Black Iris

"I want you. I want the badness in you. I want the craziness, the animal. I`m going to hurt them all, Blythe. Every single person who`s hurt me. And you`ll be there at my side."
"You drugged me."
"I didn`t, I promise."
"You drugged me," she repeated, her fingers wrapping around my neck, "with your skin, and your hands, and your mouth. You`re in my veins. My blood." Her lips were a breath`s width from mine, her wolf teeth bright. We teetered on the delirious brink of a kiss. "You poisoned me, and it feels so fucking good. I want more."
My breath came first. "Will you do it with me?"
"Yeah, I will. I`ll fuck this world up with you."
"Good girl," I said. "Let`s be bad."

"I`ve suspected since we met. There`s a spark of madness in you. Most people don`t have it, but you burn."
Wisps of hair had come loose from her chignon as if some electricity in her pushed them out. "Maybe it`s just who I am."
"It is who you are. Doctors talk about it like it`s this separate thing, like a cold or flu. Something that can be cured without curing your personality, your uniqueness, your spirit. They don`t understand. It shapes us so much that it`s more like a scar, a deformity, on the inside where they can`t see."

I knew for years, I guess. I always had bizzarely intense friendships with other girls. It felt weird when we touched. My heart would race and my skin would get tingly and if we stopped hanging out, it felt like a breakup. <...> Sometimes I wished I was a boy so there`d be no ambiguity. When a boy kisses a boy it`s either stop or go. If he starts beating the shit out of you that`s a pretty clear stop sign. But girls are a fucking mystery. Green light one second, red the next. And you have no idea how weirdly intimate it gets between us. Seriously. Spooning is a thing between besties. Like, what the actual fuck. I spent so many nights agonizing over every gesture, every hug, every time our hands touched, every stupid thing that meant nothing to her and the world to me. I fucked up so many friendships by falling in love. I never knew where the line was. I still don`t.

Once, on a science blog, I read about the life cycle of a star.
When most stars die, the don`t supernova. They aren`t heavy enough. Instead they collapse, gas and metal condensing into a tight ball that burns ultrapure and ultrabright, a white dwarf. The rest of their body shivers off in clouds of luminous stardust and becomes a nebula, an echoing veil of grandeur. But the core is pure. The core burns superhot. And over billions and billions of years it cools off, the heaviest elements sinking into the center, condensing, hardening. Becoming diamond.
That`s the fate of most stars. They burn away all their delicate parts and boil themselves down into diamonds.
Anger is like that. Runs on its own fumes, devours itself voraciously, explosively, until one day there is no fire left. Only pure, cold, unbreakable hardness.