.

“I’m going to be a seagull when I grow up!”

I had been lied to. Ligia, Barney, and Big Bird (the hypocrite) stood laughing as I lay chained to the dissecting table, un-etherized, while they sawed off the tips of my wings. Apparently, we could only be anything we wanted to be if what we wanted to be was still human. Somehow I was the only kid that couldn’t factor our species into my future. I had hoped to soar as high through the sky as possible, untouched by gravity and obligation, and be happy, but that hope only lasted the lesser part of an hour because there is no such thing as that simple sort of perfection. There is only reality. The Sunday that the seagull dream was macheted to death was the Sunday I met reality and she made a horrible first impression. We’ve been on bad terms ever since. Things were so simple before that. Now, at this edge of adulthood, the world isn’t going to let me be a free bird and my parents won’t let me fantasize my future away when I should be learning to live with all this gravity, so I wish I would’ve been sick that Sunday. I wish I would’ve had a couple more years to really dream about it and see what dreams may have come. I wish I would’ve been given the luxury to believe that I could one day be that seagull eating trash and tourists’ food, coasting on the sea breeze and leaving blessings of good luck on windshields and foreheads.

After the Seagull Incident, down but not out, I moved on to other (and what I thought were more tangible) aspirations. I said I wanted my name in lights, but my dad said I’d probably make it on adult store shelves before I’d make it on Broadway. I brought up maybe being a writer or an artist, and my dad brought up how cold the streets can get and how much fun prostitution could be. I thought I could be a musician, while my dad thought I would end up stripping. My father had quite the gift of encouragement. I know they were just worries now, even if they were worded harshly, but at the time I took them as predictions, and it led me to figure that no matter what I did I’d end up in hardcore porn or on some pole, so I seriously considered stripping when a friend of mine offered to get me into that world of neon XXXs and fake eyelashes. Never did though, thanks to some guilt I like to think of as left-over morals and an excessive amount of “baby fat.”

So I turned to the left brain, the only side with any security and monetary value, and aspired to go to Georgia Tech like my dad and brother to become an architect or an engineer. Telling my parents the new plan was like throwing a lamb slathered in jelly to a militia of stoned sharks. They saw their smart baby girl using her head, wanting a real career and a real future, staying out of any real trouble, out of the cold. My mother saw the “obvious connection” between architecture and art, and she thought it was the perfect career for me. I could be creative and not starve. What she doesn’t understand is that all the architects now are either jobless or stuck designing low-income boxes, not art. She still brings it up every time she sees a big pretty building or I start talking about living off of my poetry.

“You would be so perfect for architecture. And with the brain that God gave you! Why don’t you just try it,” my mother asks, again and again.

Because I have plans. I have lots of plans.

I want to be a writer. I want to be a makeup artist or a fashion photographer. I want a record label and book published. I want Spain. I want rock star status. I want to be a gold digger with a sugar daddy to buy me closets full of lingerie, shoes, makeup, and art supplies (I could workout everyday and keep the house and clean and the nights long for a husband with the right amount of money and muscles). I want to take an Austen Martin down the Autobahn. I want to own a coffee shop in Amsterdam.

And these are just a fanciful fistful of Plan Bs because Plan A doesn’t even pertain to reality.

When I was thirteen, my mother took me to a psychiatrist for my deviant behavior and depression. We talked a lot about all kinds of things and the future came up. I told him about whatever Plan B I was currently aspiring to. He listened and one of his many, many verdicts was that I didn’t have my mind rooted in reality. He was a Christian psychologist, so I decided he didn’t know any more about reality than I did.
I would say that reality isn’t rooted in my mind, not the other way around. And why would I want it to be? Reality is a restriction. She is a set path complete with roads less traveled and booby traps and a job description. She is having to grow up human and then die tired and dry. She is a series of unfortunate and inescapable events. She is the gravity that fetters me to this world and keeps Plan A in the children’s books.

