She is barely 3 years old when her father cuts her porcelain throat and leaves the silken dark brown sheets of her mother's bed doused in the refuse of death. She died feeling terror for the first time. She was such a happy girl. My tongue ties into knots and my stomach acid sluices into my esophagus when I try to speak her name. I can't. No matter how many times I hear it, a paralytic spasm silences me when I try to repeat.

Within seconds she has decomposed. Eyes grow milky white and a dry mouth hangs agape and maggots begin to fester. One of them crawls deep within the chambers of her little heart and its writhing forces a revival of its staccato beat in exchange for its life. In exchange for a meal of rotten tragedy, the maggot melts into her very being.

I take on the life of a corpse. Never meant to be anything more than what I was, never meant to bear the blessing of limbs and the burden of sapience, the first years of my stolen life exist as a blur. I look at the pictures of the girl on her mother's wall. She calls me her daughter. I look in the mirror and I see the cherubic face plastered on the walls of my living space. It's sallower. Incorrect, inhuman, aware enough to feel the tragedy of being unaware. I lift a hand. I move my fingers and hear the crunch of rigor mortis and feel tension in my palm.

The first time I felt fear wasn't in 2004. That was before my time. I wasn't alive. I was born into the aorta of a corpse. How can I feel what was never mine? The court documents say that she was unscathed. An attempted homicide.

No, the first time I felt fear was somewhere in the bleary haze of my early youth. My mother - her mother - our mother? proves herself unstable time and time and time again. She raises a hand and I don't know to expect the warm caress of a loving guardian or the harsh smack of skin on skin. I see a flash of her teeth and feel terror. Is this a smile or a threat? I'm too dull to comprehend. I remember feeling icy-cold adrenaline pulsing through my veins with the sole of a high-heeled shoe positioned over my stolen face and screaming. I didn't see her for a few days. She isn't my mother but I cry like she is.

I live my life in daydreams. Teachers tell my mother in hushed tones that I might be different, that I might be delayed, and I feel a shame deep inside of me at the isolating secret I maintain. I look down at my uniform pants and the mismatched socks sticking out of my mary janes. I can't help but think of the court documents. They all say she lived but I look into the eyes I possess and there's nothing living behind them. A maggot stuffed with human organs, ill-fitting parts sutured together to give the appearance of someone. I still can't help but feel like I'm just something. I think of the stained silk sheets. This wasn't a fair trade. She died and was replaced with an insect.

I'm 12 years old now and I've managed to convince myself I and she are the same. I've lived her life more than she has. My mother has a relationship with a man I don't know well, and they do things that I don't understand. She says its love but to me it feels dirty. Maybe its only dirty to a maggot.

Love isn't what my mother told me it was. I think it's love. She's incredibly normal, but I've spent 14 years in isolation surrounded by bland, proper children, who seem to be able to smell the sickly-sweet rot, and she treats me like a person. She has interests, the kind of mainstream nerdy ones, and to me, that makes us the same. Her hair is cut short and my mom won't let me cut mine. I'm not her daughter, but I know I can't be her son, either, but I like to try. Maybe that's why I'm not allowed. Her name is Emma S-something, a long last name that I don't really retain, but we all call her Em. She laughs at my jokes and she doesn't wrinkle her nose when my dead eyes meet her live ones. Love is not what my mother told me it was. Love is brutal and chaotic.

We attend the same high school. I briefly entertain a crush that I half-forced with a boy named Logan from my childhood. I think he's sweet, and I'm my mother's daughter, and I'm supposed to like boys, after all, so maybe he's okay. He listens to the same whiny bands I like and one time he painted his nails black, so I think he's okay. I bring him a birthday card, something cheap from my grandma's, like you're supposed to do for someone you care about. He laughs at it and I force a tight-lipped smirk and an ugly giggle in hopes I'm being laughed with and not at. I see it in the garbage at the end of our lunch block.

