sab3rto0thed

[sab3rto0thed]

i don't believe in change in the usual sense―i don't believe people can change. if you are a small boy with daddy issues, then you will always be that person in some sense of the word. you can be thirty with children of your own, and it is my belief that a door in your face will always make you flinch.

i do believe in the death penalty, but only sometimes, because i am often wavering. you could argue that this is me changing, but i think my constantly-shifting attitude is just a facet of my personality. i am very good at playing the fool because half of the time, i am the fucking fool.

maybe i am just lying all over the place. maybe i do believe in the state of change, because i am constantly in one. maybe, if i was the storm, then you were the eye―and i was absolutely stoic in my belief that you would never hurt me. i tear down houses and you gently circle the damage, your thumb pressed up against mine. the calm after the storm, the rainbow after the rain.

call me the fool. call me the idiot. you text that girl all of the time, and i laugh it off. oh, i know how this goes. i know what it means when i am not the cool girl, precisely apathetic except for when we are having sex―you are not mine because i own nothing. text who you want, i am very good at acting like we are on the same level, as if i have let anyone touch me in three years.

tell me you don't love her like you love me―sex for sex's sake, you say, her hips and her eyes. when you slide your hands along my ribs, i imagine her feeble gasps. aren't we all just the same creatures, unwavering in our disbelief?

here was what i believed absolutely: you would never hurt me.

do you know how humiliating it is, to be so pathetic after i tell myself that i will not be pathetic for three whole years? do you know how awful it is, to work on covering those scars and narrowing those eyes and clenching those fists, only to be decimated by a boy with a small dick and an even smaller sense of self?

you tell me about your father, the man that abandoned you a few years after you were born. i do not tell you that my mother always reeks of cigarettes and how my own dad drank cough syrup to get wasted when he was on probation. i do not tell you how the fight that night was so loud i left the house for hours, absolutely on my own, and i crouched by the church in the dark. and nobody went after me.

oh, my god, dude. i don't tell you about the experience―your petty assumptions and frazzled attitude and hands on my waist would never understand. you preen about my writing―"the english teacher here would love you," you say, "i'll put in a good word." i don't need a good word, i don't give a damn what you've got to say―you haven't ever got the patience to read the things i write, anyway. when you dumped me and i sang to you, you scoffed, "jesus, this is like a whole essay." some of us at least put effort into our lies.

it is your girlfriend who reads my words―the one who thinks my assorted strands of hair are ethereal, that i gleam in the sun, that i am twice the actor you are and three times the writer. i don't tell her anything―i don't tell her about being fifteen and forced onto my bed, my bare freckled chest, the flimsy belt around my wrists, my frantic heartbeat. the rabbit, the rabbit. always the prey, an angel, a pretty little thing with a dainty waist and a soft voice.

you sing about your ex―how a night with her makes you want to slit your wrists. you don't have the guts to harm yourself, which seems to be a pattern with boys i date―obsessed though they are with the concept, when it comes down to it, they cower in the shower beneath the water stream. i never cowered―i would show you exactly how to angle the glass.

i wrote you a letter after we broke up, a scathing one that said god, i can't believe how hollow you are. i know that i am now added to the list of girls that make you want to slit your wrists―i can't blame you for that one, though. i mean, my bed is an awful place. you're telling me.

my friend always said that you are exactly the boy she would have imagined me with―fluffy hair, a nice smile, a guitar player, a pianist. a liar. my other friend tells me that she hears pianists are really good at fingering―i bury her alive, and then i find you and i punch you in the mouth and break all of your fingers. you don't need them, i promise. you suck at everything you do, including fingering. i remember you touched me for an hour and neither of us were smiling by the end.

i take the glass and press it to your palm, though―if you are going to be good at something, not including your shitty, lying lyrics, let it be this. you don't need your fingers for this, baby. i would know. just grit your teeth and find a good angle. there you go. that's it.

your girlfriend plays make me your queen by declan mckenna when you break up with me, and i am sure she is your queen now (lucky her!), but my offense is personal, because that song was dedicated to the girl i loved when i was thirteen, the one that slit her wrists and bled out in the bathtub. oh, i adored her. oh, are we seeing a theme here?

for a year, no one ever helped me. no one picked me up off the bathroom floor, wiped the blood from my mouth, steadied their hands. when you held me, i thought for the first time that i was safe with a boy. now, i blame you for the fact that i cannot like anyone unless they are brutal to me, unwinding my teeth, unraveling my waist, cracking my knuckles sideways. my body is terrible and disjointed and i am just a girl, really.

maybe it is this―maybe i was too mean for you, too rough around the edges. maybe that happened after―maybe i was a lying bitch, and that was our problem. you had already dated one lying bitch, and you couldn't have another. you know the type we are, with our untucked smiles and thin arms and best friends that hate you. you know.

perhaps it is this―i cannot love anyone that is not brutal to me because i have become all the more brutal.

[sab3rto0thed]

i saw a post recently, on instagram. it was made by my sixth grade literacy teacher. it was a celebration of her daughter's birthday. her name is claire. in the post, she is called "little safari girl," because she loves animals.

sixth grade was eight something years ago, and i have not spoken to this woman since she taught me at twelve, aside from the occasion al "hello" exchanged in the supermarket, or that one time i was with my friend and we saw her at the park with her little safari girl. i made it a point to avoid her at all costs for a long time, because i loved her.

when you are twelve, love is a formless shape, like the one noah kahan sings about in his song strawberry wine―if i was empty space, he writes, and you were a formless shape, we would fit. that lyric has always resonated deeply with me, because often i don't even feel worth a speck of dust―i am just empty space in the body of a girl, and my eyeliner is the occasional glancing of moonlight in the dank little corridor that i exist in.

my best friend tells me that song reminds her of me. if i was empty space (i am) and she was a formless shape (she's not) then maybe we would fit. the thing is this―i met her freshly after my seventeenth birthday, when i could define love more sharply. so my love for her is very defined, all narrow edges and soft corners and steering wheels. it is a very sunny day in a very secluded mountain area. it is a few wildflowers stowed away in my pocket, so i know this day has counted.

love was not like that at twelve. but i did love my sixth grade teacher, quite possibly more than i loved anyone else at the time. she did not have kids yet, so i think, in a way, i was sort of her like makeshift child. i am very good at being a makeshift thing―a friend, a child, a lover. i cried a lot. i always listened when she spoke. she sent me out into the hall when i had a headache so i could lay down, away from the light. she always saw me as a person���she would give me books, because she knew i loved reading. that was her last gift to me when she left at the end of the year.

i didn't know i loved her until she was leaving. she wrote us all a letter about the resilience of jellyfish, and not a single soul in that classroom was crying except for me. it's not something i can explain in a solid, meaningful way. i just remember sitting on a desk and clutching that paper so hard in my hands that i tore it. and my throat hurt all of the way down to my ribs.

i was nobody's favorite girl―my hair was tangled, my teeth were unbelievably crooked, and i was unloved at home. but for that brief year, it felt very much like i was her favorite girl. she liked what i wrote, even though i was twelve and i didn't capitalize my letters properly. she lit up when she saw me at school. she trusted me. it has always been very important to me, to be able to earn trust.

i visited her briefly, only once, at her new job. and then i learned she would be having a child, a little girl that was going to be named claire, and i left her alone after that. i avoided her at all costs. she knew i had loved her. i cling when i get sad, and i was always so sad. but my mother always told me that having children ruined her independence as a person, smothered her, turned her husband mean. i figured my sixth grade teacher did not need my added strain in her life. it was better if i stayed away.

when i met my best friend, i was freshly seventeen. a few months in, when i realized i loved her, i shied away. i tried to leave her for the better part of a year. she didn't understand about me―the wasteland of my home, the way i clung like a beached cargo ship, like the titanic and an anchor. i did not need to be anyone's responsibility. i was my own responsibility, and that was troublesome enough.

she likes being my anchor. it took me a very, very long time to accept that. sometimes, it is okay to be someone's responsibility―if they love you, that is.

a year before i met her, i met the man that would later become the best teacher i'd ever had. i ditched the majority of his class that year, but the next year, when he had me again, he said, "i'm glad you're coming to school this year." later on, i asked him why he gave a damn where i was. he said, "you can write. i saw that. you have potential."

he had a gift, i think, of being able to make kids feel seen. throw anyone at him―a nicotine addict, someone who cupped a razor in their palms, a kid with scraped elbows. he knew exactly how to talk to teenagers in dire straits.

he must have felt really lucky, i guess, to have me in his classroom, because my straits were rather dire. i was climbing out of the worst hole of my life. over the next two years, i would spend a lot of time with the suicide hotline in my hands. i was a mess. i threw up every time i got anxious. the rest of my teachers all hated me. i was a walking joke.

they say one person can make a difference, which i never bought until him. because he cared for me in such a way that my dead beat dad, who was in an out of jail, and my alcoholic mom, who hadn't spend a night sober in a month, weren't able to.

i can't pinpoint the exact moment where i began to cling. maybe it was the day his class was so empty that he sat down with me to help me do my math homework. (his wife was a math teacher, a very lovely one.) maybe it was when he asked me why i had been gone for so long the previous year―maybe it was the way he always expected more of my writing. everyone else thought i was an idiot.

i can't say when it was that i stopped lying to him, but the day he and his wife were moving―quitting, yes, like they always did, i was empty fucking space―i came to her classroom crying uncontrollably. here i was, seventeen, and i had friends now, but my mom hated me half the time and i had no parents to go home to, no one that would hold me. and it's not like i can explain why i fell in love with them―it's just that, when i saw his wife in the hallways, i would tell her, "i'm like your own personal disease," and she would say, "you already said that." they never thought i was horrible, even though i tried very hard to scare them away.

it didn't matter how far away they went. they loved me all year―they sent me emails. he would tell me "i was just bragging about your writing yesterday," and they would email me over the holidays, and they would always sign off with "we love you." i had a thousand sleepless nights and i hated school, but when i graduated, they were the only people i thought of. they had invested more time and energy into me than anyone else. they were more my parents than my own parents were, and i loved them irreversibly. i was like their daughter―their favorite girl.

and that sort of thing never ceased, no matter how much i expected it to. they offer to buy my drink when i see them next and they look at me like i am a person, still, not just a feeble collection of words or a bad joke. and as they help me with college, as they tell me they want to keep seeing me, i can define this love. it is unyielding and determined. i always tell them that i don't want to be their responsibility, but he never stops visiting me at work. he says "i was thinking of you" and here i am, because i thought i was the only person who did the loving here. i cling, after all.

