Manifesto of a Girl and Her Ghosts

The writer keeps her graveyard close. Epitaphs of files, digitized skeletons of words. Here, a heart.

“I devote to my Aphrodite of death.”

There, a skull.

“So wise I have been made, I know nothing of what that makes me.”

An empty grave.

“She walked on water, and I followed her or drowned.”

Look at them, all clustered together. What a lovely mausoleum, words choked in ivy, grating like rusted iron in the throat.

“How much of my isolation was me thinking I had to inflict some kind of grief upon myself?”
“The idea that everything that happens to us is our own fault? I can’t imagine anything crueler.”
“People could share the experience of being haunted, but every ghost was different.”

What does haunt you? What have you come to breathe life across, hoping for it to follow you home?

Do you think it will grant you understanding when it does?

“I can’t call this place a graveyard. That would imply that I was bold enough to kill anything.”

Write what you know, so they say.

What a load of bullshit.

How miserably limited does a person’s thoughts have to be, to write exactly and only what you’ve seen? Oh, look at you, with the possibility to create literally anything at your fingertips and you’ve – what, crafted a world identical to this festering sinkhole of ours?

And no, I don’t care about “deconstructing” or “unpacking” anything. I do enough of that on my own time every day, and your take is not as groundbreaking as you’re telling yourself it is. I mean, Jesus, the philosophy department is right next door. Psych is the next building over. Go there if all you want to do is smoke out however your childhood fucked you up, I’m actually trying a fascinating concept called escapism. You might like it if you weren’t so high on your own pretentiousness.

Writing worth reading isn’t anything that’s just being used as a crutch. Sort your shit out on your own time. Don’t put me through it.

“If, God forbid, I’m wrong, I’m even more wrong than I’ll write.”