Dear Artist,

Your kind is the hardest to leave and the hardest to love. They're the hardest not to give a fuck about and the hardest not to fuck over. You are the hardest to understand. You are the messiest. Yours is the kind that will leave smears of paint on a mattress, with no care for how the owner will respond. You will stain a ceiling with charcoal so that when someone like me lies awake at night all we can think about is the little smudge, wishing it had been something more beautiful. An artist wouldn't leave handprints on just anyone's possessions, but it would never wash out, if she decided to. Not even with bleach or baking soda and toothpaste tricks. The artist will drive those around her to hunger when they'd rather starve. Your kind induces vomiting. They will make someone like me so sick that her ribcage shows, and once she's cured, she will ache for the pain of illness. And someone like me might think that the smell will never come out of her hair, but once it does, she will miss it more than an artist could ever know.

Dear Everyone,

I don't know how you do it. I don't know how you can bear to contribute to society. I don't know how you can bear being with your kind.

It's only been three minutes.

I don't understand this culture. This breed doesn't make sense to me.

I want to laugh, but I want to crack open like a jawbreaker and forget about the mess and who will feel hurt and who will gain a petty victory.

It's only been six minutes.

The door is being broken down. Now walked through. Now slammed.

I don't understand the dramatics.

The windows are being broken through, and I can feel it, but I can't hear it.

And I feel sick to lay next to someone who says it's love, though everyone tells me that I should feel happy. I'm fucking blessed to have someone obsessed with my presence because no one wants to be alone.

I felt fine by myself.

At least all I had to measure up to was my latest best. And I think it made me feel prettier. And less stupid. And less cruel.

It's much less stressful not to participate.

Writer's Statement

My creative writing professor felt that it was important for all of us to write 500-word writer's statements talking about our work. I was an asshole and wrote this:

I do not wish to make a writer’s statement because I believe that doing so is a waste of time. I think that writer’s statements, artist’s statements, and whatever statements politicians make are totally arbitrary. In my humble opinion, whatever a writer or artist’s intentions were when they created his or her piece goes out the window once they show it to someone else. Totally irrelevant. People see what they want to see in something, and the general consumer population doesn’t do a lot of research before they read something or look at something.  They just take it in and react to it based on their own experiences and ideas. They make jigsaw puzzles out of anything they can; they cut everything apart themselves and then piece it together.