in the summer, they will have their first child, a little girl. i was one of the first people they told. they don't know what they'll name her yet, but i know―oh, i know that they will be great parents. the very best. and i am still, selfishly, a little heartbroken―i will never be their favorite girl again. i am a fill-in, a makeshift, make-pretend thing. it wasn't as if a shaky sixteen-year-old would ever fill in for a real child.

i know their love for me doesn't change with a child. i know that's not how these things work. but i look at my mother, smothered, and how we hate each other half of the time. and i think of the fact that i am seeing them less and less, that i have stopped receiving texts and visits. and i know when it is time for me to step back.

they have created a foundation for me, a concrete jungle of irreversible love and care and connection. they have shown me the steps, and i still have those emails as ancient relics of unconditional seeing. and i am a writer, now―passionate, determined. i grit my teeth. in august, i am going to college. and i would not have done it without them. without them, i am not sure i would still be here at all.

i know they will always love me. but sometimes i wake up in the morning, and for a moment, that confused sixteen-year-old resurfaces. she has no idea what she's doing, and she is terrified. and she misses the people that used to be her favorites―the ones that hugged her very tightly whenever they saw her in the supermarket.

i am no one's favorite girl. that is a reality i used to struggle with, but i accepted it a while ago. it's not something that truly matters―plenty of people love me. it's not as if i'm lacking anything.

sometimes, though, the nights get heavy. i think of how my sixth grade teacher writes about her daughter so passionately―her love of animals and music and people. and i wonder why the hell my parents didn't love me like that. i wonder why i came out so wrong, a fish out of water.

i wonder why they never wanted to know if i liked animals. i wonder why they never wanted to hear my ideas, why they never had the time to read my writing or talk me through a panic attack. why they always wanted someone else to take care of me. why, now that i am adult, it is me who is almost solely responsible for my cat that is dying of cancer, and how i can't even do that right. sometimes, i wonder why i came out at all.

i am going to be okay. it just stings a little―it might sting forever, i think.

[sab3rto0thed]

tell me the story again. the one about the bodies, in the lake. how we pulled them out. i didn't want to, but you always had a way of making me do the things i was scared of. we grabbed them by the ankles and piled them in the same shopping cart. tell me how you kissed my temple in the car. tell me you'll fight for me this time, that you'll kiss me at the carnival in front of everyone in the middle of june. tell me that story. the one where you love me, where you hook your shin against my thigh. tell me about the scars on your knuckles. tell me that you have the guts this time. tell me the story about how you aren't so callous and i'm less loud. the one where you pinch me too hard at the creek. the one where you are better as a spirit than a person, the best story i ever told, my favorite boy to kiss on a list of deadbeats. tell me that my cat isn't dying of cancer, that the dog hasn't been dead for nearly a year, that you didn't crush those spiders. tell me the story. tell me again. you are made of sugar and i am the one with the scars now. here we are again, switching roles. you always were better at it than me. you had the portrayal correct, and i was all wrong, twisted up. tell me the story. tell me you like that i'm twisted, and i'll get a tattoo of every single lie. i'll start with the car crash. we both will. we drowned in the river. when they pull us out and put us in that shopping cart, you have an arm around me, and your lips are smashed against my temple. your hair is longer than mine. we are sightless in death, though we still find it humorous that we managed to go at the same time. we were always grappling for ground. you always wanted to kill me, and i was going to kill you after. a thousand times. a million.

[sab3rto0thed]

next time, instead of worshipping another cunt, i'm going to become a devout christian with a bible tucked underneath my arm and a cross on my thigh.

my boss jokes that if he ever sees me like that, he'll know it's really over for me, because i'd have started worshipping a straight boy with a cross on his arm and a folder of dick pics. i had to laugh with him, before i remembered we are both meant to look miserable. misery does love company, though, so i laugh anyway. he doesn't know that it's been over for me for a long time.

when i was in high school, i met the girl that would become my metaphorical virgin mary. the one in the background that somehow stuck to the front of the photo, whose name everyone said reverently. she was more of an anarchist than a catholic, but she had a smile that would kill and a way of balancing opposites. misery loved to keep her company, or maybe it was the fact that company loved to keep her miserable.

i can never be a christian because one very important feature of christianity is forgiveness. i know this as a fact―everyone close to me that goes to church has had to forgive me at least three times. this isn't the point, because i have a way of avoiding those. i can never be a christian because they're all about forgiveness, and i could never forgive this girl.

she was my god as soon as i laid eyes on her. she was only a year and a half older than me, an august baby, which meant she was a virgo. according to the internet, this means she was hardworking and reliable, lovely and modest. she wore doc martens like they were wings. she had eyeliner smudged on her thumb and a layered septum ring, like a miniature sun coming out of her nose.

she had everything that i didn't, and i tried so hard to fix that. i smudged eyeliner all over my thumb and bought knockoff docs from walmart. i made my hair choppy, gave myself a semi-decent bleach job with my aunt. what i didn't know was that none of this would matter. there was something fundamental about her that i simply did not possess.

maybe i was too loud. they would let her climb in the shed and they wouldn't let me, because i would get splinters in my palms and laugh about it. i cried too often―she never cried, and if she did, she always had company. no one ever wanted to see me cry. after she moved to los angeles and i was forced to let her go, i broke down on the ferris wheel the first time i went out with my new friends. that's the kind of fundamentality that i possessed―she would never do that. she reeled you in first. i was shit.

i just wish―oh, god, i don't know what i wish. i wish i hadn't told her about the suicide attempt. i wish she hadn't hugged me in the dead of winter. i wish i hadn't said a word about her to another soul. i wish i could be decent about something in my life. i wish i didn't shut the hell up whenever i was in the car with her. i always said―i always thought, oh, she's done with me. she never had me to begin with. you can't be done with something you never really cared about in the first place.

i was in love with her ex-boyfriend. he hated it when i interrupted them at school. i was a public nuisance. five years later and we are neighbors. i see him every six months and i wonder if she would ever be jealous. i would still give my life to protect him, even though he only gives a damn about me for one month out of six. she sucks his dick to get vape pods. i would suck his dick for free―that's why her other ex tried to rebound with me. i am the cheap knockoff version of that bitch. we call this the full-circle drama club whore―she is getting fucked in the backseats of cars and i start crying after i sleep with anyone, so we still can't figure out who the whore is.

she had everything i ever wanted. she never even offered me an edible. i cried so hard in my bedroom, the kind of sobbing that makes you gag. she didn't love me. none of them did. it's not a big surprise―the only person i have ever had sex with was my friend's ex-boyfriend, which is wrong on at least three counts. i may as well have committed murder. everyone knows, and that's fine―let them spew the narrative. i just have to remain unapologetic.

that was the thing about this girl. she never, ever flinched. i wish i could be that apathetic. i wish i didn't care about others the way she cut me out when i needed her the most. maybe i would be more successful. maybe i would be less hurt when i'm lied to about little things. maybe i would be better.

i can never forgive her, and that's why i can't find religion. i hold on to my spite like a second skin. i push too hard in groups even when i haven't spoken to her in three years. i make sure everyone knows i'm there, because i cannot be the ghost in the backseat of another girl's car. i just can't. it's better if i spew the narrative. i can't shut my mouth―she always stayed quiet. well, good, then.

i have not been raised with anyone. all of my friends ditched me for drugs and los angeles and new cars and decent parents. no one ever stays long enough to kiss me on the mouth―if they do, oh, god damn, they learn fast. i will get through another winter, survive another night of being hacked open in my nightmares. i will get out of this room. maybe i will not cry after sex, and maybe my partner won't leave. i held his hand. i knew it was wrong. i do all the things wrong.

i am always waiting for something to give. i push the ones i love away before they can examine my organs and find the nasty thing in my body―the thing that is fundamentally wrong with me, that scares people away. i'm afraid i will never be able to sit naked with a boy again because he will see the history of who i have let touch me. i can't bring friends home anymore. i try not to ask for other peoples' time.

i am a decent liar. sometimes, i feel like i should be better. more often than that, i feel like i should work on being worse. she was full of lies. i could never hate her. i think i have to forgive her eventually―she was only seventeen. seventeen is a very difficult age. i think, maybe, if i can start by being better to the shape of her―maybe i can be a little better to myself, too.

[sab3rto0thed]

last week, i met a little girl. she was exactly like me. it was like putting both legs in a swimming pool and then being pulled all of the way in, hitting your head on the bottom and drowning.

i guess little isn't a fair thing to call her. she is fifteen. when i was fifteen, i did not feel very little. looking back at that now, i ache.

she was exactly like me. she had a sort of bouncing, childish joy that lit up her little corner. she looked younger than she really was, maybe twelve or thirteen. her front teeth were crooked. she maybe had freckles, but maybe not. maybe her ex boyfriend told her she did and she didn't, but now it's drilled into her as a facet of her personality. that shit happens with ex-boyfriends, you know.

her ex-boyfriend worked at the car wash right next to the gas station that i work at. we would hang out in between shift. i would drive him home and listen to him whine about anything and everything, including foreign chocolate and dead teenagers that actually deserved to die, apparently. it was like being in the car with my own ex-boyfriend, except i was finally the one driving, which meant i had the power.

i didn't know he was seeing her until she dumped him. he loitered around the counter at the gas station i work at, tears in his eyes, face stoic. he kept asking me for hugs. when i dumped my ex-boyfriend, he guilted me and wrote me a suicide note and then slit his wrists and landed himself in the hospital. i texted him four months after the break up asking if he meant to hurt me so bad. he asked me why the hell i was asking him that, when i had been the one to fuck him up. he was the one with gashes in his wrists and bad hair dye.

he was nineteen. i was sixteen. he wrecked my relationships for the better part of a year even though i never spoke to him again. i would see him while i was working―brown hair, a hat, the way someone walks. i would feel panic so sharply that my entire body would turn inside out. whenever older men ask me out, i have to hide in the coat rack until one of my coworkers find me. when they ask what the hell i am doing, i have to laugh it off. i cannot let them see this remnant of myself, this relic. i am strong and important and independent, untouchable, utterly vicious. i was never scared.

