Thyestes | Lizzy Seitel

See what you have inherited-I have placed it next to your ear as you slept. You wake up before me and so have your own time to examine it, give into awe, grow bored and discard it. By the time I come to see what you’ve made of it, it’s gone and you don’t know where, there are grains of sand on your pillow, nothing more.

I thought the seaside would be perfect for us, the beach thick with fat sun, the cold water I would teach you to swim in. instead the air choked me, I was too hot, your joy was too loud and I hid my face from the harsh light. you’ve only ever wanted a partner in your joy and this is something I can’t be relied on to give you.

I’m too romantic, I am too easily cowed by my own fears, Furies punishing for future sins. My father told me I am focused on image , his hand holding the wine glass, the fluorescent bulbs bearing down, the plaid tablecloth on the high table in the rental house. He wasn’t rebuking me, I use his words to rebuke myself. Images are thin and can never sit still, never tell a simple story. In that seaside rental I was pregnant with what I would miscarry.

My emotions are books left open to some page, face down, dampened paper hearts left all over the floor, the couch; everything untidy, everything starting to turn. When I was 16 I resolved to stop feeling sad. Anything could bring it on, playing a certain chord on my guitar, seeing a certain color. I can metabolize anything into melancholy. I can gnaw at the edges until the shape is unrecognizable, identified by tiny teeth marks, an autograph of longing.

After the event your father and I meet to discuss what happened like two sports casters, workers in the peanut gallery. It started when I looked at him, it started when I grabbed his arm, he was hungry, it was too loud. I fear that you are tender-hearted like me, racked with guilt at how you spill out from yourself constantly. I thought I could make you better, I thought I could create a happy child. I writhe at any thought that you are in pain, and yet I don't want you to feel you need to be different, I huff, indignant at the idea. How can I lament how I have made you but ask you not to change?

Once, my friend asked me to cut her bangs, she instructed me on how they should look, parted on the side, swooped across the front. I knew the way she always wore her bangs and yet I cut them just like my own. It’s all my hands could do, rejecting the instructions from my brain. I stood behind her as she looked into the mirror. Two of me looked back, narcissus at the water’s edge.

How does one live with the guilt of complicity involved in having a child? The world will come in, the world is already in, the house is sinking, the house is sunk.

But still, I lick the sand from your pillow, I hold you close, closer than you want me. You are my greatest love, I wish to be killed by it. It seems the only pleasing way to go. If you are hungry for death, destruction, if you evolve into a beast that must consume flesh then let it be me, let it be me.

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Lizzy Seitel is a emo mom in Philadelphia.