Alison Rose’s Reviews > Sunburn > Status Update

Hate me if you want to hate me, I'd love the attention. Let me be delivered to the Devil and wait in Hell for a second Harrowing. All I'm doing is trying to love people. All I need is the right kind of love back.

It's hard not to be demolished by the thought of her, b/c I live in a body that has loved her & see w/eyes that have witnessed her ... Presumably, if she ever remembers me, it is only when she catches a perfume that is vaguely familiar, & it takes hours to recognise it as mine. I bet she laughs because she hasn't thought of me in a long time, & then puts my memory away, folded up in a drawer in the back of her mind.

Everything about me is washed away, until there is nothing left but love. This is why I am doing it, for the blinding glory of Susannah, Susannah in the Highest. What she doesn't do to me. All my guilt disappears into the condensation. My hair is damp, my skin is flushed, I don't mind how I look. Before her, I was just one of Dad's rocky fields. She came and picked all the stones from me, she made me useful & green.

Remember that, left alone, Susannah would just be a piece of the earth. She cannot be held responsible for my reaction to her, for the scream of her sun-kissed skin against the blue bikini. Remember that, without the sweat on her sternum and the Autumn color of her, in her most basic and fleshy form, she is only another piece of the earth, the same as me. We are all just pieces of the earth. I must take a breath.

It feels as though I am an island, apart from everybody else. Perhaps we are all islands, apart from each other. Perhaps everyone else feels foreign in their hometown too. Yes, perhaps we are all just islands, as wild and merciless as each other, separated by our countless defects. Perhaps there is no remedy for it, and all we can do is learn which parts of ourselves to deny and which parts to bring into the light.

We have never been the type of family to argue; we feel things very strongly, but we feel them quietly. Our deepest emotions may be manifested in the lightest of sighs, but not much else. The silence says a lot. All that upset has to go somewhere; I sometimes feel it moving under my skin, waiting to be lanced.