growing up on a farm with parents who have no ability to recognize or care for your emotional needs is fun because you'll be a suicidally depressed eight year old and you'll run out into the field with them to find a chicken that's been horribly injured by some wild animal, and is slowly, painfully dying, and they'll hold it and care for it and tell you that when something is in pain, when something is suffering and it won't get better, the kindest thing you can do is make its last moments as pleasant and loving as possible, and then break it's neck so it dies as quick as possible, and you'll stare and watch them do this and instead of whatever you're supposed to be feeling in that moment, you'll just feel some indescribable yearning. some jealousy. and you already know that you want to die, but some part of you realizes that you want to be killed. that being killed means someone loved you enough to take away your pain. and then it happens again, and again, and again, repeated every time something strikes the farm, the animals, every time something has to be put down, and it smolders like an ember in the back of your mind and you lay awake at night crying that no one loves you enough to kill you, to put you down, even though the pain seems endless and desperately obvious, and at some point it becomes your only definition of love, that love means someone caring about you enough to end your life, and you know that no one ever will, and you lay awake wondering if that unfillable hole in your heart will ever heal over, or if you'll be hit over the head with these desperate, painful, yearning moments for the rest of your life, and that some part of you will always feel a little bit empty. And it's terrifying.