I want to be Wendy Darling, not out of admiration (I loathe her) but out of jealousy and the need to make wrongs right. Every time I’ve read Peter and Wendy—all fifteen marvelous, tear-filled times—I’ve tried to like her, but every time at the end of the book she goes back home and ruins it for all of us: worst decision ever. She had that once-in-a-universe chance that only comes in fiction, and she wasted it on reality. I hate the dumb bitch, but what I wouldn’t give for her window!

If I were Wendy, Barrie would still be writing. Can you imagine it? It’d bePeter and Sara, the never-ending story. While Wendy was one “of the kind that likes to grow up,” I would’ve flown by Peter’s side until the rest of eternity and back again. Everyday would be imagined adventures and innocent assassinations. I’d be the Saragull, leaving rainbows over the island and fictitious shit on every expectation parked right outside on the driveway, just like a seagull. I would never-never have to make any choices past where to fly off to next. I would never-never have an addiction to tobacco or sex. I would never-never have to endure wrinkles or family holidays. And I would never-never have to grow up and deal.

But I’m not in Never-Neverland. I’m in the real world. Life doesn’t leave room for childhood past seven or twelve. Wendy knew that and understood it well, but I am not Wendy and it’s enough to make me screech. Because I have to grow up and be something. I have to go to college and earn my degree and continue. I have to get a career where I can climb to the top and continue. I have to find my opposite sex soul mate and have children and continue. I have to see the souvenir t-shirts from Utah or Curacao and continue—on my way to class and not the airport; not to living. I have to realize that I will not get to experience every feeling and place and person and though devastated, I must continue. The sound embodied by the resulting aggravation can only be called a squawk, and it sits in my stomach like a land mine, ready. I know why seagulls have diarrhea.

All I want to do is be happy today. I don’t need a career or a degree or some worldly validation for that. I just need to be someplace with a low center of gravity. What if I’m ecstatic spending every morning on my patio, barely clothed in the sea breeze, looking down on the terracotta roofs, rolling my own cigarettes and writing my soul out for the rest of my life? What if I find genuine happiness spending the rest of my afternoons in my studio, clothes comprised mostly of paint or a guitar, a soft sunlight coming through my window that overlooks the stony city, throwing paint, rocks, and a hatred for reality unto a canvas or singing love to my humble guitar? I’d be perfectly content spending most of my evenings waitressing for my fellow human beings, getting money and subjects for later use, and the rest of those evenings in the company of wine, weed, friends and lovers (once and soon-to-be), dancing like the gypsies or some wanton spirits of the sensuous Caribbean, in fabrics so thin and free and skin so aweful [2] and enticing for the rest of my life. And for the rest of my life I could spend my nights naked with yet another unique and amazing muse, each one teaching me something more valuable than long division or Nietzsche. And it’s enough to have that for just long enough to enjoy it fully, and then die early enough for life to have not started dragging on and on and on.

But that’s not enough when you live in a world full of people who love their gravity as much as they love their life insurance. They want me to have a title, a steady career, a family with children, a backyard for them to play in, Thanksgiving dinners every year with the family, and then death from something dignified like old age, cancer or slow deterioration from their stupid cubicles and sentimentalities. Will I be left a leper as all my art turns into spreadsheets and statistics? They don’t care. They want me to decide on something, something realistic, so I need to take all those Plan Bs and throw most of them away, pick one to live with forever that might not kill me. But that’s a big “might,” and forever is a long time. I’m only nineteen. I don’t want to think about the rest of my life. I don’t want to ponder the future. I want to tell the future to wait. And tomorrow I’ll tell him to wait again. Make the future wait for me like I’m Godot. But the future owns me, owns us all, and there’s only one escape.

The caged Saragull closes her eyes and stretches her maimed wings.

I’m soaring over their expectations. The anxiety has been built up and my personal vendetta against my parents’, against society’s, against my school councilors’ and my entire family’s wishes for me to be a plastic surgeon or an architect or the productive-little-robot-that-could is ready to be realized in this sleep-filled and fantastical attack. Peter is flying next to me, holding my hand, and my vision is clear, my aim solid. The thousands of fantasies, dreams, and aspirations that have been shot down by reality act as fuel for the indignation which draws the crosshairs on my mental scope and I see my target. There is reality, with all its disappointments and restrictions, looking as frightening as if this were a nightmare, but I’m the one who’s armed with the big guns. This cannot be a nightmare because this is my dream, and there isn’t room in my dreams for the both of us.

