Parasite/Psyche
By Robin Kinzer
When we modeled together—two pin-up girls stripped to luminous bare, twining around one another, delicate and taut as thread—the name you took was Psyche.
I adored Greek Mythology, but didn’t remember much about Psyche. Later, after you left me for your cousin, I paged through acres of internet articles about her mythos. Tears drove down my cheeks at gale force. I discovered she was the daughter of silk-spun Aphrodite—human but just as beautiful. Her name meant breath of life, much how I once viewed you.
But I’ve long seen past the choking smoke and mottled mirrors you present, calling yourself empath, sensitive, insecure. Swearing: I just feel everything. Psyche nearly died in the pursuit of beauty, was then saved by her lover, made goddess of the soul. You did love to be rescued. To sink your fingers into the meat of other’s souls.
I worshiped at your altar for seventeen years, but when finally my lenses were crystalled clear, I saw you as soulsucker rather than soulmate. As parasite rather than paramour.
I used to sing you lullabies at night, backdropped by pop music; a really gay, romantic sort of karaoke. Taylor Swift, Halsey, Hozier. The week before you left, you made a playlist of every one of those lullabies. I wonder if you were archiving me in preparation for the end. Cataloging our seventeen year soundtrack.
Loving you was always a little like gazing directly into the sun. It seemed like a good idea on instinct, all that scintillate and shine. But you’ll burn right through your sensitive slivers of retina, and soon won’t be able to see at all.
Maybe all those hours laced together on my thrift store mattress, island on glossy black bedroom floor, I did stare into you like the sun. When your eyes gripped mine, I could see nothing outside of you. Maybe that’s how I missed the truth for so long. You are not burnished sun or glorious moon, are certainly not seer of souls. You are just a really sad woman with bony ankles, full lips, and bronze-flecked eyes wide as an infant’s, worshiping yourself as false idol.
When we modeled together, my name was simply Bird. You called me Pink Bird, Sweet Bird, my Bird, Lovebird. Wreathed spindly legs around my full hips, pulled me close.
Now I leave you wholly behind, pink and teal feathers pumping like full fist of human heart. I will not scald my wings to sun like Icarus. I leave you to fields full of palm-cupped supplicants, each of them as fooled as I was for nearly two decades. Each of them wide-eyed and quivering, convinced you are the very stuff of spirit.
I leave you to your abundance of orange bottles with labels scratched off. To your seventy-six year-old cousin who can write you prescriptions, who will leave you millions. I was sure you were goddess, but in the end, you were parasite—no dominion over anything but dried blood.
Psyche, lost love not because you cracked my heart to clay, but because you never actually existed.
Psyche, I did once believe your eyes were the vast brown moons I orbited— that if anyone knew my soul, it was you. Now I know you were just draining me of usefulness and spitfire, squeezing the blood-rich from me until you found a cushier option.
Psyche, I will never send you another poem; never write you another three a.m. love letter; never again run fingers through the pomegranate of your hair.
Only flight is left to me now.
Robin Kinzer (she/her) is a queer, disabled poet, memoirist, and editor. Robin has poems and essays published, or forthcoming, in Cleaver Magazine, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Blood Orange Review, fifth wheel press, Delicate Friend, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. She’s a Poetry Editor for the winnow magazine. She loves glitter, Ferris wheels, vintage fashion, sloths, and radical empathy. She can be found on Twitter at @RobinAKinzer and at www.robinkinzer.com.