my friend―he is eighteen. the girl―she is fifteen. do you see the similarities?

he lied to me about everything. her age, her existence, her name. when i finally confronted him, he laughed in my face. i withered. my coworkers that had met him, the ones that were softer around the edges and believed in true love when random boys brought me gift bags, told me i should forgive him. three years is not a big deal, they said. he's a good kid―attractive, humble, kind. going places.

that's what everyone said about my ex-boyfriend too, until they saw my hands shaking.

i sent my friends, the ones still in high school, to do some renaissance work on the girl. they came back with this―he kissed her without asking, he tried to touch her in a movie theatre. she was fifteen. all i could think of was my own ex laughing about how he had fucked this girl in a movie theatre―it was all her fault, he had said, all her doing. she had been fourteen.

here is the thing―i stopped going to school. i slept for more time than i was awake. i became nocturnal and sat clothed in the bathtub as the water caught up to my chin. i still fumble razors and think about smashing glass. i still think about pressing a hot lighter into my skin, the way he showed me.

that experience has fundamentally changed the way i think about intimacy. whenever someone puts their hands underneath my shirt, i want to cry. when a boy hugs me, i tangle my fingers together so they don't see my hands shaking. my more recent ex found another girl to have sex with, even though i told him multiple times―my god, i was groomed when i was fifteen, alright? he doesn't want to hear the details. no one wants to hear the details.

back then, i had no one around to protect me. now i am always looking for protection in others, pursuing only those i know won't pursue me back. sometimes, i seriously doubt i will ever stop hiding in coat racks.

there is a girl. she is fifteen, the exact same age i was when it happened. she has two crooked front teeth. i shook her hand, and she laughed nervously―"i don't do handshakes," she said.

i laughed. "don't worry. me neither."

she relaxed a little.

i do handshakes, actually, but she doesn't need to know that. i lie a lot, about little things. i don't need to know her and also do handshakes at the same time. i am hiding in the coat rack for the sheer amusement of the experience. i am gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles as we drive down this street because i like having control of the car.

the other kids treat her the way i was treated. they are fond of her in a very detached way. they think she's a little annoying, a little immature. i think she just wants to be included. i think it is enough for her to be in a room with them. i pray to god they are protecting her the way no one protected me, because i can't watch her be like this in four years. the idea of that is like murder.

i don't really believe in god, so it's hard to pray about something with conviction. but there is this―i think about her every day, and i really hope someone is looking out for her. i really hope she is going to be alright. she made it out a lot faster than i did―and maybe that will be enough. i hope so badly that it is.

i can't save everyone. sometimes one person has got to be enough. even if that person is me―fifteen, crooked teeth, so tired. if i were to tell her anything, it would be this: when you are sixteen, someone will hug you. you will not flinch. and you will realize that night, alone in your bedroom, that people want you alive.

[sab3rto0thed]

they live in a house―two houses, actually, in los angeles. they are supposed to be actors, their skin a monument to the gods above, a holier-than-thou exhibit that they get away with better than the formally religious people in my life.

i simmered all summer before they left, picking the legs off of spiders and talking about kissing. this was before i wore my tall socks, and after i stopped asking for money―the belt was my best feature. it narrowed my waist and made me helpless. i floundered like a girl at sea.

all of the boys i have kissed, at least, are starkly transparent with me. they say shit like "no one has ever looked at me the way you do when i touch you―" i am stretched across my bedroom floor, various pieces of flesh tapered to the wall. it is a fucking crime scene in here. it's awful, he says. my eyes are so wide and i am always trying to push him away―stop it, stop it. i am fifteen. i want you to leave.

i tell everyone that will listen about this. i show them the nails i stitched underneath the skin in my wrists, an arts-and-crafts projects that took nearly two decades to finish. it was decided before i was born what i was going to be: resolutely, absolutely fucked. in return, you tell them all about my mom―how we shove each other in the hallway, how i steal her hard liquor and drink until i black out in my bed instead of going to class, how she wishes i was dead. there are no secrets with me.

and the second one, who kept trying to press his knuckles up against my thighs, with the waist that was thinner than mine―he bought me a baja blast before he abandoned me at my doorstep, which was probably the kindest thing a boy has ever done for me. i never let him see my tits and he never made me touch his cock, so we called it even. i mocked him as my boyfriend and he bought me mcdonald's and lied to my face―he loved lying, up until the very end. he taught me everything i know. that was how i knew it was over. in two years, it was the first truth he had ever told me. it was also the last.

his girlfriend takes my starbucks applications. she fucking hates my guts in very apathetic means―she doesn't want me dead in any particular way, but if she saw my face on the news, she wouldn't even blink. she would think: that bitch had it coming. i am a meddler, a mockery. i bludgeon myself in my bedroom until my gums bleed.

her mother makes her cocktails when she pleads. at parties, she finds a corner to get high in at all times, like she is scouting out the area. (we do this differently. after the first time, i always need an escape route.) whenever she has sex with the boys i love, they don't make her plead like they do me. i am a master at comforting her leftovers, wiping their tears, trembling when i unzip their jeans. when i sat alone in grade school, her mother sat with me and told me that her daughter struggles with being lonely, too. we have been tethered since day one. i tell her about a song and she tells me to rot in hell.

i see her in most of the women i find comforting―a smile, a sly word, a lock of hair, a nose ring. that expression, holier-than-thou, her skin flecked with paint. jesus died on the cross for girls like her, and i am incomparable. even if i wasn't fundamentally fucked up, a liar and a thief, i still would be nothing compared to her. i set my head on fire and burn at the stake. i am never going to be anything. i will never have my own car or a decent bleach job, or a list of boys volunteering to fuck me in the backs of their cars. i can't be her.

the third was the best in his own polite way―he took me on three dates first, at least, and he tried to pay for everything. i think the way his mother raised him wouldn't allow him not to―he gave me forty dollars every time we kissed, because if he didn't, his guilt would eat him alive.

guilt is stupid. guilt is reckless. i don't feel guilty for a single thing i do. my cat has cancer, and although i could scrounge up the three thousand dollars he needs to survive another year, i will not. i blinked back tears the entire way home―"if i don't do it," i told my grandma, "then i'll have killed the one thing in the world that trusts me the most."

i have grown out of having most of those fits. i carry no guilt, which sobered him up really quick. the first few times i left him hanging he could pass―and i did try to warn him about me. it's not my fault that he didn't listen. i told him very plainly, in the best english i could manage. i can't have sex. i get all shaky, my head fucks up. my arms bend the wrong way. i can't do it, baby.

he found someone else to fuck. my friends say she has the face of a frog and my family all thinks she's a whore, but i actually liked her quite a bit. it was a learning curve, because she thought i was untouchable―you know, scouting for spots to smoke weed, a good bleach job, my own car. and i never begged. i couldn't help but pity her, because she was just like me before i had become what i am now.

i have never been untouchable, although i think part of the key to being untouchable is to do things with your entire chest―lie, laugh, linger. worship no one, and make sure no girl is grabbing the crystals on your neck. don't let them into your bedroom. don't let them push you over. lie about the significance of others, including them.

he tried really hard. i am an expert in the art of coercion―it's not something i practice, but i applaud the art. when it's well-done, it's a really lovely thing. it'll stop your breathing for at least six months. he was awful at it. he tried to guilt me―i am guiltless. it is hard to be invincible―pretend-invincible, whatever―when you are afraid. so i said, alright, whatever. we fucked. i bled all over the sheets, and i made him ache all over again. he hated me―in the end, they all do.

i told you, i said softly, when i was pulling my clothes back on. this is how i am. this is how it is. i am irreversibly fucked up. you owe me more gas money. a month later, he broke up with me―he didn't tell me that he was fucking that other girl, but he didn't have to. i knew exactly where my cunning charm stopped. he had passed the line a while ago.

his ex-girlfriend was the one point of kindness in my life. before all of this, she had been the only decent person in the world to me―the one who sat me down at parks, who noticed when i was quiet in a group. this was the girl who held me in doorways and steadied my legs, the girl who didn't let me eat alone at lunch even though she didn't know my last name. we were barely friends, and i hated her smile, because it was the loveliest thing i had ever seen―i was never lovely.

i am sorry, because i know he pushed her the same way he pushed me. he is awful at coercion―we both knew it. we both gave in anyway. there are not many things that are the same about her and i, but we do share this. the closed throats, the fumbling while friends are in the room, the shaded eyes. i think the biggest thing is, she learned to say no. i was always a little more pathetic.

and this is what i do―i lie, i linger. i broke the crystal necklace she made for my birthday. i ruin things, a natural gift. i wander the street at night until my throat is too heavy to hold it in anymore. i used to lay on my floor and scream into the carpet, because there was just something so wrong about me. i was twisted inside.

intimacy is not a love language, not to me. i try my best to stay away. i do things perfectly, in a structural pattern. cargo pants and the shirt a girl i loved gave me. i wash my hair, i simmer in the summer, i lay in only a bra by my open window in the evening. i write love letters to girls whose names i don't dare speak anymore.

there is a small thing called redemption. i grew out of los angeles. i try not to think too hard about my face on the news. one of my best friend always wants to see me when she comes home from college―i am one of the first faces she thinks of, she tells me. we talk about books in her bed―time loops and lovers and butterflies. she tells me that all boys push. if anyone ever pushed her, i would knock all of their teeth out.

it's not that she protects me, exactly. it's just that she lets me sleep in her bed―she talks on the phone with me for an hour whenever i get bad news. she thinks better of me than just a girl with a pair of scissors and a vengeance―she was one of the first people to make me a person. when she leaves, she leaves me alone in her bedroom. i study the snow outside of her window, the passport carefully laid by her mattress. it's not that she protects me, but she does give me room to breathe.

this is how it is now―room to breathe. i have all of those things now, time loops and butterflies and lovers. my friends take pictures of the moths on my hands. they trace the lines of my new tattoo and they beam at me when they see my car, the one i never thought i would get to buy. (i did.) in may, i will drive it to utah and my aunt will give me a good bleach job, and then we will get cherry-cinnamon cokes.

i have been lonely for so long. i don't do anything slowly, and my tests are more like battles. i was telling a boy about the placement of my tattoo―how i used to crush jagged pieces of glass in my bedroom at night, hoping so hard to bleed out. he told me he would never have guessed, but he is glad i am still breathing. sometimes, it is hard to believe that not everyone sees the same suicidal teenage girl with the hollows underneath her eyes. sometimes i still see her in the mirror, and i am sick in her memory. no one is protecting her.