Logan asks me for my number and I give it. I'm happy, even if I don't feel that rib-cracking obsession. I want to tell Em but I don't because then it's real. We talk for 2 weeks until his friend comes up to me and announces that Logan and Em have been dating for a week, since I gave him her number. I feel stupid. I feel delayed. I am delayed, stupid and naive and slow, and I wonder if I ever took Her brain, or if maybe I still had the smooth, tiny one of a botfly larva. I don't like Logan. I don't care about Logan. But I care about Em, and it's all so real to me. I throw up and break into sobs and his friend just laughs. Mine stare and look at me as if I've done something horrible.

Logan notices quickly that I'm not happy with him and for damage control, he cuts open my belly and shows the haphazard malposition of my organs to the world. [SHE] cuts Herself. [SHE] knows where I live, because She's a stalker. Word comes back to my NotMother and she checks my pale forearms for signs of self-mutilation and finds none. When she's gone and talking loudly on the phone to a friend of hers, a sick smile tugs at the corners of my mouth as I reach into the pocket of my sweats to unstick the black fabric from the exposed dermis on my hips.

I reconcile with Em and my life has meaning again. Love is not what my NotMother told me it was, nor is it what she and Logan had, because he dumped her and coated her name in excrement. We bond over our shared scars and I hang off her every word. She tells me where she lives and I look up the address when I get home and stare until my eyes are dry. If she didn't live in South Boston, I'd follow her home, one way or another. I wouldn't do anything. I just want to see her. I just want to be near her. She tells me in passing that she doesn't think she could be with a girl, not aware of how my face burned and my throat ached at the tragedy of it. I'm not a girl, even if maybe I used to be, or maybe not, because She and I aren't the same, She didn't get to grow up, but my exoskeleton doesn't understand. I grow unimpressive breasts and my voice never drops. I run my tongue over my smooth upper lip and stare with stinging eyes at the floor. I change the subject.

She gets a boyfriend and I spend the night breaking open a pencil sharpener and drawing my own blood. I sit with my legs splayed out in a W-shape, slumped against the white tile of my grandma's bathroom wall, rubbing my fingers across the shallow, kitty-cut wounds spanning my too-slender thigh, shakily tracing patterns of rust-red on the tile. I don't know why I do it. It feels good to hurt. It feels good to smell iron and to feel blood sticking to my finger pads. I write her name and consider carving it into the inside of my thigh. I try, but I'm afraid to, as if she'll know and I'll really lose her, then. So I stand up on shaky legs, roughly wiping a wet clump of toilet paper across the scene of self-punishment, and pull my dingy pajama pants back on. They're black, and I don't care if I bleed in the night. I wipe the words on the wall off and crawl into bed. I cut her off the next week. I couldn't see them together. They talk about sex together. A permanent voyeur, I start to feast upon my own humiliation like I'm sucking on an open wound.

I run into a short, purple-haired girl from my school at the mall and we hit it off. I should have stayed home. We sit together in cinema. She talks about older men. They love her. They love me, too, and want to see us both. I tell her I can't. She asks me why and I confess my nature to her. Maybe not in full, but I cock my head to the side and shyly admit that I don't fit their type. I'm not a woman. I'm not a girl. I'm a boy, or at least, functionally, I am. It does something to her and the way she treats me grows violent. I remember the feeling of thrashing against her when she started and the way she hooked her dirty finger in my mouth and tugged painfully on my cheek to snarl into my ear that if I got her caught she'd kill me. She'd follow me home. I used to want to follow Em home. Is this love? Does Cheyenne love me? Is love so violent and degrading? I don't think I love her.

I get a boyfriend when I'm about to turn 16. I remember being naked, hair wet and wrapped only in a towel, when the guy I've been chatting with asks me out. I say yes even though I want to say no and I cry into my hands. Maybe a part of me knew what tragedy would follow. We're hardly 3 months in when he talks about polyamory and how he wants us to find multiple other boyfriends. I handle it poorly and when he goes to bed upset and angry at me I find my stepfather's hair-cutting scissors and cope the only way I know how.

