I inscribe three lines, hush hush hush, into my skin. Ghosts trickle out.
It’s easier to floss with barbed wire than admit you like someone in middle school.
Gym should be illegal. It’s humiliating.
This is where you can find your soul if you dare. Where you can touch that part of you that you’ve never dared look at before. Do not come here and ask me to show you how to draw a face. Ask me to help you find the wind.
Can’t escape pain, kiddo. Battle through it and you get stronger.
If I ever form a clan, we’ll be the anti-cheerleaders and walk under the bleacher forming mild acts of mayhem.
I doubt trees are ever told to ‘be the screwed-up ninth-grader.’
I was good at digging holes. It was the rest of life I sucked at.
Having a friend made everything else suck less.
Used to be that my whole body was my canvas-hot cuts licking my ribs, ladder rungs climbing my arms, thick milkweed stalks shooting up my thighs...
I wonder how long it would take for anyone to notice if I just stopped talking.
Do they choose to be so dense? Were they born that way? I have no friends. I have nothing. I say nothing. I am nothing.
They say they have noticed me drawing. I almost tell them right then and there. They noticed.
I know my head isn’t screwed on straight. I want to leave, transfer, warp myself to another galaxy. I want to confess everything, hand over the guilt and mistake and anger to someone else. There is a beast in my gut, I can hear it scraping away at the inside of my ribs. Even if I dump the memory, it will stay with me, staining me. My closest is a good thing, a quiet place that helps me hold these thoughts inside my head where no one can hear them.
My parents didn’t raise me to be religious. The closest we come to worship is the Trinity of Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. I think the Merryweather cheerleaders confuse me because I missed out on Sunday School. It has to be a miracle. There is no other explanation. How else could they sleep with the football team on Saturday night and be reincarnated as virginal goddesses on Monday?
We should teach our girls that snapping is ok, instead of waiting for someone else to break them.
My earbuds were in, but I wasn’t playing music. I needed to hear the world but didn’t want the world to know I was listening.
It had been a good day, all things considered. I had managed rather well on my own. I opened Grandfather’s Bible. This is what it would be like when I had my own shop, or when I traveled abroad. I would always read before sleeping. One day, I’d be so rich I would have a library full of novel to choose from. But I would always end the evening with a Bible passage.
I just want to sleep. The whole point of not talking about it, of silencing the memory, is to make it go away. It won’t. I’ll need brain surgery to cut it out of my head.
Shame, turned inside out, is rage.