someone once told me―if it is an emergency, call. this man does not want to see my face on the news. and it is not as if he is exactly protecting me, either. but he reads everything i write, no matter how awful i think it is. he lets me hug him in the middle of winter, because we couldn't do this last year―he was gone last year, and i was awful. he helps me with scholarships and college applications. i know he would drop everything if i asked him to, if i needed him to. i told him about my dying cat, because if anyone knew the right thing to say, he would. it is so hard for me to have faith in others―when it comes to him, i hold fast. we are writers, english majors, a little reckless. i'm afraid i might love him until the day he dies. infinity has never been an option for me.

a friend was driving me home a few weeks ago. i was giving him all of these truths about me―i am trying to be more honest, you know. he told me he doesn't want to sleep with me―i told him i don't want to sleep with him, either. i just act like i do. we exchanged very soft looks, like the beginning of understanding. he sees when i am tired. very rarely has anyone ever been good at that without months of hard work―i am not a very easy person to love, i don't think. i lie a lot.

when this all started, four years before, it was my cat who i was staying alive for. he would hear me crying in my room in the middle of the night and meow at my door until i let him in. we would sit on my floor and i would hold him, wrap my arms around him and sob into his fur. he hated being held like that, but he let me―we've been best friends for a long time. and i know infinity has never been an option for me. but if anything were to be infinity, it would be those nights with the closest thing i have ever had to a home. we would lay in the dark, watching the sun rise from my bed. he would head butt my chin. i would kiss him right between the eyes.

he cries whenever i'm at work. i've never had a love like that. i know life will go on. but sometimes i still simmer in the summer, and i don't know what i am going to do this summer, when there is no one for me to hold at five in the morning. it is hard to grasp sometimes, but everything changes. growing pains are not unique to me, but i don't think they will ever stop hurting.

i will never go to los angeles. i will never be a great actor, holier-than-thou. and i am trying―every day, i am trying―to be more of a person. sometimes, the truth of that simply has to be enough.

[sab3rto0thed]

i think i am the best girlfriend you ever had. i make you wait two hours for me in your car because i don't get out of bed. i cut all of my hair off because i'm feeling angsty and i hate my friends, because they hated me first. i only take pics of my tits after i come out of the hospital for anxiety attacks. you only send me photos of your cock when your family is home. you fantasize about me in every way―splayed, anxious, wanting. you send me a picture half-naked and want an award for not showing me your penis. you already did that last year. you tell me i need a man to take care of me. i buy my own fucking car. you pull me in tight when i tell you i attempted to kill myself last night, and then you give me blackouts for the next two years. you're better at fucking than me, but i'm a good statuette for the boys you let down.

i think i am the best girlfriend you ever had. i hold your hand and make you feel real guilty for dumping me. i wring your pristine neck and break all of your fingers so you can never play the piano again. i tell you about all of the boys that want to make out with me and make sure you know i am using them to use you. i tell you i'll be fine when we fuck and then i don't even let you cum. you should have known better by now, you god damn idiot. i kick you in the chin whenever you put your hands on my waist. i fucking hate you, and that's the only reason we're still dating. i wake up tangled in your sheets and i cry in your dorm while you sleep with your arms around my stomach. you want to fuck me so bad until you actually do. this is how it goes―i am a let down. i did warn you, sweetheart.

i think i am the worst girlfriend anyone has ever had in their life. i wish you would spit in my mouth, if you even care. i make sure to take my jokes too far until you want to hit me in the head and knock all of my teeth out. i hate loving boys. i love when they hate me. my best friends are a union to my defense―they don't pull me in when i write suicide notes, but i don't really write suicide notes anymore. i am the worst girlfriend to them. i cannot make flower crowns and i cannot drive. i am frequently angry and sometimes i smash chalk and tear the house apart in my fury. i used to call the suicide hotline from my closet and get casually sick on the couch. i hate making out but i want to do it all the time. i use all of the boys that like me. i make sure they are second place. truly, i don't need anyone―i just thrive off of attention. it's all a lie. i am an actor, award winning and all of that.

i am fairly certain that i am the worst girlfriend anyone has ever loved. i am not talking about my exes anymore. i say awful things and i am frequently defensive, very judgmental, and high on edibles at least fifteen percent of the time. i tell you my cat is dying and you show me a picture of your dead cat on your lockscreen, and then you hug me really tight. i feel threatened and you tell me that i, of all people, should not feel threatened―i can say fuck off at my corporate job. you'll let me. i need a place to stay and your parents will have me. i need a place to stay and you'll have me. i am cruel. i am mean. i am awful. i am the worst girlfriend you've ever had. i wake up in your bed with my hair standing straight up and you look at me so fondly, i cry. i throw up and you tell me to stop taking pills and that it only feels like the end of the world―you would know, you say, you have anxiety too. we dance around saying i love you because it's a little tricky for both of us, but i tell you you're kind of my dad and you hug me every time you see me. i am the worst girlfriend in the world. i underbake my cookies. my one redeeming trait is that i am loved―irreversibly, irredeemably. i can get away with being the worst girlfriend in the world. in theory, i can get away with whatever i want. i can fuck off. i am, after all, just a girl.

[sab3rto0thed]

everyone adores me when they have their hand around my throat.

my first boyfriend bought me a really cute shirt and i had to stop wearing it when i dumped him because it was fetish―everything was a fetish. my belt, the smooth silky wrinkles of the shirt, my croaky little laugh. he said, i want to fuck you until your eyeliner runs. i think about it all the time. it took a year and a half until i stopped being hollow and started being sixteen again.

and it's not as if this is an extra-large and life-altering development. i'm a teenage girl, honey. of course i think about sex. he always told me your belt is so hard to get off and i would laugh my croaky, breathless little laugh―my last line of defense, that belt. i had to throw it away along with the suicide note and the cigarette stubs. i never figured out which was mine and which was his.

and these days, everyone is like i want to fuck you so bad. and i laugh, not breathlessly. of course you want to fuck me so bad, sweetheart. i look so easy, breathless and messy, my eyeliner a fucking mess. i bet you want to make it run. i bet you want to fumble with my belt and say nasty things. i bet you can't get hard because your mom is in the other room.

but my god―you do not want to fuck me so bad. i have this issue that whenever someone sticks their cock in me, i ragdoll. my arms bend the wrong way. the bones pop out of my legs to say hello. i don't wear belts anymore, because it makes the process longer and more painful. i grit my teeth and get it over with like i'm fucking sisyphus climbing the mountain.

ask my exes. they dump me as soon as the deed is done. i cry in the bathroom and consider buzzing my head and hit myself in the face a few times, because jesus christ. and you would think the rag doll thing is sexy, because my first ex used to compare me to his fleshlight, but it's not. i don't do the ragdoll thing sexy. i get a snapdragon tattoo on my forearm for my dying cat and when guys say i'm so sorry i say go to hell. it's all for show, all of it. i am local in the business.

in high school, all of my closest friends called me a whore while they fucked in public parking lots. after they all moved to cali, i became very transparent about my sexual history. i call them sometimes and leave voicemails on their receiver―alyssa, your ex-boyfriend wanted to fuck me really bad because he knew how easy i was now. did you tell him that? i bet you did, you lovely girl.

i try so hard! i've never had a man fuck me so good that i wanted to say i love you. i fucked my friend's ex and sent her a text about it―hey, sorry for sleeping with your ex. it was kind of bad. sorry for hitting your car, too, lovey. whenever i lose a boy, i breathe a massive sigh of relief and go back to doing my eyeliner properly. i carry a knife all the time and only get high when all of the doors are locked. my ex makes fun of the music i listen to and i laugh―ha, ha. don't be bitter i won't suck you off. you're still the love of my life, i promise.

flamingo pink. clink, clink. i tell my coworkers about these forty-year-old men that think i'll make eye contact while sucking their cock, and they look disgusted―yes, sweetheart, that's exactly what i was looking for. i'm a teenage girl, of course i think about sex. i only tell the truth to boys who don't put their hands on me.

i fall so hard for people that will protect me, because my defense is feeble and you can only lay in the bathtub for so long before you've got to get up. another day to work, another joke gone too far, another pat on the back. i love it when guys see right through me. tell me that story again, about how you knew i was lying as soon as you saw me. most of them look at me like i'm a ghost, the pale imitation of an ex-girlfriend. i am only the pale imitation of myself.

love, to me, is better explained by richard siken. it's like a religion―no one will ever want to sleep with me. i tell that to guys all of the time. not the rag doll part. i say no one will ever want to sleep with you, you know. they argue by presenting a detailed list of their body counts―i say, congratulations! i'll make you a badge, you dumb fucker. no one is sucking you off now, baby.

there's no originality. everything is on a script. everything is on a wire. i would know―you can't lie to a liar. and where the hell do you think i learned how to lie? maybe it was the kids in california, who picked me up in their car and then dropped me off first. what a nuisance you are, when you are sixteen and your belt can't be untangled quick enough. what a god damn joke.

[sab3rto0thed]

what to do when you love a liar.

chew sand particles instead of metal pinpricks. don't talk to the moon. walk your dog, impartially. do everything impartially. bear no witness. let his ex burn in metaphorical hell. know you are going there next. never do your hair past the first date. draw a heart on his forehead. never call him by anything but his name. call him sweetheart in your head, fondly. never write anything of worth where he can see it. agree with whatever he says. tell him you loved his ex when she was with him because she was finally safe. don't tell him she was the one that took the bullet for you. don't tell him that you can't believe he lied to her. don't tell him how you hate him for making sure she was still unsafe. don't tell him how you and her are the same shape of glass. compare piercings with his new girl. tell little truths, like of course i still want to see you. do not tell him big truths. cry after sex, but only in the bathroom. take less than three minutes. wipe the blood from your thighs and take the trembling with it. take three hours to text anyone back the morning he leaves. let him kiss your fingers. read his script back to him. post only your friends so he knows he is insignificant in the great narrative of your life. only you know that you love him. be sick within your four walls. don't show him the scar on your upper arm. keep cutting your hair unevenly. when he dumps you, be a martyr and then call him a lying fool a month later. slip in a few i love yous that you never got to say during the relationship. they are lies now and they weren't then, so that's policy. dip your fingers in a coke bottle. when he presses his knuckle against yours, count all of his bones. pop his tires. key his car. make sure he wants you dead. make sure he ends up in a ditch, like all of the boys you kiss. make sure you have someone to be truthful to, because he doesn't. make sure you are not the liar that someone is loving. make sure you still have a cat at home to love and a bottle of pills you do not want to swallow. get the last word in, always and absolutely―you are the writer, after all. and writing is the most twisted version of the truth.

