I’m three years old and there’s bullet holes in our kitchen
I often wonder why I’m miserable. Why I can’t seem to find the same joy in life others do.
I dream of being chased by dogs.
No one sticks around to take the blame, so it must be.
I’m too small to see into the coffin. I don’t understand. He doesn’t look like someone I know anymore.
My cousins teach me how to play Uno on the floor of the funeral home.
Death becomes an option. His absence tells me this is forever.
So when my mother picks me up in my first grade classroom, I understand. I scream. I cry. I don’t see the eyes of my classmates on me. I don’t see my teacher cry.
I hadn’t yet started to speak. They hear me scream.
Too new to earth to understand poetry, I write about death in second grade English classes with messy prose and misspelled words.
My only friend moves across the country. I won’t see her for several years. In class, I learn I don’t know how to spell her name.
A councilor sits with me in the hallway at a tiny desk and asks about bullying. All I remember is crying and fear.
I make friends with a girl in third grade. It isn’t a choice, but she stays by my side for years to come. I find her fascinating and assume she must be rich.
There are holes in my ceiling at home.
We’re independent people, I learn, we don’t ask for help. I’m eight years old and cleaning with bleach unsupervised. It’s not until high school I learn I should have gloves.
I want to run away. I learn we have a home somewhere else, where my aunt lives. I don’t understand boarders. I don’t understand passports. I’ve been there, so surely they’ll let me back.
My mother watches as I empty my dresser into a Disney princess suitcase and storm off to the corner to go home.
But I’m small. I have no money. I have no control. I come back.
I’m nine and I ruin my life.
We have no insurance, but I don’t understand that. It’s 2009 and I’m at my birthday party in agony, unable to stand. I crawl back to my parents and am told to stand up or I’ll scuff up my shoes.
It’s too late on that. And six months later, when the pain still hasn’t gone away, it’s too late to fix that, too.
I’m given pads for my shoes to make it easier to walk. When I grow out of them, they aren’t replaced.
The bullying doesn’t stop. A girl that follows me after school. She knows my address, the school made a phonebook to try to build a community. I’m too scared to go outside, and I hurt too much anyways.
I’m put into cross country to make friends and fail out of it.
I’m out into tennis to make friends and fail out of it.
I’m put into soccer to make friends and try and try and try. I’m the joke, collapsing in the field. I’m told I’m dramatic.
I must be, if they say so. There has to be a fix as to what is wrong with me. I wonder if the answer lies in the nutrition facts we learned about in school.
I’m ten years old and counting calories.
I draw comics of my stalker getting abandoned at my summer camp with my friends and I. We kill her and bury her on the first page.
My councilor hits me and shoves me into a tree. I’m small and skinny and hurting, but I’ve learned not to cry. I laugh, and she leaves me alone.
It’s middle school and I learn I don’t have to be girl.
But I’m told I don’t understand. Adults that know more than me say so. I make myself bleed instead. I get my calories down.
We travel, and I remember what it’s like to be alive. Home again, for the first time in over half of my tiny life. I fall in love with the island all over again, and cry on the plane home.
I’m twelve years old and five foot six. I weigh under 100lbs. I’ve trained myself not to feel the heat when I wear long sleeves in the summer.
I visit my friend that moved away when I was small and fall in love. Being a lesbian is more acceptable, and now the adults find it cute when I cut off all my hair and refuse dresses. I’m made to watch Rent for the first time, and fall in love with theatre.
My friend is the desktop background on my laptop. I’m the only openly queer person in my entire k-8 school. The others come to me and tell me, but we all know better than to make them come out.
My stalker leaves the school in 7th grade. She’s replaced by a boy who makes it his soul mission to harass me.
I discover poisons. Well acquainted with death, I design my entire science fair as a rouse to collect what I need for my suicide.
It’s 8th grade and we’re on lockdown. Sports have failed me, my untreated injury from years before embarrassing me at every turn, so I’ve retreated to online spaces.
