I meet her older sister first.

3 years old and a bard, plucking strings of narrative from the air night after night to weave my own bedsheets. When my mother recalls this, she means it as a compliment, and I neatly cross through the corresponding criteria.

I am stolen. She vanishes.

I court many muses (wicked). I enter the world with kaleidoscope eyes (mind your fucking business). I surround myself with tealights as a guy on the TV points at a glitching map (I don't care. When's Jeopardy on?). The moment she first stepped into my room has been recycled (we need space, cadet!) but I remember her escape up the chimney.

a twisted piece of thin wire. laughter, free from malice in my memory. I don't get the joke.

Good riddance, I tell myself. I encase myself in resin. I pickle myself in Jack Daniels. I do not evolve.

She visits, from time to time, brief candles. This time, I supply the hurricane. I light the match. I cut off my hands so I don't have to reach out.

Nobody puts up with that sort of treatment forever. She's patient, but not a saint. When I drag the bag full of glass to the curb, I expect the cacophany to catch her attention. I am bleached by streetlights.

Will you call?

Yes.

Every day?

Of course.

The crypt collects dust.

You mesmerized me with a touch, blinking back 17 years, a time before all the bullshit. A picture in a book. On the cusp of a terrifying future we are seduced by the idea that the world isn't what it seems. We are entranced by monsters. We sup at the table of melancholy. We don't think about it. We do everything we can to not think about it.

How can a memory of tracing patterns in the wall be so strong? The taste of a popcorn ceiling under deft fingertips. The clocks didn't melt, they ring heartily across a devastated landscape inhabited by dead things pretending to be alive. You aren't in hell. Hell is a fantasy to distract you from meaninglessness. We do everything we can to think of hell.