#poetry #writing #list poem #prose #oh

[sab3rto0thed]

most of the things i used to do were about closeness. they stopped being that way a while ago.

when i was sixteen, i got really sick for a day. i was fighting with my mom, all of the time, so i remember being hunkered on the tile floor of the bathroom with a towel bunched between my knees, alone. i had thrown up four times already. i would throw up eleven more.

that night, when everyone was dead asleep, i remember trembling in my bed, my ribs a cave around my stomach. i pressed my face to the pillow and flattened my palms against my forehead. i blabbered to the air in the room, thick with grief.

i want to be held, i whispered. i choked on that idea, that word: held. holding. no one held me. there was no one to bring me soup or stroke the hair from my sweat-soaked forehead. i was not precious enough to anyone to be held.

i slept for a long time after that. when i finally rose from my bed, it was dinnertime. i remember doing my eyeliner, belting my pants around my concave stomach, putting blue clips in my hair. irreversible, presentable. i sat at the kitchen table with my reheated pizza, the first thing i had eaten in days. my hands trembled. they always trembled. there was nothing to be said about something so usual.

i was always fighting with someone. my boyfriend hated driving to see me, and he hated my friends, and he hated me, especially. he would gripe about all of these things in that order, ticking them off on a list. he put his hand on my stomach when anyone could see, just so they all knew exactly what i was. irreversible, presentable, concave. i was not precious enough to anyone to be held. apathy was the largest tragedy of my life.

it has been three years and i don't talk to any of those people anymore, but the emotions of that night still ring true. they cut bitterly. i stopped trying to be held after that. i stopped trying to be a lot of things after that: soft, quiet, agreeable, lovely. lovely, especially. i was never lovely, not even when i tried.

i thought: if they want something to talk about it, then i will give it to them. there is this girl that saved my life and slaughtered me right after. i see her in the store and i grit my teeth, my anger brittle. my ex told me that he couldn't be with me if i was like that, tight with rage, a coca-cola bottle ready to explode. so now i let anything shake me.

i was not close to death that night, but there was a long stretch of time wherein i had wished i had died anyway. palms to my forehead, body a prayer, nameless and indistinct. no one would have cared. it would never have mattered.

if the girl that i see at the store today wanted to talk about me three years ago, then i gave her something to talk about. my eyeliner, one side always a little sharper than the other. my hair, an undaunting mess. my stupid little smile that i hated for five years. someone at school laughs at my hair and i laugh with them. everything i do is on purpose now. there are only so many times you can bear of someone choking you against your wall before you hit back.

that is why it is so stupid that the one thing i miss about my most recent relationship is closeness.

i don't really dabble in romantic relationships at all, because they are scary and they hurt and they make you look weak. i was no longer in the business of looking weak, which was on purpose, of course. if someone hurt my feelings, i hurt them back twice as hard. in relationships, you can't do that. you have to have a balance, and i am no equilibrium.

i did well at first. i let him pretend to have the control and i kept my teeth sharp and my nails jagged and my eyeliner, of course, uneven. my hair a mess, little brown curls resting against my forehead. he said i looked good anyway, and i snorted when i was alone. what a lying fool.

i am a great god damn actor, and i have been for as long as i have avoided closeness. boys think they always have the upper hand, but no boy has the upper hand on me. i am not fifteen anymore, naive in my bed, my ribs crushed beneath my skin. it doesn't matter who you are. if you hit me, i hit back twice as hard.

i trusted him a little, or it wouldn't have happened at all. the kissing was good and the sex was fine, and at least now i am in control of the dick i suck, which in itself is an achievement. i can do without all of that, though. i have for a long time. it doesn't bother me.

for him, it was about the closeness. he sang songs to me about waking up in his ex-girlfriend's bed, her hair all over his pillow. he hated staying over at my house. he loved the piano, so i hated his hands.

there is a level of falling in love that i am just incapable of. that might be what happened here.

closeness is hard to achieve, but i do manage. i had an english teacher and when i threw up the night before graduation, i let him know. i think he laughed about it a little, but he knew what it meant. i was not dead and i had graduated, and if anyone knew what a feat that was, it was him. for two years, he had watched me grow up.

and i love him―i love him always. i love his wife, too. i love how when i saw them in the grocery store for the first time all year, they both rushed in to wrap their arms around me like i was the most precious thing in the world. i love that i'm eighteen now and he still gets coffee with me so we can sort out colleges, because he knows i'm a little lost, because he was like me once.

but i think if he wrapped me in his arms and held me forever, i would never be afraid of anything again. i would stay there forever, and i would remember the first time i saw the wedding band on his finger and thought: this is a man that loves things properly. and i wouldn't worry about the gray hairs starting to sprout in his beard, and i wouldn't worry about infinity, and i wouldn't worry about getting my words right.

i know intimacy. i know about going into the new teacher's classroom while i am having a panic attack, and she tells me to breathe, and she doesn't know me that well but for the first time all day i do. i know that she writes to me still, all the time, and i know she defends me relentlessly to her coworkers that make a mockery of my name. i know things might be easier for her if i wasn't so close, and i know she doesn't care.

i know intimacy, i do. i know staying at my best friend's house, her parents hugging me before they go to bed, pressing their chins to the top of my head. i know that when i am about to cry, she holds me, and that makes me cry harder because i know i am precious to her. i know that these little loves, like the fact that she makes me malts and shares her dinner with me and mails me friendship bracelets even though she lives in a different state now―i know they are so important.

i don't miss him. the boy, i mean. i don't miss anything about him. i can do without the kissing and the sex and the dates. at this point, i kind of hate his mouth. whenever he touched me, i could feel the script between his teeth, carefully curated, like an insert your name here moment. i know all about performing. i did it for a lifetime.

what i miss is the closeness. i miss the way he held me when i was shaking, pulling me in by my shoulders, like he would protect me from everything in the world. i miss lying in his bed, my face in the crook of his neck, our legs tangled. i miss sitting between his legs while he ran his hands through my hair. i miss being held.

i have a friend who has been through the same shit i have. the using, the mocking, the loneliness. the acting. the acting, especially. i have known him for four years, so i am now older than he was when i met him. i have watched him grow up the same way he has watched me, and as we sit in the back of a car together, he looks so at peace.

i drive him home. i don't know what about the night makes me so honest, but i don't lie to him anymore. we are too close for that. it would be a crime, i think, to lie to him. we have both seen each others worsts.

i tell him: i hope you know, out of everyone back then, you're the only person who feels like family to me.

he pauses, his neck craned to look out the window, slumped down in his jacket because of the cold. then he says: me too, soph. me, too.

he hugs me over the glovebox when i park outside of his house. he pauses before he closes the car door, and he says: i'm proud of you. i really, really am.

i'm proud of him, too. we are like family, he and i. we know the same type of shit.

i'll be okay. i'm still learning intimacy, but i will. i will be okay. because i am not scared of closeness anymore, and my ribs are not a hollow over my stomach. and when i am sick, i always have someone to bring me soup.

i am not scared of closeness. that's important, i think.

#poetry #prose #drabble #words

[sab3rto0thed]

you meet a boy when you are fourteen and you know he carries the world because it is obvious. it is in his smile, in the even set of his teeth, in the checkers on his shoes, in the futile necklaces he wears and the overpriced smoothies he brings to school and his shitty, endearing haircut. you are fourteen and you do not know many things but you know these things, about people who carry the world.

you know because when you were thirteen you fell in love with a girl who had the world between her teeth, like the way pirates are televised holding knives with their bones. you know because she tells you she was bleeding out in the bathtub a month ago, and you don't know if anyone ever found her or if she just picked herself up and threw the ruined towel away. you don't know but you do know that the world is hers. you know that your world was hers.

so you know this boy and you strive to know everything about him and when he smiles at you, baring his perfect teeth, you hold the sun. you know because when he holds you tight your permanently unsteady world steadies for three seconds and you smell like his cologne all the way home. you know because he always seems to ask why you exist and you always are telling him back, jesus christ, if i knew do you think i would still be alive?

people do this, actually. people always ask why you exist, why your hair is a mess and you resent your too-crooked teeth. it is a grudge, a practice in self-loathing, and your skin is clean but your brain is not and you have a smudge on your forehead that spells out the date you are going to die. it is always tomorrow.

they are always asking and you know their figures perfectly, because you are an artist in many ways. there is a boy with scars all over his arms, and you know exactly how they are slashed because his blood is all over your hands. there is a girl with dark hair and a face that makes expressions the same way her mother does. there is a boy that eats food with you in the backseat of a car and holds your wrists and tells you to call him and never picks up the phone. the list is infinite.

none of them are like the first boy, the one that knew the world. it doesn't matter how much he resents you because you have been a nuisance for the entirety of your small existence and so when you turn fifteen and cry on your back porch in the rain because he is gone, it is just something that happens. it is the grudge. nothing lasts with you.

here is the thing: your whole life, you have been starved of a family. it does not matter how much they push you around and choke you and look at you blankly in astronomy (you have missed two weeks of school, this is on you). it doesn't matter who touches your stomach or pulls you by the back of your head or plays the drums on your knees. you are used to hard work and you will carve a place out for yourself.

you are a terrible god damn artist.

you cut and you carve and you chisel and you spit on your bedroom floor, body split in two so everyone can see the ligaments holding you together. (you wish they would disconnect. the date is tomorrow.) someone ties your belt around your hands and you are a walking exhibition and you are chiseling, this is how you make art, this is how you do things right. you know because of the girl you loved that bled in her bathtub. in order to be like her, you need to suffer for as long as she did.

here is the thing. here is the grudge. you are fifteen and small and so naive, and nobody loves you. nobody has loved you in weeks, and you have stopped counting the dates on your forehead, and you memorize the exact pattern of the wooden hallway because you need to savor every breath. here is what love is: it takes and it takes and it takes and it leaves you sprawled on the concrete with a split lip and a chest full of rocks.

