Sarah Rose Etter

No one else can see the black hole. It is mine and mine alone. It always has been.

To survive here, I have split myself in two: my true self and my false self

Maybe there must always be two of us—our real selves and the ones we create to survive in the world as it is.

In the awful stillness, I can hear the deafening river of melancholy roaring through the dark red cave of my heart.

Language fails us, so we personify the phenomena.

Black holes: eat, ingest, suck, spew, devour, expand, grow. We make them familiar in order to understand them, to reduce our fear of what is beyond this life.

There is safety in metaphors.

The sheer number of people who need help paralyzes me. Most of the time I look away.

My mother stung and stung. Her words stung. Her fury stung. Her palm stung across my skin. Some part of love must be the stinging.

Eventually, after enough stings, you learn to avoid the wasp altogether. Eventually, you grow up and move as far away as you can. You might even put an entire country between yourself and the wasp queen.