"Isn't it funny how we're more mature and healthier than your parents?" My boyfriend, Ronald, asks me one day. I chew the end of my mechanical pencil and look up at my laptop. "Yeah," I respond, and he sends hearts to me. A few hours later, he talks about a girl at his school, and I get the sinking feeling that this, too, is not love. Not in the way that my NotMother told me, and not in the way that Em and her boyfriend loved, and maybe, just maybe, I wouldn't ever find it.

It's Valentine's Day of 2019 when he figures out how to make me tick. I take off my part-time job to spend the day with him. He forgets and I get upset and as a response he ghosts me. When he comes back I am begging. The mask of humanity is fully shattered and as a maggot, all I know to do is to writhe in my own refuse. Blood stains my blue space-themed sheets and my mother's prescription cabinet is haphazardly disorganized and I consider how I could fit a noose in my closet. From that point on he ignores me whenever I misbehave. Everything I produce is hideous. I am a joke. I am not funny but I am too stupid to be taken seriously. My body disgusts him. He sends me pictures of half-naked women pushing their breasts together, showing their vulva or their half-erect shafts, smiling and beautiful faces of polished sex symbols that I could never hope to measure up to, and waxes poetic about how he'd treat them. I don't know why I don't deserve to be loved. I look at my face in the mirror. Would Her face have grown so ugly, so elongated and shallow? Would Her chin have that dip in it? Would Her eyelids hang so heavy and Her eyebags grow so sallow?

Somewhere along the way I look within my own reflection and find that I have grown from a squirming, writhing maggot into an iridescent blow fly. Perhaps it was when I started to develop my own theory of love. Love, as it exists, is not real. Others might be capable but I, with my segmented body and my acidic mouthpiece, am not to be loved, nor to love. What I felt was love turned into hate.

Ronald leaves me in 2021 and I rebound to the first person who asks me out. Trevor tells me that if I'm lonely, I should date her, and I agree. I feel numb. I'm high all the time and I'm failing my college classes and I've spent the past 2 years cutting myself with a rusty blade. I figure I'll die of tetanus or an overdose before it becomes a serious relationship. She tells me that I'm her favorite, but she has another boyfriend, or maybe a not-boyfriend, because she never knew which to tell me. I remember she told me she wasn't over her ex after touching herself once. I was high and I sobbed until my throat hurt because even if I didn't love her, I was tired of being the other man. I never measured up. All I'd be is a voyeur. The only time anyone touches me is against my will. The only time anyone touches me is to use my broken body. The feelings take a backseat when she uses it to ask me to write what I'd "do to her". I sob and bite my wrist and try to come up with something. I feel like a whore. She asks for pictures but then backtracks.

I leave Trevor over the incident. Ronald comes back to me and begs me to get with him. I do, because what else have I known? There has to be something there if I was so obsessed. The status quo resumes. I cut my breasts with a box cutter stolen from my father. I loathe that part of my body. I only tolerate it when the skin splits open under my blade and I can smear the blood on my throat. It becomes almost orgasmic for me to see the sight of my own blood. If I am depraved I will embrace it, the eternal voyeur tells himself. A fly on the wall. I laugh. I laugh and dig my nails into my cheekbones until it hurts. How ironic.