you are never going to be beautiful. you are never going to be resolutely, absolutely correct. you have stopped making art as if you ever started and your skin is as clean as your brain, and it doesn't matter that your hands have blistered from all of those fucking walls you broke through. you are not graceful, and your smile is still crooked despite the fact that your teeth are straight. you are never going to own the world.

here is what love does: it takes and it takes and it takes.

there is blood in the water and you are crying in the backseat. a girl with ginger hair and soft hands will ask if you are okay. in two years she will be a drug addict and her green eyes will sink into her cheeks and you will never speak to her again because you will fuck her boyfriend, and that is how these things go, and she should know that love takes and it takes and it takes. she should have learned, but she didn't have to fight like you did to stay around. everyone always loved her and no one ever took.

the boy with the world cranes around to look at you from the front seat and you are sure he hates you for the exact same reasons you hate him. because he is oblivious, because he is arrogant, because he carves just as hard as you do. desperate people do desperate things, and you are both so fucking desperate.

you tell everyone you hate him, and they all nod. you don't know that they all hate you, too. they don't know that at night, you are still a little hysterical over the boy with the world and the checkered shoes.

eventually they all leave and you are slowly learning not to beg, because you begged them for everything for two years and you are so tired. you are not even desperate anymore. you spend weeks floating on the surface of a pool, blood at the corners of your lips, in the hazy in-between state that determines if you have tomorrow or not. you are the girl in the bathtub now, except you have suffered far longer than her. you always knew your worth, though. you would have done anything for her, but love takes and takes and takes. it takes when it's you.

in these moments it is when you wish there was a world without hope and love and all of the pretty things. you have no driver's license and you will never go anywhere except for this place, and you wish it would just end already. you drag yourself out of the pool and you show your teeth like they taught you and you wait for someone to finish you off.

it never happens.

you meet new people and your determination to be gone makes you reckless. you say mean things and you are brash and impulsive, especially when one day you wake up and you are afraid of losing these people. because you realize, dramatically, frighteningly, you have not had to chisel your way into this. your smile is perfect. your hands are steady.

it is not always like this. you are on a rapid decline always. in march you remember your blades and you never tell a soul. in august you lay in the dirt and look at the stars and eat peach-flavored candy. in may you lose your mind and your best friend drives you home and makes sure you feel safe before you get out of the car. in august a man you love that you haven't seen in a year sees you in the grocery store and hugs you immediately.

people don't do that. they take and they take and they take.

you always tell others that used to be like you that healing isn't linear. and it's not, it's really not. you are eighteen now, and all five feet of you is always fighting, and when your friends come home from college they always check on you first. you can't describe how long you've gritted your teeth, how you used to put your hand over your mouth to silence things.

in june, the boy that used to carry the world sits with you in your best friend's living room. he is so tired and he only has a few countries left in his palms. he used to have the entire atlantic ocean in his smile. you can see the evidence of brutality, the scrapes across his knuckles, the crookedness of his smile. you see the way he shakes a little, slumping into the couch, his dark hair a mess.

you have loved him for so long. when he leaves that night, you curl up with the blanket he was holding and you think: not everyone made it out.

for the first time in your life, you are the lucky one.

in september, you fall in love. october, november, december. it is all a process for you, because after what happened before you don't think you are capable of falling in love still. you have your friends, you have the man always answers the phone when you think you are going to drown this time, you have your coworkers who give you their fondest smile and their tightest hugs. but you don't play this specific game anymore. that's how you get hurt.

you play the game and you do get hurt. for a moment, you are screaming in the car because you refuse to be silent about anything these days. that is how you get stolen from. you are always cleaning up these messes even though you have not talked to these people in years. this boy is broken, because his ex-girlfriend's eyes sunk into her cheeks and her best friend gave too many damns about the way he played the piano. and you know exactly what he means.

it doesn't matter how much he hurt you, actually. in retrospect, it does not. you know because here you are, whole and healthy and breathing. you know because everyone you love loves you. you know because this boy is just like the boy with the world. they are both slumped-over, broken, sad. they were not lucky. not like you.

your hands do not shake anymore. when you are bawling in the car, you always have someone to call. when someone you love has good news, you are one of the first people they tell. when you finish your shift, your coworkers always tell you to be safe. and they mean it. and you love them. and nothing is taken.

this is the grudge. you think of your boys, curled up in their beds, heads between their elbows. you loved them so much and for so long and that is exactly why you have to turn away, because you cannot help someone that left you. your fingers are raw still. you have an emotional stake in the matter.

you will always hold a grudge against the people who hurt them and you will always fight for them to get better. if it comes down to it, you will be the one taking the blows, because you can handle it now. you are not bleeding in the bathtub, you are not crying with a hand over your own mouth, you are not tied down.

this is the grudge. and you love them, you do. but you learned a long time ago that love isn't supposed to take.

you tell your best friend about them, the girl that chose you ten times over no matter how brutal you could be. she turns over, looking at you in the dim light of her bedroom.

"they'll find someone that will make them want to pick up the pieces," she promises.

you think of all of the people who did that for you. you are a very large puzzle, and you are going to be fine, because there are people to hold you together when you are not. you have grown up so much. you haven't touched a blade in nine months.

"i hope so," you tell her. you really, truly do.

[sab3rto0thed]

two and a half years ago, your boyfriend's ex-girlfriend saved your life.

and it wasn't as if she meant to because often the littlest things are the most important. it was just that you had no one else, and so she sat you down, her hair like goldspun auburn, and she taught you how to stop saying please.

you had always thought she was very pretty and at first you had resented her for it but after this you could never resent her. those first few weeks were the worst because the person she had saved you from, not yourself, your at-the-time-boyfriend, was trying all the ways to drag you back down. he was bruising your wrists and bruising your throat and the backs of your ears, and of course he knew where you lived, you stupid fool. he said please can we just call this a break and you knew that if you said yes you would swallow a stone and throw yourself face-first into the river bed.

and, of course, it was nice that he was the one saying please now. it was nice because it wasn't you.

but despite all of that you would have said yes, of course you would have said yes, because the river bed was very pretty that time of year. the sun was out the way it hadn't been all winter, and you were awfully tired of the bones in your wrists. but then the girl that would eventually be your boyfriend's ex-girlfriend, the one that saved your life in the little-big way, saw you on the first day of summer and hugged you so tight and she said i am so proud of you. and no one had been proud of you in months. and no one had ever been proud of you just for surviving.

and of course she forgot about you. it was a slow-and-steady decline because humans are multi-dimensional creatures, which was a hard thing to swallow, almost as heavy as a stone. but she said oh i forgot your invite at my house and then she never gives it to you, and you write her a letter that she forgets to read for three months, and when she finally reads it you tell your friends and they say it took her that long? but you are not used to people caring. and this girl saved your life, after all.

but she is growing up, you see, and she is moving on to bigger and better things, and perhaps it doesn't matter that you are left in the dirt. you chose this, you did, and she dug you out of that hole, avoided the riverbed. and yes, yes, maybe the last party she invites you to is the last time you will ever see this boy you were friends with for two years. and maybe he made out with you because he knew you were broken-in, a basement with wooden floorboards, and of course everyone knew. of course all of her friends knew. and maybe you could not sleep that night, too afraid of his eyes. but maybe she didn't know.

you are proud of her is the point. she has a boyfriend now and the way he looks at her makes you ache in a way that you have to ignore, because you don't play that game anymore. she wears striped rainbow overalls and when she asks you to leave the room because you are too loud, well, that is what everyone tells you. this girl saved your life, after all. if her boyfriend gives you a pitying look, you ignore it. you don't need pity, you have never needed pity, you scrape by.

and you do. you do scrape by. fuck her invites, fuck everyone. when the boy that threw spiders into the water, the one at the party, keeps trying to kiss you, you don't even know how to cringe. you are still immobile, trapped in your bedroom, your mother barely ten feet away and apathetic. it doesn't matter how spiky your barbed-wire edges are growing. in your head, you are always saying please.

and everyone knows. they all hear it. the girl that saved your life surely talks about it with her best friend, and her little sister says she's so pretty and you know. of course you know. you lay on the bottoms of their shoes for two years and you are not happy but you don't know what else to do, and then the boy with the spiders laughs at you and says we know. and so they all hear you saying please too. they all hear you and that thought is the one that should be the fatal blow.

friendship for you has always been like a china shop. everything is all pretty and intricate and it breaks. when you were ten and your father took you to the park, you saw two teenage girls sitting on the concrete playing halsey and you just thought oh, god. when you are twelve and having a panic attack, fingers too cold to feel, you go to mcdonald's and you see a group of friends just laughing with each other. and there it is again. oh, god.

and they lied. the girl and her friends. they all lied to you. every touch, every sound. your ex that dragged you down, the boy with the spiders, the girl, her pretty best friend. they all lied. every day you woke up and everything was a lie, from the smallest things. and it was terrifying. you did not think people could lie that well. it was how you picked up the art.

you know. you know this is how it is and this is how it has always been and this is how it has to be. you have the same panic attack you had when you were twelve at sixteen and you run away from school with your backpack slung over your shoulders, and you are crying in the animal shelter, and there is no one. there is no one but the small, bright-eyed cat in front of you. but maybe there is a little light still, even though it is the middle of winter, because when you finally return to school your english teacher says are you okay and it's the first time someone has really asked in a long time.

he goes to spain the next year with his wife and they don't say it's going to be okay but they do tell you they love you in every email sign-off and he says he was bragging about your writing just yesterday, and so now anytime you panic you can at least swallow around your feelings. and you have friends now, and they sit with you in the hallway and let your anger have a voice. and yes, maybe you spent half of the year ignoring them on purpose because you could not be lied to again. maybe you blustered and bluffed and maybe you were the liar this time. you are lucky the people that love you are stubborn, because by the time you graduate, they know you better than the backs of your hands.

and it's a miracle, honestly, that you graduated at all, that your corpse hasn't dried up in the river bed yet. you had a teacher that year that told you your old english teacher moved to spain just to get away from you which is preposterous but you know that everything is your fault and you were good at embracing that until people became soft with you. but people are still soft with you, like the other new teacher that lets you sit in her classroom whenever you feel like crying and treats you like you are your age, a little young. you are tired of being treated like you are made to carry the world.

