I don’t know how to be a person anymore.
I don’t know if I ever did, but I’m pretty sure I never questioned everything this much.
I stand in the kitchen, lean against the stove, and just wonder. About everything. I wonder if this winter will ever end and why I hate myself most of the time and how I think I’d make a good housewife even though that’s the last thing I ever want to be and about one day wanting that more than anything because it’s ingrained, probably, and I wonder why two minutes on the coffee-maker lasts longer than sitting at the ocean for hours and I think about the sand stuck on my feet and about dying, about how I won’t live in this house for very much longer but how much I feel like a little girl, still hurt so easily, so afraid of everything.
Then the tea kettle whistles and it sounds like a scream. I pour the water into a powder blue mug and think about how ridiculous it is. Everything, I mean. How all those thoughts and things are happening all the time while we live like this, worrying about being on time to baby showers and things like that that mean absolutely nothing. But string them together and they’re everything: a whole life. And I’m so confused. I don’t know how not to think about these things. I don’t know how not to laugh at all of it. I laugh at so many things, because of the sheer oddity of it all. But I’m always the only one laughing, and that scares me a lot. How seriously they all take it. How much it means to them. Then I wonder if anything means enough to me. It hurts like it does. Everything f***ing hurts; when the sky turns the right shade of blue I’m done for. When somebody looks at me for more than a second I’m split right open. It all hurts like I’m bleeding from a thousand tiny paper cuts, dribbling quietly out onto the floor. Gasping for something I’m not even sure exists.