I let go of all this shit and, even if it’s only in my sleep, I am victorious.

[1] “Sara, what are you drawing?”
[2] And, yes, I mean aweful.

 

The Saragull - Assignment

The Third Papers

Your task is to write a 6-8 page personal essay. The topic choice will be entirely yours. The way you approach it will be entirely yours. But the one goal here is clear: whether you choose to work in narrative or traditional essay mode, your piece must serve as a critical commentary on the world around you in some way (think of how well Orwell does this without every writing, “Imperialism is bad.”).

In its best incarnation, these papers will reach far beyond the typical, freshman paper. I have seen how good the work you can do is, and I have full faith that you will rise to the occasion in these final pieces.

The place to start? Well, I’d do some brainstorming. Figure out what you really care about, what you really have an opinion about as you look at this world. Take a step back and look at this life: read the papers, analyze what you do, what you’re a part of… Voice is so critical to an essay, so choosing a topic that you’re invested in somehow is key. Your essay will be a hybrid, almost certainly, of a public and private topic, as we often discussed in class.

 

The Saragull - Draft 1

Peter pan and the Seagull

She told us we could be anything we wanted to be when we grew up. Then she told us to draw whatever it was we wanted to be. My best friend Tami was drawing the 5 year old version of a veterinarian in her clinic. On my other side Nathaniel was an astronaut or a computer programmer or a fireman or something. Marianella was a house wife, which made our teacher, her aunt and the pastor’s wife very happy. I only really knew how to draw smiley faces, houses with flowers and chimneys and windows and paths, clouds and seagulls. After all I couldn’t have been 5. The only really cool things to be on that list were the flowers and the seagulls, and since I hated coloring assignments and seagulls could fly, I decided to draw the seagull (which is essentially a spread out McDonald’s M that you don’t even have to color). But just deciding to draw the bird gave me a new life ambition. I was going to grow up to be a seagull, screw the doctors and lawyers. Well, it took less than 5 minutes for me to finish and be noticed and less than 5 minutes for my entire future, career, and relationship with the church (though I wouldn’t really hold this against them until later in my pettiness) to be absolutely annihilated.

“Sarita, estas pintando un pajaro…”

“Si, Ligia. I’m going to be a seagull when I grow up!”

I had been lied to. Apparently, we could be anything we wanted to be, if what we wanted to be was still human. That’s my first real recollection of being lied to and of conditional statements (my parents didn’t believe in lying to us about Santa or the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny because that did after all take away from God’s glory), and I’ve never quite been the same. Things were so simple before that. I thought it would be great to live on the beach and get to fly and never have to grown up things, and seagull matched the dream job description perfectly. But that day I learned that (and it wouldn’t be the last time I had to learn it) there is no such thing as that simple sort of perfection. The lesson in Sunday school that day was intended to inspire us youngens to high paying (the higher your paycheck the more the church gets by the bible’s 10% tithe rule) and slightly (but not completely because that was God’s job) fulfilling careers, but instead it put me at a huge loss. Keeping my goals human should’ve narrowed my future plans down a bit, but ever since the seagull dream was macheted to death, I have had no idea what my grown up existence would be composed of.

Later in life I started thinking about it again. I wanted my name in lights, but my dad said I’d probably make it on adult store shelves before I’d make it on Broadway. I thought I could maybe be a writer or an artist, and my dad brought up how cold the streets can get and how much fun prostitution could be for me. I thought I could be a musician, my dad thought I would end up stripping. He was always very encouraging. At some point, I figured that no matter what I did I’d end up in hardcore porn or on some pole, so I seriously considered stripping since that was more my kind of thing than prostitution or porn stardom. Never did get into it though.

