Dead Girls

The girl on the tv drips saccharine from a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes as she croons

“You looove dead girls”

She is grave and callous, and she is right

Dead boys are plentiful too, but they just don’t have the same ring to them

Dead boys are violence and sacrifice and glory, and a hundred other words that roughly translate to “human nature” if you’re being generous, and “boys will be boys” if you’re not

But dead girls… dead girls are a hot commodity, romanticized tragedy never looked so good

We give girls life on paper, inken veins flowing, and then stifle their breath between pages in every library

Claiming the pen to be mightier than the sword is a clever deflection from the admission that both can wound

Industries thrive on girls drowning out in static on the TV, a mass-produced perversion of everything good and innocent and desired

Worse still are the girls made of flesh and bone and blood, whose deaths we’d give anything to turn into just another story

Girls we couldn’t quite grab onto, who slipped through our fingers and became ghosts you can only see when you don’t go looking, a figure in the corner of your eye if you’re lucky or a cold-sweat in the night if you’re not

We mourn our dead girls and we’re mesmerized by them, like a car crash you’re certain you can’t bear to see

Until you find your traitorous eyes would sooner extricate your skull than look away , in penance or worship

Maybe we’re all dead girls, dragging around the skins of a life that we’ve already lived and died and shuddered out of, but can’t bring ourselves to leave behind

Maybe we love the dead girls because they remind us that we’re not

But then again…

Maybe “you love dead girls” is really nothing more than a passing line in a TV show,

And this is just an exercise in the most melodramatic irony.