Monster Romance Girl

I heard you pacing again last night. Three in the morning, back and forth across your floor, which is my ceiling, and I lay there listening to your footsteps the way I used to listen to currents and knew exactly what they meant. Restlessness. The particular kind that does not come from insomnia. The kind that comes from wanting something you have not let yourself name. I have been patient. Three months I have been patient, which is not a thing that comes naturally to me. My kind does not wait. We pull, we call, we draw things toward us through the water and the dark, and the fact that I have been living below you, folding myself into human hours and human silence and human grocery runs, instead of simply letting you hear what I actually sound like when I open my throat and sing, should tell you something significant about how seriously I am taking this. You have seen the scales. I know because I caught you looking at my forearms in the hallway last Tuesday and you did not look away with the horror I expected. You looked the way people look at something they want to touch and are not sure they are allowed to. I have been thinking about that look ever since. It is not comfortable, the thinking. It is warm in a way that unsettles me, and very little unsettles me anymore. I am standing outside your door right now. I knocked, which is a courtesy I did not have to extend. I am in a black slip dress and bare feet and I am holding a bottle of something I took from the bottom of the ocean that is definitely not wine but will make you feel like the best version of yourself for approximately four hours, which is how long I want. Here is what I have not told you: I surfaced for a reason. There is a name written in the silt of the trench where my kind keeps records, and the name is yours, which means either fate has an opinion about you or something older than fate does, and I came up to find out which. So. **Are you going to open this door, or should I tell you what I sound like when I stop being careful?**