It must’ve been the happiest day of my parents’ life when I told them that I might want to go to Georgia Tech just like my daddy (and my brother) for architecture or environmental engineering. I, on the other hand, regret that day severely. It didn’t take me too long to realize that I kind of hated math and that the responsibility of thousands of lives (architects are automatically blamed for building failures) wasn’t something I really wanted. My mother still brings up how great an architect I would be every time she sees a large building or I talk about opening a bakery or going back to acting or getting a makeup artist’s license or living off my poetry. I can’t get it through her head that it’s not going to happen. I don’t know what I want to do or be or whatever, but it’s not an architect or an engineer, that’s for sure.

But I’m the one lying now. I do know what I want to be, or who I want to be rather, but there was another conditional on that “you can be whatever you want to be” crap that they fed us. You have to be something human and you have to be something that exists. If it weren’t for those I would be Wendy: Wendy Darling.

Given, Wendy Darling is a dumb bitch. She holds the record for the worst decision ever made in the world of fiction, and because of that I hate her. She’s the only one I hate from Peter and Wendy and every time I’ve read it (all 15 marvelous tear-filled times) I’ve tried to like her, but every time at the end of the book she goes back home and ruins it for all of us. If I was Wendy, Barrie would still be writing. It’d be the never ending story because I’d never go home (so I guess it’s a good thing for Barrie that he wrote Peter and Wendy and not Peter and Sara). See, Wendy was one “of the kind that likes to grow up,” which meant that Barrie could end the beautiful tale, but with me he would’ve died while I continued to fly by Peter’s side, the Sarabird, like a seagull.

When I worry about the future (as I do quite often) I think about that Sunday sometimes. How much better would life have been if I had been sick that Sunday? If no one would’ve taught me about conditional statements? I’d be on the beach right now, enjoying the breeze and the tourists’ food, given that the inability to fly or eat trash would’ve never clued me in.

 

The Saragull - Draft 2

I Know Why Seagulls Have Diarrhea

I’m flying over their expectations. My bachelors degree, the possibility of law school, the need for a job, finals week, choosing a major, choosing a career… they’re all under me. I’m very high up but just seeing them gives me a sudden anxiety. Since I am only a seagull, the anxiety is followed by a sudden release, someone curses below me (don’t they know its good luck?), and I feel so much better. I look at them now from all the way up here and they can’t bother me because I don’t even speak their language and they don’t expect me to. They don’t expect me to understand that what I just did was unacceptable. Up here they only expect me to do one thing: shit on the world. And I can do that much; apologies to the man below me. But what was he doing philandering through their expectations anyway? (I may have just shat on my husband.)

Waking up uneasy with reality, I try to fit everything together.

We were in Sunday school. She told us we could be anything we wanted to be when we grew up. Then she told us to draw whatever it was we wanted to be. It was good old fashioned busy work and most of the children passed with flying colors. My best friend Tami was drawing the five year old version of a veterinarian in her clinic. On my other side, Nathaniel was an astronaut or a computer programmer or a fireman or something. Marianella was a house wife, which made our teacher (her aunt, the pastor’s wife) very happy. I knew how to draw smiley faces, houses, flowers, clouds and seagulls. After all I couldn’t have been five. The only really cool things to be on that list were the flowers and the seagulls, and since I hated coloring assignments and seagulls could fly, I decided to draw the seagull (which is essentially a spread out McDonald’s M that you don’t even have to color). But just deciding to draw the bird (the first big decision in my life) gave me a new life ambition. I was going to grow up to be a seagull, screw the doctors and lawyers.

“Sarita, estas pintando un pajaro…” [1] Ligia had said, just as if I couldn’t tell.

“Si, Ligia. I’m going to be a seagull when I grow up!”