Never without my laptop, other kids come to me crying as I sit in the lunchroom with the lights out, trying to track down missing classmates. I wonder if I’m going to die. I wonder if I get to die helping people.
We get out okay, and the adults tell me how proud they are that I could be so calm under pressure.
I sweep up bits of my ceiling when I get home.
I wonder why you’re all here with me. I wonder why I ignored you so long. Overly independent and scared to be a home to people I love.
I loved my friends, and when we go our separate ways in high school, I realized we sat on different waves lengths.
A girl latches on to me in my summer gym class. It’s supposed to help us make friends before the school year starts, and get a class out of the way in the process. She tells me later that she noticed me because I was wearing a knee length sweater in the Indiana heat.
She becomes my first girlfriend, and I put her through trials.
Death follows me, and she comforts me as I sob over the phone when a three year old dies far too soon. Food is a love language to her, and for the first time someone sees I’m starving. She’s smart, and no matter where I move to target she finds the untreated wounds in my skin and wonders why I do this.
I leave her. She comes to my door in tears.
I wonder often how our friendship survived me.
But it does. It survives late night sobbing phone calls. She stays as a friend dies, and another. It survives as I try to join them again and again.
A friend bikes to our house to hang out. He gets rained in and asks to stay the night.
He hurts me in ways I never thought I’d be hurt.
She stays. Everyone else turns against me.
I graduate with my name mispronounced in front of thousands of people. Blind in pain and misery, my voice catches the microphone as I correct it.
I don’t remember much of high school.
But I graduate in 2019. I plan to travel the world in 2020, working in the meantime.
My first trip is canceled when I try to die and it can’t be ignored. I try to start HRT, I’m told I’m too young.
The world locks down. The rest of my travel plans are canceled and I start to get between my parents when they fight.
We don’t go in that building anymore, they found a friend’s body there.
A woman I work with tells me she’s scared to let me go home. I spend the night at her house and cry the whole night.
For over a month, I sleep on the couch at a friend’s place. I wake up every day covered in bites; the ants lived in this couch first and they don’t plan to move aside for me.
When she moves, I move with her, and suddenly I’m an adult with rent to pay. It’s a good thing I’ve starved for so long, cutting down to half a meal every day to pay the bills isn’t that hard. She tells me she loves me, that she always wanted a little brother, and I believe her as I starve and she parties.
She tells me I’m just a homebody. If I wanted to go out, I would. My body fails more and more every day, but I believe her. When I’m sad, she gives me vodka. When I overdose, she tells me to go to bed. Another failed attempt, another sick day. I miss work, and don’t eat in result.
Then we met him. For the first time in a long time, someone looked at us. He talks, and listens back. He doesn’t mock the things we love.
Suddenly, there are ways to go outside that don’t involve being drunk or being alone. We go on hikes, we visit the zoo on a free day. My leg gets worse still, and instead of leaving us behind, he waits as we learn to use a cane.
She gets upset. We move in together. She says we’re too close.
I meet his head mates. I adore them, more so once I learn to recognize them. Slowly, scared, he meets us.
She hates him. She hates them. Someone has given us attention for the first time in two years, and we no longer trip over ourselves at whatever kindness she finds convenient. She tells us to try dating elsewhere, and we do.
We start seeing a man that shoots himself in the head nine months later. Our mother, divorced, tells us to come home. Our roommate throws my boyfriend and I’s belongings down the basement stairs with rotting food. She doesn’t seem to understand why I don’t want to talk to her.
Home isn’t much better. I’m sent to the psych ward for trying to drink bleach and miss his birthday. Two years later I’m told my mother complained I was being dramatic.
The mother to the child that died also dies. This, apparently, is acceptable mourning.
Now, we’re close to running away. Our mother sent us to college kicking and screaming, terrified by previous experiences in school. We gain a new stalker, but get seen by professors as well. We talk to peers, people who seem just as broken but are absolutely brilliant.
Some of them see us, too.
Home is bad. Community college can only keep us out of the house so long, but for once, we have help.
We were accepted into our dream school a month ago. It’s far, far away from here.
All I want is to go home.