and it's not bad, then, when the first boy you will have gone on a date with in two years asks you out in august, a few weeks before he goes to college. you know it is a bad idea, but you are the capitalist invention of a bad idea, and so you do not really care. you have spent all summer looking at the stars with your friend and feeling invincible, and so you warn him that you are terrible at relationships but he doesn't care.

he doesn't know how screwed up you are. that's the problem. he goes to college and you don't talk for a month because you are good at putting those walls back up. and then he reaches out, and you can't remember the last time someone fought for you like this, and at the beginning of november you drive out to see him and sleep in his dorm and wake up with your shirt folded in his knuckles. you are growing up too, now.

and then a girl he was with tells you that he had sex with her twice in late september, right after he told you he missed having someone. and of course you weren't that someone and you should have learned a long time ago not to assume things, and you have spent all this time sleeping in his bed. she tells you that he said he would stop talking to you for her, and oh my god, there you are. there you are.

you don't know why it is such a slap in the face because he says sorry over and over and you know he regrets it and he feels awful for all of it, the doing it and the not telling you part. and you just don't know what to say. maybe it jabs you so deep because you wouldn't have sex with him when he was here because when you tried you couldn't stop shaking. sorry, you want to say. sorry, sorry, sorry. you are screwed up. you tried to warn him, didn't you?

you are screaming all the way home, and at first you are just angry, because your ex told you the relationship wouldn't work out if you weren't so now you are all teeth all the time (it has been two years). and then you are just sobbing and screaming the same word over and over again, just, fuck, because why are you like this. how the hell could you let this happen. and then you get home and a month passes and you make amends he keeps saying sorry and he knows when you are lying to him, and you keep telling your friends you'll keep him at arms length, but you know how lying works. if you want to be a good liar, you can't be so close to someone. and you are way too close.

you lie and you lie and you lie and he says holding back information is still lying and you want to say back is that why you didn't tell me about that girl for two months and let me drive up there and flirted with me for so long and you are so used, so usable, just serving your purpose. and you can't do this again. you can't deal with the blackouts in your room, you can't wake up twisted in your sheets. after it happened two years ago, you couldn't breathe a certain way without wanting to die. the way it sounded triggered you, made your hairs raise on end.

on the way home, you are not going to crash the car. but sometimes you wish you would have three years ago, because no one cared about you. you are not so selfish as to do it now. you will not do that to your lovely, star-struck friends. the ones that sit with you in the booth at mcdonalds, laughing until eleven, heads on shoulders. they love you so much. you love them so much. you haven't lied to them in months.

your old english teacher is back in town and he visits you at work sometimes. you texted him after the incident and he doesn't know what happened but when he sees you next he gives you a brief hug, real tight, and he has sort of become like a father to you, the kind of man that brings down your barbed-wire edges with a kind word. and he says is everything going to be okay and you tell him yes, and everything will be okay. but then sometimes you can't stop bawling on the way home, and you end up curled up on the couch, and your half-sober mom says what's wrong, what's wrong. and all you can say is it's my fault, mom, it's all my fault.

it is your fault. what happened in september. it is not on him. it is not on her. it is all on you. it is your inability, your mental block. you know it will happen again and it is not a judgement on him. this sort of thing just happens. when they realize what you are they throw you away. you never stood a chance.

and he is good to you, which is why you must throw him away first. he always asks and he never pushes and he doesn't treat you like you are fragile and he doesn't get mad at your jokes and he is the perfect balance, and that is why you have to bite the bullet so you are not cleaning the bullet hole.

you keep waiting for forgiveness and you don't know who you're waiting for forgiveness from because no one blames you for any of it. and you don't want forgiveness from your boyfriend's ex-girlfriend or her friends, too pretty and too perfect for you. you don't.

you wake up one night, curled up on the couch, too tired to breathe, and you realize that the only person you are still waiting on forgiveness from is yourself.

[sab3rto0thed]

even before you start driving, you think of crashing the car. it is a game all of your favorite friends used to play, piano on the gas pedal and the brake. you wanted to learn the rules so damn bad because you thought they might love you if you did. it is the things you do when you are desperate.

a desperate thing to do: a girl with a face full of constellations. the first time you see her, you notice sirius right under her eye.

a desperate thing to do: you lie to her all the time. the desperate thing she does back: she never lies to you. it is the worst balance on the scales. if you were in court, they would send a dog to eat your heart.

you sit in the driver's seat with your ankle tied to the engine and you imagine your mother dead in the passenger seat, the lenses of her glasses shattered against her eyes. you are terrified of your own will, boundless and impermanent as it is. you are going to crash the car.

there is a girl with a face full of constellations and you are sure she is going to crash the car. everyone plays this game with you. on the tip of her nose lies orion.

you don't know when you begin to love her. you ask her: what do you do when you love a liar?

she has eyes like the moon, bright and reflective and celestial. she tells you: i wouldn't know. you don't lie to me anymore.

you are an actor. at night, you sit on the road in the rain picking up all of the pieces. she finds you there one night, sodden in the street, slumped over like a ragdoll. she pulls you inside when you cut your hands and has you takes sips of something warm until there is feeling in your body again.

you tell her a secret for all of her trouble. you tell her that you are a car crash. she just looks at you. vega gleams on the arc of her jaw. she loves the stars. you love the planets. in another life, you could have been best friends.

when you see her in the daylight, you duck away from her. she says why do you act like you have no idea who i am and you tell her because it is better for you, it is better. you don't want to know me.

the hurt in her voice is worse than any kind of cut you have ever made. she says i would never pretend not to know you. i can't believe you would think that of me.

all of your tragedies before this have been loud, like metal crumpling or chemical burns or choking with your head tucked between your elbows. for the first time, you understand what grief looks like when it is quiet. there were a thousand miles between you two, and you could've heard a pen drop in every one.

this is what you do. you ruin things.

in another life, you could have been best friends. in this life, you are impermanent. all you are good for is crashing the car.

you drive too fast when it is raining. you bare your teeth in the dark. you play rock paper scissors with fate until it wraps around your throat. piano on the gas and the brake, ankle tied to the engine.

the girl with the constellations in her face tells you that she calls you sideireus, which means star-bearing. you are speechless.

you love her.

you are never easy. you are hysterical about her leaving. she is a little hysterical about leaving, too. you sit with your arms pressed together, knees to your chest. when you cry, she doesn't flinch. when she cries, you don't leave.

you love her. the shadows in the room shift every time she blinks.

one day you are driving the car and you end up in a car wreck. you don't know how it happened but you are sitting in the middle of the road and there is glass all around you. your spine is protruding from your back and it gleams just like the sky at night. the police officers are ignoring you in favor of dragging everyone away on stretchers. you don't know what happened.

the girl with the constellations finds you there on the street. she crunches through the glass and she has to say your name three times until you finally see her face.

"this wasn't you," she says. "you didn't crash the car."

there is blood in the corner of your mouth like someone hit you in the face. there is sirius right under her eye.

she doesn't lie to you.

there is a boy that likes you. he was in a car crash. he is always a little worried about you crashing the car. you tell him you never crash the car when you have a passenger in the seat. he doesn't seem to read too much into it, but you know what you mean. when he is falling asleep, his entire body jerks. when you ask, he says car crash. the irony is bitter. you don't know how to tell him that you are a car crash.

you squeeze his hand. his body jerks. you say, car crash. he says, car crash. neither of you have any idea.

you curl up in an armchair at your best friend's house, the girl with the constellations in her throat. she is in the living room, but sometimes she will come to touch the top of your head. she knows you feel isolated in small rooms. she wants you to know that she is still there. she wants to know that you are there. it is an important job, to be someone's anchor.

one day, you realize it is raining and you are not swerving on the gravel. the string that ties your ankle to the engine has been carefully cut. there is no one in the passenger seat.

you are not going to crash the car.

[sab3rto0thed]

nobody has to know.

it is both an omen and a promise, both ways a warning of things to come. you say it to yourself over and over as you steal from the grocery store. you say it to yourself over and over as you sit on the pavement, your shoulder wedged against someone's tire. your fingers are broken. your mouth is a mess.

you are an expert at keeping secrets, ever the actor. your entire life since you were ten has been a practice in immersion. you keep people strung, keep them guessing. they will want you that way, keep them stuck around, flies in honey. you are super sweet. you are too sour.

nobody has to know.

your teeth scrape divots in shoulders. your fingernails have been filled with blood for years. you hand out secrets, the ones that are yours and the ones that aren't, like they are free pieces of candy. small objects of representation are better passed quietly and never taken back.

you sit in your living room preaching about those that left you behind. you sit in someone else's living room preaching to the boy that left you behind about who left him behind. everyone is the same. you know this. he does not. you are not breaking his immersion.

nobody has to know.

you meet people over and over again and you are never truthful. your biggest rule is no touching, because that's where it gets dangerous. when you were suicidal three years ago a girl pulled you into her arms and then two weeks later she cut your voice box from a small slit in your throat.

you bleed and you bleed and you bleed. you bleed with want. your cheap golden rings cut the circulation from your fingers. you cut all your hair off and then scream about it to the walls and the pillowcase you have owned for four years. you are so loud when you are alone. you say nothing at all.

nobody has to know.

you meet a boy. you have met him at least three times before this so it is not as if the third time is the charm. you are just having fun like your friends do. you never have fun because you are not like them, edges spray-painted in gold. you are no bark, no bite. all bark, all bite.

everyone you have ever been with kisses you and then leaves. you can't be touched; you break the immersion. you god damn warned them. it's their fault, but they aren't the ones suffering for the character flaw. it's you. it's always you. you are always the one left behind.

nobody has to know. that's what you say to him over and over again. you lay in his bed and you say nobody has to know. he grabs your hand he kisses your neck he pulls at your shirt. no one has touched you in three years and you are a mess. the immersion has broken. everybody knows exactly what is going on.

i want everyone to know, he told you. fuck it.

the immersion broke into a hundred tiny little pieces. you cut yourself on all of them, accidentally this time. you clenched the steering wheel and screamed all the way home and this time you were actually saying something to the silence. you missed his hands. you missed his mouth. you had laid awake for so long in the dark filling the silence in his image.

you want everyone to know, too. you are tired of acting. you tell your friends he is not my secret because often you feel small and weak and you don't think you have very many things. but you have your words. and your best friend has made you so many friendship bracelets that they could take up a whole wall, so you have that, too.

nobody has to know, you told him.

fuck that, he said.

it was like waking up. it was like finding oxygen after a near-fatal drown in the local swimming pool. it was like throwing all of that old shit away in the middle of the night. you are not made of sugar. you are a survivor.

you're a god damn bad actor now, and you've never felt better about it.

everybody knows. he does, especially.

