It's Not You

I woke up on Tuesday as a bug, and my boyfriend did not want to work through it.

- Cirocco Dunlap

“We have to break up,” he said, and I could feel the floating organ on my back, which had taken the place of my human heart, start to break.

“Can we try to make it work?” I pleaded, though it came out as a series of garbled clicks.

I should have seen it coming. He smelled different, you know? Clean and fresh, and there was little to no feces on him that I wanted to ingest. Isn’t that strange? When someone who once smelled like home suddenly repulses you with his lack of a feces scent? Love is brutal.

He said that, ever since that morning, I’d had “wandering eyes.” In fact, I had twenty-six wandering eyes, but they weren’t looking at attractive young pupae. They were looking at flying predators, at crawling prey, and, mostly, at him, the love of my life. But also mostly at danger, because everything in this new world wants to eat me.