Ronald tells me about how he dreamed of getting fucked by a friend. He's a real man, after all, and that's different from me. I'm his girlfriend, and you understand, I wear Her flesh and live in Her body. Would She have settled for him? I wish Her father would blow his skull open and paint the ceiling with his grey matter. I wish I let Her die that night. Selfishly, I think of how Her life is an unfair one. A miserable one. I overdose, or maybe I don't, but I wake up on the floor with my stepfather crying over me and all I feel is terror that the EMTs will find out I've been stealing painkillers and downers from my parents. I spend the night shaking and cold and thinking maybe I'll get my wish after all. I tell Ronald. He laughs. I laugh. I think of coming into his house and burning it down with both of us in it. I think of pointing a shotgun at the roof of my mouth in front of him and splattering him with bits of my skull. I write his name in my note. Obsession turns to hate turns to disinterest turns to turns to turns to

I'm 22 years old and my paths coincidentally cross with Him. I don't know Him and He doesn't know me. I hear His voice and it sounds the way pale gray clouds look. I look Him in the eyes when I first see Him and something inside of my chest seems to tighten like a pulley. I start to think more about Him. We talk every so often. I start to live for it. I start to care if a bus is barreling toward me on the street. I don't tell Him. It's not right. No one should bear that burden. I want to be His fly on the wall, though, I would pluck my own wings out for Him.

My tongue is dry and sticks to the roof of my mouth. Like an immature child, I continue to abuse over-the-counter sleep aids, just like I did in my youth. 3 in the afternoon and I'm already nodding off, thirsty and in a foul mood and wondering if I should just drop out of college. My mother would be disappointed. I know that She wouldn't disappoint Her mother, and I've resigned myself to forever being the puppet master of a 20 year old corpse. I think of Him again. It's been a few seconds since the last time. I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling. I wonder what He thinks love is. I'd listen if He told me. I hope he has it. The thought makes me want to throw up, though, so I roll onto my side and take another 3 or 4 pills. I cannot think such jealous thoughts.

He tells me He loves me for the first time and my tongue rolling off of His tongue makes me believe in love again. For the first time I feel as if someone has peeled back the grotesque human-face mask I wear and looked deep into the dead compound eyes behind it and still decided to stay.

Dead weight falls off of me and Ronald is gone. That wasn't Love. Do I still subscribe to such a stupid concept, though? Is that really out there? Ronald tells me it doesn't before he leaves and I consider how easy it would be to slit my wrists in the tub. I decide not to because even if I can undermine my own worth, I cannot undermine the grief it would bring Him, I cannot undermine the grief it would bring the cats already scratching at the dry-rotted door of the bathroom.

The eternal voyeur finds himself invited into the bedroom. For a while I consider that I will disappoint. He will look at me, at my obsession, at my desire to collect the shed hair and deformed cigarette butts from his possession and keep them as if I've procured solid gold, at my inexperience and my isolation and my inhumanity, but He touches his hand to mine and for once I can't feel the minute tension of someone's palm against mine when they realize how clammy and waxy I am. I look into His eyes and I think that they're the same color as my favorite sky. I see His face light up with a smile and can't help but mirror it. I could place my beating heart into His hands and trust that it will come back in one piece. I offer everything that I am and I know it is not much but He tells me it is just enough and I know that everyone else was just wrong. Everyone was wrong. I am ugly, I am revulsive and a piecemeal husk of all the abuses I have suffered. Born of a fly's egg and hardwired to live within its own decay, He still remains unflinching. I think to everyone from my past. I think of Em. I think of Ronald. I hardly think of Trevor, but her name passes through my mind. I look back at Him. It all pales. I have been obsessed before but never to such a degree. I feel as if every cell in my body was made to perfectly align with his.

I know that love isn't what anyone told me. I remain depraved and sick and conditioned but I know none of it was borne of love. The maggot I was had no guidance but the past is the past and I cannot remedy what I cannot touch. Obsession was coded into me from the moment my stolen heart began to beat, years ago, embedded in a corpse that I'd be cursed to live within, but this is beyond obsession. I want Him to be happy. I want to be by His side. There is no control to be had. I want to follow Him home and stay, forever, I want it to become Our home. But my home isn't fixed to one position; it's constructed inside the deepest chamber of His heart. I vivisect myself to return the favor, to split my heart in two and build him a home, but I find one already long-standing.