ramblings

[07/23/2025] ☞ buck-knife ☞ I DON’T THINK there has been a single day since I turned ten where I haven’t been praying for a housefire. And my life has been one large theatrical failure thus far, and my life has only been given meaning through the way I hurt others. I cannot exist without killing someone else. I killed my father the second I was born— my mother; nine months before. And I would clench my jaw in class, or sink my teeth into my bottom lip, or plug my ears to hear the blood wash through them, and I would never feel any more or less human than before. I have always had too much time on my hands. I’ve never had enough. I have never had anything sufficiently important to fill the endless stretch of ceaseless seconds that fractal leeward and away from me with, so I have always spent my life bored and upset and unhappy. (The wings of the thirty-three stints crowding in my chest unfurled, and I spat the feathers out.)

I could not stop my pulse from ringing in my ears to the point of a rather unforgiving headache. Hastily, I glanced around my room, from poster to poster— textbook to textbook, empty water bottle to empty water bottle— hoping that I’d be able to ground myself in some kind of reality even halfway resembling ours. But it was no use (it quite frankly never seemed to be), and I was suddenly struck by a wave of nausea, my whole body then clammy and wracked with even more uncontrollable trembling, and the door was left open. I squeezed my eyes shut; white petals drifted hazily behind the lids. My mother didn’t even bother closing the door. After parting my lashes just enough to see the blurry outline of them, I noticed that there was a dead millipede curled up near one of the posts of my bed, and that was, funnily enough, what broke me. I began to cry, and it wasn’t quiet in the slightest. I was sobbing, and snot was dripping from my nose, and I couldn’t even stop for a second to catch my breath because that millipede wandered into my room, and I was sitting here thinking of ways I could kill myself, when it just died, unceremoniously, on my carpet. There were wet splotches on my indigo charity shop sweater. I pressed the heel of my palm against my forehead, unable to think of anything more complex than the repeated prayer ‘I hate myself, I hate myself, I hate myself’.