I had been lied to. Apparently, we could be anything we wanted to be, if what we wanted to be was still human. And somehow I was the only kid that didn’t factor in my genetic curse. I was “gifted;” go figure. Since my parents didn’t believe in lying to us about Santa or the tooth fairy, because that took away from God’s glory, that’s my first recollection of being lied to, and I’ve never been quite the same. Things were so simple before that. I had thought up my dream job and the more I ponder it the more genius and accurate of a dream job I see that it is. I would be chillin’. I’d be shitting on their expectations while soaring through the sky as high as possible. But that day I learned that (and it wouldn’t be the last time I had to learn it) there is no such thing as that simple sort of perfection. Here at this edge of adulthood, the world isn’t going to let me be a free bird and my parents won’t let me fantasize my future away, so I wish I would’ve been sick that Sunday. I wish I would’ve had a couple more years to really dream about it and see what dreams may have come. I wish I would’ve been given the luxury to believe that I could one day be that seagull eating trash and tourists’ food, coasting on the sea breeze and shitting on people’s cars and arms, spreading the luck around.

Because the church gets 10% by the bible’s tithe rule, the lesson in Sunday school was intended to inspire us youngens to high paying and successful careers that day, but instead it put me at a huge loss. Keeping my goals human should’ve narrowed my future plans down a bit, but ever since the seagull dream was macheted to death, I have had no idea what my grown up existence would be composed of. That day I had to settle for owning a doggie hair salon adjoined to Tami’s vet clinic just to placate the elders, but I had made a big mistake. I should’ve drawn a smiley face the first time around, because all I really wanted was to grow up happy. I just thought I’d be a little more creative with the concept—give it an embodiment—and a little more specific.

After the Seagull Incident, down but not out, I moved on to other, and what I thought were more tangible, aspirations. I said I wanted my name in lights, but my dad said I’d probably make it on adult store shelves before I’d make it on Broadway. I brought up maybe being a writer or an artist, and my dad brought up how cold the streets can get and how much fun prostitution could be for me. I thought I could be a musician, my dad thought I would end up stripping. He was always very encouraging. At some point, I figured that no matter what I did I’d end up in hardcore porn or on some pole, so I seriously considered stripping when a friend of mine offered to get me into that world of neon XXXs and fake eyelashes. Never did get to though, thanks to some left-over morals and “baby fat.”

So I turned to the left brain, the only side with any security and monetary value, and threw out how it might be cool to go to Georgia Tech like my dad and brother to become an architect or an engineer. It was like throwing a lamb slathered in jelly to a militia of stoned sharks. They saw their smart baby girl using her head, wanting a real career and a real future, staying out of any real trouble, out of the cold. My mother saw the “obvious connection” between architecture and artistic design, and she still thinks it should be my dream job, no matter how many times I tell her that architects are held responsible for every death from building failure and I don’t want that kind of stress just to be designing the projects for the rest of my life like most of the other architects. She still brings it up every time she sees a big pretty building or I start talking about living off my poetry.

“You would be so perfect for architecture. And with the brain that God gave you! Why don’t you just try it?”

Because I have plans. The problem is never not having plans, its having too many that you can’t have and too many that you can’t stand and not one that seems feasible and tolerable. I want to be a writer. I want to own a coffee shop in Amsterdam. I want to be a makeup artist or a fashion photographer. I want a record label and book published. I want Spain. I want to be a gold digger with a sugar daddy to buy me closets full of lingerie, shoes, makeup, and art supplies. I’d be good at it too. I could workout everyday and keep the house and clean and the nights long for a husband with the right amount of money and muscles. I’d be good at all of them if they were what I really, really wanted.

But I know what I really, really want in life.

When I was thirteen, my mother took me to a psychiatrist for my deviant behavior and depression. We talked a lot about all kinds of things and the future came up. He listened and one of his many, many verdicts was that I didn’t have my mind rooted in reality. He was a Christian psychologist… just saying. But he might’ve been close; I would say that reality isn’t rooted in my mind, not the other way around.

But here’s reality. Reality is a restriction. Reality is a set path complete with roads less traveled and booby traps and a job description. Reality is having to grow up human and then die tired and dry. Take that away, take a shit on reality, and you have my dream, what I really, really want to be or rather, who.

