MEMENTO MORI / NON OMNIS MORIAR
If you are a man: draw blood.
If you are a woman: bleed.
When you were a child, you wanted to be a surgeon. Because your grandfather told you your hands were steady as stone. Cold as ice. Of continental speed. Mighty and male enough to fix what is broken or break what meant to be broken. But you – never broken. Never breaking. The occasional earthquake. But nothing more. And your fingers are lonely and clean enough to pry open the chamber of their chest. Pluck their solar plexus. So, you became a surgeon. Why not.
You are twenty-five and you have bled a hundred and forty-two times and the moon has punctuated your life with its heartaches and blue tears and hysterical glee and you have never envied the sane, and the romantic in you blushes when she is kissed and the savage in you picks flowers with their roots and all and offers their soft cluster of spines to anyone you think needs something to cling to, and
“If you could do anything without consequences, what would you do?” someone you didn’t know once asked you.
“Fall in love,” you said.
the imaginary adult in you asks you what would you do if you could do anything without consequences and the very real eternal child in you answers that she would walk into the sea to find Atlantis because what even is the purpose of life if you don’t believe in magic, and
Because your first love was the sun. Even now every cloudless day reminds you of your own heart. Which you do not know how to mend. You don’t know if you were Icarus or a weakling chasing catharsis you never needed. It didn’t matter. When she kissed you, you hated how she chiselled the backs of your hands crimson. Fingerprinted your nose with freckles that looked like dirt. Left your lips blistering and viciously aging.
the philosopher in you wonders how many could-have-been-hearts you have handed to others as if you will never run out of love but what you do know is that although you have struggled yourself into stretchmarks and bruised your knees watercolour-like, others call them lighting and the eyes of a storm and you like their pale glow, and your tongue speaks in generations and whenever you fall in love you fall hard, viciously, and age accordingly, because
You shut yourself before she had the chance. A closed door. Cemented rigid. If you fall in love again, you will fall in love in secret. You will take that sickness to your grave.
to love is to be consumed and you plan to love even from your grave, you plan to love from the six feet under to six solar cycles’ distance away and you hope your love reaches every existing being and says please do not be afraid for there is nothing to fear –
Veera Laitinen, 26, Finland ✯ IG: @veeralaitinen
“Veera Laitinen (they/she) is a queer hobbyist writer and avid reader from Finland. Their work has previously appeared in Pom Pom Lit, and two more short stories by them are scheduled for publication by Literally Stories in July.”