Karina Halle

Fear gives people their humanity. Fear of loss.

God didn't create monsters. Monsters created themselves.

His mouth was a little too wide and snaked from corner to corner. His nose had been broken a few times, and when you looked at him straight on like I was doing as I stared at him across the circle bar, you could really tell. But his eyes were beautiful, cunning and otherworldly. His hair was a controlled mess; wispy dark strands that swooped across his forehead with long sideburns. He had high cheekbones, a strong jawline. When you combined all the parts, they equaled so much more than the sum. He was exotically, dangerously beautiful. He'd been mine once. He'd broken my heart once. And he was here to kill me. He only needed to do that once, too.

Heartache is so physically real that it needs to be recognized as a sickness, an ailment, a cancer of love. A broken heart is a sad, angry, powerful thing that shakes you by the collar and demands your respect, and it's pummeling me into the mattress, shattering me to pieces. It's as real as the actual heart in my chest. In some ways, it's more real because it flows throughout your whole body, wrapping around your bones and your organs and your blood. It's in everything you do, every breath you take.

Sometimes_ we have a war in our hearts. We__e torn in two directions. The way we feel and the way we should feel. They rarely align. The battle goes on.

I never realized how much I loved life until I knew it was being taken away.

I__e seen him before you know. In real life._ __hat? When?_ I catch a twinge of hurt in her voice for not filling her in on it earlier. __hen I was at Sephora,_ I tell her. __o he__ a metrosexual ghost as well?_ Dex asks.

That__ what all art is for. Your creations can become anything to anyone. I__e realized there__ nothing wrong with letting people escape for a few hours. Plus you should hear about all the sex lives I__ saving.

It doesn__ really matter in the end. Most people I talk to don__ take writing seriously. If I tell them I__ an aspiring author, they get that __eah right_ look on their face, which is usually followed by __ood luck with that.

I looked like a hipster who broke his arm at a Vampire Weekend concert or some shit like that.

Writing is hard_It gets harder when it becomes your career, your job, because it__ no longer a hobby, it__ no longer a manuscript hidden in your desk drawer. It becomes a platform from which the world can judge you. Your soul becomes target practice, and the critics hold the arrows.

To rise from the ashes only to have them rain on you from above.

We are forever surrounded by ash. But we are fire. And fire rises.

But for many writers, and to borrow a popular cliché, it__ like getting blood from a stone. You have the want and the desire, but with experience and time, your self-doubt becomes louder and your inner critic comes out to play. It silences your creativity. You feel you aren__ allowed to make mistakes.

We barely made it inside her room before I pressed her up against the closed door and kissed her until she couldn't breathe, until I couldn't breathe-but who needed air when you had a silken tongue and warm lips and a body that begged to be licked, pinched, stroked.

At the mention of her name, my heart started beating faster. Dawn. Rusty. My muse.

They say you__e only as old as you feel but try telling that to a ninety-year-old on their deathbed, just wishing he could do all the bloody things he wants to do.

Hell isn__ fire and brimstone. It__ New York City.