Shiyang Su 

Sad Girl

It is Spotify Wrapped Season. Don’t hurt me is still on my playlist. I am lonely, I want to love you more. I want to play Elmore James’s It Hurts Me Too aloud in my bathroom as we did in that apartment near Erhai. Your fingers ran through the water to touch my face, the small weight you lay on my eyelids when you told me every song we love turns out to be blues. And how I was convinced love is a kindness only to be failed: like all these endangered tropical butterflies whose heartbeat remains 9.8 hertz even when they are falling, whose death so tender must feel like a turn-down jazz. Silent catastrophe is how you described the butterfly effect. I called it sad story. It was a November night. I pulled off my jeans, wanting you to hold me again, not knowing we were in a loss and that tomorrow there would be more names we no longer speak of: Urumqi or Please Hurt Me No More. You were stroking my hair. You were stroking until it turned into the darkest blue you had ever seen.