Little boy, you must know that there are little girls who will grow up into girls like me. You must watch them from when they are young and look for the signs: when they are playing, watch their smiles for eagerness because eagerness is the precursor to despair. When they don’t know you are looking, watch their eyes for vulnerability, because opened hearts learn to protect themselves and close. If you see her walking on her own, see how she treats the world. If she treats it simultaneously like an ancient artifact and like a dearest lover, if she reaches out to touch the fragile and the hard, the beautiful and disfigured, the evident and the mysterious, boy, you must take hold of her, for there is endless hiddenness behind her happiness.

She is broken inwardly with a yawning chasm that she doesn’t understand and that she never meant to have. Her mind curls and writhes against itself like a snake’s body, her heart beats harder than her lips could ever tell. She will consume herself, safe behind a personality that looks quite ordinary to those who daily pass her by.

Hold her though, and by god, she will love you.

If you treat her with superficial affection, agreeing to take the smiles, touches, and the words that are projections sent by her spirit like messages in bottles, you will submit her to an infinite resignation to nothing breaking through.

But hold her, give her a safe place away from herself, peel at her layers with your bare fingers and don’t shrink from the slime you find, and when she reaches back to touch you, beware—-it won’t be what you bargained for. She will strip you naked and run her hands along the fibers of your soul. If you take hold of her, you’re never letting go.

Before you take her, little boy, you must be prepared to never hear her hidden voice. For in reality, each person exists in a world of their own and never passes into another.

How lonely it is to pour your love on a person’s inexpressible mind! One can never experience the gratification that their love gives, never feel the care another has for them. The only thing one feels is oneself. So then how is it worth it to love someone you will never know? Her mind will always be silent before you, her heart nothing but a pulse you can feel with your skin.

But she will love you. She will write herself on your body like a poem, and at the center of her inexpressible thoughts will be you.

You decide if that’s enough.