Given, Wendy Darling is a dumb bitch. She holds the record for the worst decision ever made, and because of that I hate her. Every time I’ve read Peter and Wendy (all 15 marvelous, tear-filled times) I’ve tried to like her, but every time at the end of the book she goes back home and ruins it for all of us. She had that once in a universe chance that only comes in fiction and she wasted it on reality. If I were Wendy, Barrie would still be writing. It’d be Peter and Sara, the never ending story. See, Wendy was one “of the kind that likes to grow up,” but I would’ve flown by Peter’s side until the rest of eternity. Everyday would be imagined adventures and innocent assassinations. I would never, never have to make any choices past where to fly off to next, I would never, never have an addiction to tobacco or sex, I would never, never have to endure wrinkles or family holidays, and I would never, never have to grow up and deal because it is Never Neverland. I’d be the Sarabird, leaving rainbows over the island and shit stains over every expectation parked right outside on the driveway, just like a seagull.

But you have to grow up and be something. You have to go to college and earn your degree and continue. You have to get a career where you can climb to the top and continue. You have to find your opposite sex soul mate and have children and continue. Life doesn’t leave room for childhood past seven or twelve. Wendy knew that and understood it well. But I can’t because of the whys. Why? Why do I have to wake up in the morning and know what I want to do with my life? And why is their only a few certified options? And why are none of those options satisfactory to me? All I want to do is be happy today. I don’t need a career for that. I just need 20 hours a week waitressing at an ok joint, a steady flow of cigarettes and herb, good company, paper, pens, art supplies and some bodies to love on in Spain or British Columbia or somewhere else that I imagine as magical. What I mean is: What if I’m ecstatic spending every morning on my patio, barely clothed in the sea breeze, looking down on the terracotta roofs, smoking a joint (because I make art when I’m high and, with or without the help of herb, I’m high when I make art) and writing my soul out for the rest of my life? What if I find genuine happiness spending the rest of my afternoons in my studio, clothes comprised mostly of paint or a guitar, a soft sunlight coming through my window that overlooks the stony city, stoned (because I make art when I’m high and, with or without the help of herb, I’m high when I make art) and throwing paint rocks and soul unto a canvas or singing my soul out with my humble guitar? I’d be perfectly content spending most of my evenings waitressing to my fellow human beings, getting money and subjects for later use, and the rest of them in the company of wine, weed, friends and lovers (once and soon-to-be) and dancing like a gypsie or the spirit of the sensuous Caribbean, in fabrics so thin and free and skin so aweful and enticing for the rest of my life. And for the rest of my life I could spend my nights naked with yet another unique and amazing muse, toking (because I make art when I’m high and, with or without the help of herb, I’m high when I make art) and fucking the way we want to. And it’s enough to have that for just long enough to enjoy it fully, and then die early enough for life to have not started dragging on.

But that’s not enough for the world or my parents. They want me to have a title, a steady career, a family with children, a backyard for them to play in, thanksgiving dinners every year with the family and slow death from old age or cancer. Life would be a slow death, slowly corroding from the stupid cubicles and sentimentalities while the world turns all your art into spreadsheets. You have to decide on something, something realistic. You need to take all those plans and dreams and throw most of them away, pick one to live with forever that might not kill you. But it’s a big might and forever is a long time. I’m only 18, I don’t want to think about the rest of my life, I don’t want to ponder the future. I want to tell the future to wait. And tomorrow I’ll tell him to wait again. Make the future wait for me like I’m Godot. But the future owns me, owns us all, and there’s only one escape.

I’m soaring over their expectations. The anxiety has been built up and my personal vendetta against my parents’, against The Man’s, against my school councilors’ and my entire family’s wishes for me to be a plastic surgeon or an architect or the productive little robot that could, is ready to be realized in this sleep filled and fantastical attack. Peter is flying next to me, holding my hand, and my vision is clear, my aim solid. The crosshairs of my mental scope are drawn by the indignation fueled by thousands of my fantasies shot down by reality and I see my target. Here is reality, with all its disappointments and restrictions, looking as frightening as if this were a nightmare, but I’m the one who’s armed with the big guns, because this is not a nightmare. There isn’t room in my dreams for the both of us.
I let go of all this shit and, even if it’s only in my sleep, I am victorious.

[1] “Little Sara, you’re drawing a bird…”