and the heart is hard to translate //nude {blitz}

Humans are dangerous creatures. They are fickle and lovesick, easily broken and never truly mended. They're unpredictable and selfish, and the most human thing can be done is to make a promise that cannot be kept. Penelope made a promise when she let me look after her soul while she was away. Perhaps the concept did not pass her lips in so many words, but her empty eyes were enough. And then she went and died. Learna made a promise when we were young, to always be more insane than I. She would fight me, said her doctor's records and her pills, until the day I died. Only, she didn't, for she left the earth without a goodbye (and good riddance to her) and now I am alone in my own illness, with nobody to beat. (And so I must beat myself, which everybody knows is the most dangerous rival to race.) My father broke a promise to his mother when strangers came knocking on our doorstep demanding to use our name as their own. Those filthy beggars, thinking themselves worthy just because they share the dirty blood of our father. (Being a Libertine is more than minding the shop, they ought to know.)

Lastly, of course, Jude broke a promise. He made a promise when he kissed me. To be there, to stay until I decided it was time for him to go. (It's not time.) It was up to him to be safe and keep me safe, to fight the dark curse that has hung over our lives for longer than my memories can reach. It's one thing, of course, for a boy to hack at his wrists until the blood almost drowns him and arrive beside the beach wrapped in bandages. It is quite another for a boy to stand at the reaping and allow his name to be called. It was thoughtless of him. As though he was reaped simply to spite me, to tear the last of whatever heart I might own from my chest and destroy it entirely. I scowl at the whole wide world until my face aches, because who is he to decide that I deserve more suffering. (I don't! I don't! And in truth I know I could not live another day if he dared take that train to the Capitol without me.) I find him on the fringes of the crowd, looking around with wide eyes and a frantic expression, as though he has not just played a terrible game with fate.

"How could you? Don't you know that it'll come back to get you, Jude? He stood up and volunteered in your place and God or whatever else writes these awful plans is going to come and take you to a place where the sun doesn't rise? That's how it works! That's how death works, Jude. Stops for nobody! How could you taunt it and play with it?" I am a million words and a thousand goodbyes and terrible mocking melodies and hushed whispers and the taste of his lips and I am a girl with a forest in her mind and I am angry and I am scared and I am a fluttering heartbeat and I am a pocketful of stolen gold and I Nessie Libertine and I am not okay. "You fool, Jude!"

Humans are cruel and vapid creatures, obsessed with a world that cares nothing for them.

And yet I am the most human of all.