Blame

Games we played as children

I haven’t left my room today. Yet. Yet is an important modifier. It’s only 11:30, after all, but it means a lot for someone who used to come down every day to eat breakfast with her family. I can hear laughter from the kitchen. Miri’s voice is particularly loud—her smile alone can cut through glass and sinew. Someone is vacuuming. I can hear the buzzing through my bed frame.

I will have to eat soon. If I go downstairs, though, I will have to confront the reality of my illness, and the reality of my place in this family. How quickly I fell from prodigal son to despised daughter. And they only know a fraction of the truth, the little bandaid lies I thought might cover my open wounds and the little bits of the truth I tried to tell. God, how that backfired. Cry too many times in front of you mother—let’s say, two? Three?— and you become the black sheep. The outcast.

If only I hadn’t told the truth. If only I hadn’t let them peak beneath the armor. I really fucked it up this time, didn’t I, my dear? I do wish I could take back what I said, I’d give anything, trade any treasure. Really truly, I swear it on my soulless self. Now, though, it’s all out there and it’s never going away. My fault, my fault. Can’t you just shut UP for ONE FUCKING SECOND?

I avoid it all. I avoid seeing their faces. I avoid talking about how I’m feeling. They’ll pity me whether I’m in the room or not. Why give them the satisfaction?

They’ll call me for lunch soon, I hope. I’m still hoping they want me, after all of this. I just want them to treat me like normal, but there isn’t a normal anymore, only this looming shadow that they can see now and point at and mock and laugh. But probably they won’t call for me. They don’t do that, anymore. Not after I sealed all my walls back down as tightly as I could. They may know some of my secrets, but I’ll never let them close again.

I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT

I hate most of all the feeling of being perceived. I want to wither away until I’m nothing but smoke. I want to give it all up, and then some.

I wish I were adopted. I’m so different from them, on the inside. Why can’t that difference manifest itself all over my face, my arms, why can’t it be scribbled in black ink across my chest? Maybe I want a sharp, icy exterior that matches my brittle prickliness and sour bitterness, my unfeeling/wrong-feeling nature. Maybe I want a reason to hate them or hold them at arm’s length or avoid them or stop dreaming of them dying in increasingly painful ways while I stand there, with all my abilities, unable to prevent anything.

Maybe what I really want is a reason to be this messed up on the inside, some ulterior motive. Please, god, give me a proper, solid reason, some traumatic childhood event, a chronic illness, something, anything. I need an excuse, a fucking reason, or else this really is all my fault. Or else I did everything, drew every drop of blood, made every cut, hurt every single one of them with my own hands guided by nothing but my fucked-up head.

If there’s no method to all of this madness then there is no one left to blame except the only one still standing: myself.