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Sometimes I'm like "I don't know" but I do know..

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An Exploration of Guilt in a Fifteen Year Old Girl

She used to know somebody. A friend, a close friend, who was smart and kind and funny and broken. This friend asked her who she knew, and being young, she told them. Three months later she found out what happened. Two years later she blames herself.

She is rarely interested in anything. How could she be? She has already experienced everything she cares about and now the world is dull with nothing to love. Until a film comes out, and she watches it six times with eight different people. Until a rocket launches and she falls asleep watching the people aboard be the only place we cannot contact them. She loves these things with such an intensity that she feels like she is losing her mind.

How can she focus on the good things when the world is ending around her? Every Friday she watches three comedians make jokes about the apocalypse and she dreads the moments when they stop laughing. She checks her messages and somebody is telling her to prepare for nuclear war. She goes to her garage and her parents have started stockpiling. Her dad calls himself a "low-effort prepper". Her sibling says the same. Her dad defends his privacy like a cornered wolf unless its his computer, in which case he is a docile dog. Her sibling is studying the very thing she thinks is going to kill her.

Sometimes she dreams of the future. One where she can eat what she wants and see who she wants and won't feel like she's melting when she talks to the people she loves. Maybe she's on a stage, performing a monologue to a still and raptured audience. Maybe she's on a set, speaking lines she helped write to a camera she pretends isn't there. Maybe she floats above, working with people for hundreds of days from around the world, knowing that she is safe.

She hates to think of the future. It is so uncertain, how dare she believe she has one? Even when in free-fall she still thinks of the stars, of the stage lights, of the pen and paper and flashing lights. But how dare she try to reach them? It is not her place to live, it is not her place to think. She must watch the world end and she must be willing to let it happen.

The strange thing about this girl is that she knows what she is not. She is not the name written on birthday cards, nor the one her books are signed to. And she knows, within her bones, that she will not tell people. Her friends, yes, and the people at her school know, and her sibling, and her parents, but most of them don't believe her. And she has to make a choice between living as who she is and betraying everything she loves, or living as who she is not and betraying the scared ten year old who didn't know why she felt so wrong.

She knows what she will choose. She will be a woman, a scientist, working with people who aren't like her at all, and she will be fine. Not happy, not good, but fine. And she will live with the guilt that festers within her soul until the day she dies. She will be buried under a name she wants to burn and if she's lucky, two people will remember her not as the accomplished woman she grew to be but as the teenage boy she was scared to let go.

She knows people. People who make her happier than ever before. And she knows that if she's lucky, some of them might stay. Some of them might let her stop being a female pioneer and let her be a tired man. Just once. Maybe she'll find somewhere safe. For now, though, she'll stew in her guilt until it wears her down to something people find palatable and pretend to be something she's not.

It seems to work.