[sab3rto0thed]

actually, when people ask what you do for fun, you say you tell stories. mostly, your stories are about a girl. love looks bad on her. it's a good premise, because love rarely looks bad on anyone.

she has probably always been this way, even cheerful and grinning with two front teeth missing. she loved to love regardless of how it made her neck hang. when the neighbor boy told her he would kill her mother if she didn't kiss him, she didn't kiss him. she was terrible at following directions.

every night of every year after that, though, she haunted the hallway by her mother's room. pale feet, wooden floorboards, shoulders locked back. love looked terrible on her, a sodden goose drowned by the legs. she would stand there minute after minute, waiting for an inhale. a greek statue, but less glamorous.

when she is fifteen, she meets a boy. he does not threaten her mother until later. he has a nice face and slightly crooked teeth, the kind of stomach that is freckled if you look hard enough.

he loved her in the way you hate someone. you kiss them and then cut their belly open from the tip of the ribcage.

love looked terrible on her. she flinched every time the knife came out, because she was terrible at following directions. it didn't matter how many times he said i love you. she learned to hate his mouth.

it was hard to let anyone near her after that. days trickled through her fingers like tap water. when a different girl with blonde hair and very dark brown eyes tried to pull her away from the sink, she did a lot of damage.

love looked very good on this girl. she had a way of warming up an entire room with just the curve of her shoulders. the girl loved her fiercely, and avoided her with the same fervor. love was a disease. she would rot from the inside out if she stayed in that room.

the girl got better at love, though. you live and you learn and you heal. she stopped looking at the mirror as a cutting instrument. her eyes, which had always seemed a little sunken, seemed more blue now. she could tie her hair back with quick maneuvers, and she had a nice smile. a genuine one.

she hadn't ever noticed that before.

she had a lot of scars from all of the years love had thrown her around. there were always a few bruises around her throat and the skin was peeled off on her left knee. she had a large incision in her upper arm.

these were the sort of marks you couldn't see unless you really loved her, and so usually, no one saw them. but love had begun to be gentler with this girl, and in turn, she had begun to be gentler as well.

love was a two-way street with very few cars, a ball park at night. love was a shout in the dark. love was the saying call me, i love you. for years, she had had no where to go. now she had plenty of places. it was a little dizzying sometimes, like a labyrinth.

she met a boy.

he never threatened her mother. when he was fifteen, he had the sort of shitty haircut and roughspun hue that made him endearing. she made a living of avoiding his mouth. he kissed her anyway.

love looked terrible on her. she triple-laced her shoes, pulled her socks over her pale calves. you could almost see the bone, and you didn't need to love her to look.

she fell in love the way you drown. each time varied in degrees of lethal. when she was fifteen, falling in love had been a handful of pills. now it was a room full of water with slow-closing walls.

she was a girl that had always been a bit drowned. she could take on a little water.

he made a fool of her in the way you have people laugh at you on purpose. he wore a perfect blue hoodie and he took handfuls of her shirt to pull her closer. she was good at not flinching, because love hadn't hit her in a long time.

(she tried not to say this part out loud, but she never felt the need to flinch around him.)

it was a good joke, then, when she did flinch. it had something to do with her thighs. she was terrible at directions. he was gone the next day, leaving her haggard in the mirror, too small in his jacket. there were better girls with fuller mouths and unmarred skin. they didn't flinch. she knew.

she ruined things. she had made a career out of it. forget college.

he said sorry. the people around her that both loved her and didn't said we've never seen him look at anyone the way he looks at you.

none of it mattered. what had been done had been done. a boy behind a gas station counter had given her a free coffee and a look full of pity. he knew that she had flinched.

she was a joke. love looked terrible on her.

[sab3rto0thed]

when i was thirteen, my close friend at the time said that death, to him, was like an empty seat. a classroom of bobbleheads, a rainy day, and an object that was misplaced. too many chairs. not enough students.

i did not like him very much after that. it wasn't because of the comment. he was often callous and self-involved, as many thirteen-year-olds are. actually, at eighteen, i am probably much more callous and self-involved than he could have ever hoped to be. he is a college boy now, star theatre student. there was never an empty seat of his.

the same could not be said for me.

i struggled with school. i struggled with most things, actually. being kind. being patient. being believed. this would be a recurring theme throughout my high school years.

when i was much younger than thirteen, i remember sitting in the back of my mother's car. she and my little brother were talking about something or other; the details were not important. the day was rainy and gray. i had a princess-themed toy in my hand, its coloring pastel blue.

dread melted along my skull and trickled down my back like warm water, because i had realized that i was going to die.

death was also an important recurring theme throughout my high school years. when i was sixteen, i would stumble out of class as if i was drunk. if i sat still too long with the same four walls looking at me, they would start to crumble. the floor would fall and i would end up upside-down in the counselor's office. i hated the way they would look at me, with a cocktail of disappointment and pity in their eyes.

one day, i pounded down the dirt road that led to my school, my backpack draping awkwardly over my shoulders. dust flew up in my path. i ended up at the animal shelter, crouched outside of a cage with my knees to my chest. the cat inside of the cage mirrored my position, its eyes as wide as the moon.

when i was younger, i would write about superheroes. the S girl, who wore everything bright pink and sparkly. she was me. when i was thirteen, i climbed the ropes outside of the middle school in the early morning frost in my super girl costume.

the best teacher i'd ever had suggested a few days ago that i should write about a teacher that was also a superhero. i was far past that.

my dog died a few months ago. before her and even while we had her, i was not very fond of dogs. the day we put her down, i knelt on the carpet next to her and took her paw in my hand. it was a very human experience, the act of dying.

she turned her eyes on me. for the last few months of her life, i was the closest person to her. i took her out at night and always made sure her water dish was clean. she would take the leash from me and hold it in her mouth, and she would always cling to my side.

i didn't like dogs, but i liked her. we were the same sort of creature. our lows were very low.

during high school, i had produced a lot of empty seats. i hadn't thought i would make it past sixteen; and in a way, i hadn't. i am still half-convinced that i was mostly decaying for that entire year, walking around with an anchor hooked in my bones.

i am eighteen. i graduated high school. for a month, i felt like i was high on that fact. now, the reality of it tastes like metal. sometimes i don't know if i am ever enough.

my lows are still very low, but then my highs are steady. my best friend went to college two months ago, but she visited last weekend. we sat in her bed and while she dozed off, i laid there next to her, watching the rise and fall of her chest. it had become easier for me to live and not think so much about dying. that in itself was worth a thousand graduations.

the best teacher i'd ever had suggested i write about a teacher that was also a superhero. i didn't need to do that. i didn't believe in the whole fancy-suits-and-climbing-ropes thing anymore. actually, to me, a hero had been my junior year english teacher, who had noticed every time my seat was empty. if he was no one else's hero, he had been my first one.

i was eighteen. if i wanted to drive two hundred miles to see the boy i liked, i could do that. and i did not need to live in empty rooms anymore.

suicide had been my most intimate relationship for a long time. moving on gave me growing pains, but most things did.

[sab3rto0thed]

i dreamed of you again.

you were you except your face kept shifting. you tended to like the guise of the boy that asked for my number at a convenience store. he said we should go hiking. we didn't talk after he learned i was eighteen and he was twenty-three. you were never above shit like that.

you were reciting richard siken to me, in the dream; which is an irony that i find exhausting. over and over again you said love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love. it's like a religion. it's terrifying. no one will ever want to sleep with you.

i woke because my spine was scraping the mattress. i could feel the gristle of it, the roughspun hues of my skin. my body was still a little foreign to me, though i was learning what she knew.

it was deep in the night but the light creeped under the frame of my bedroom door. i walked with heavy feet, making no sound, across the wooden floorboards.

there was a girl curled up on the couch, surrounded by the dim light of her house. she kept asking you to come over. she said please. she knew how to beg.

during the summer, you took her hand and turned her palm up to the sun to check for splinters when you were both done lifting heavy wooden splints. during spring, you held her tight in the backseat of any car she wanted, an either/or situation. in autumn, you slung her around by her ankles and kissed her neck. in the winter, you checked for scars on her wrists.

i didn't eat for weeks, she murmured.

you should have called me, you told her. i would have come over. i would have made you something.

she should have said you never come when i ask you to. my hope would have just killed me.

she didn't say it, but you both knew it was the truth.

the poem is called litany in which certain things are crossed out, i told you. you head was turned. you didn't listen, unrepentant.

i bashed your face into the wooden floorboards. i am still talking to you about help. i still do not have these luxuries. that was what i told you. another quote from the same poem. you would laugh at me. you were always sick in the head.

there is a girl curled on the sofa. she is sick and starving. you know exactly who hit her and where they placed their palms. you want to be the next one to put your fingers around her throat. you are both unrepentant in nasty ways.

love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love, you said. you slipped a few pills down my throat when you kissed me.

when i was laying with a different boy, i told him about you. he stroked my hair. i can imagine that.

he liked me so much. he thought my eyes were pretty. you never took more than a glancing hit, but i knew everything about you. the white scars on your knuckles. your blue jeans that never fit. your hips, too thin. the one truth we had in common.

you ruined me.

sometimes, you dream. my head resting against your thigh. your foot on the gas. crashing the car.

when i was littler, i would wake in a cold sweat, my spine against the mattress. i was thinking about god. i would run to my mother.

that was how it was, on that couch. when i thought about you, i was terrified, slick with sweat, my spine protruding from my throat. it was just you and me. there was no one else that could break the sound barrier.

i made a friend that had suffering rearranged the right way, with all the correct letters. but he had your laugh and your voice, your endearing sense of humor. the other night, i saw a boy that looked at me a second too long. he had the sharp cheekbones, the messy hair.

i want to be brave, but i feel so small around you. like a little kid.

hi, sweetheart, i would say to you. i would cut.

i take the girl from the couch. she is very small. she hasn't eaten in days, and no one is checking in on her.

come on, sweetheart, i tell her. let's go to bed.

we go back to bed, and our spines don't scrape the mattress clean open. you never come, but others do. they don't try to choke her.

you will die before me. if i have no other gratification, i have that.