Fifteen. I did not know how to wear black eyeshadow in a way that didn’t look like a bruise. It made me want for bullets as rouge. Still, I wore it. Smudged like soot over the thin film of skin over my eyeballs. I pressed my thumbs into my eyes the way women test fruit at the market. The way children press into the skulls of their newborn siblings, with a kind of curiosity that doesn’t fade as you age. I thought about how long it would take before vision slipped away. I was an artist. I liked playing with charcoal on paper the most. There was an inexplicable movement that this medium could create, that my body couldn’t. Still can’t. I was forever moving in a certain rhythm that made my father question what was wrong with me. My shoulders sat wrong on me, like a coat stolen off a dead girl. I wonder where I read that metaphor. My feet used to turn inward as I walked, the bones already broken. Everything was wrong if you looked at it closely. I wanted to go blind at the canvas, leave the last stroke unfinished so they’d call it genius. I wanted for nothing but outline, of myself, of this world. The ingenuity of it prepossessed me with a want for disaster unlike any other I have known. If I had lost something vital, an eye, a hand, they might have called it character. Perhaps tragedy would have done the genius God refused.

I couldn’t drive yet. I had failed my learner’s test five times, maybe more. Matter not. Mother always drove the family van, praying under her breath before inching forward on the driveway and then reversing out, as if that ritual could keep us alive. I didn’t feel safe. I biked everywhere just to prove to myself that I am not. Prayed to God, both feet on the pavement. Wheeled forward an inch. Reversed backwards onto the road.

One afternoon, a car met me halfway. I was only pedalling toward Dairy Queen, thinking about rocky road. It wasn’t even about the ice cream. I just wanted to be proven fragile. I wanted something stupid to happen to me, something I could name tragedy even if it was small. I would constantly seek out ways in which this could occur. I thought that might be enough. So instead of flinging myself out of the way the second the bumper clipped my tire, I let myself hit the ground. The car ran right over my foot like someone rubbing a hand on me. The warmth spread quickly, not love exactly, but close enough. Tire rubber kissed the meat of my body. I wanted to see the imprint. Would it stay? Would I peel like tape or wallpaper? For a second, I thought I had finally done it. Became nothing but the wet splatter of skin to gravel. Then the world blinked, and I was still here, only the same.

It was like that day in the schoolyard when my best friend pressed his hand against me, sudden and graceless and left it there, and I laughed because I didn’t know what else to do. If I didn’t laugh then I would’ve cried, and I had seen enough of how the sensitive girls were treated compared to the ones with more boyish traits like mine. I did not want to be ostracized. All I could think was that he should’ve at least taken my mouth too. I carried the shape of his palm for weeks, the faint ache blooming under my shirt. A cellophane balloon. I used it as a kind of ruler, measuring myself in secret. At Superstore I bought bras as other girls did, but in my case, size had already been accounted for. I would trace his handprint across the cups, pretending it was just another number to memorize.

I thought maybe it could still be useful to me. Maybe I could siphon it into something else, the way I had done with the car accident. Perhaps, this is where my attraction to mathematics comes from, the assortment of logic and organization. Everything has a use, a reason for existence. When my mother asked how I’d managed to guess my size right, I lied. Not for the first time. Some truths are too small to hand over. Better to let them fester where no one will ask again.

The car sped away, and I stayed on the ground, watching the sky flicker like an old cartoon. I imagined Tom finally stabbing Jerry, the knife cutting through fur, the blood spilling out in something serious and red. But of course, in the next frame, Jerry would be alive again. That’s how it always went. Why was nothing ever for real?

My mother was only my mother because she popped me out of her womb like the same Prozac pills she vomited down the toilet. My father was only my father because he forgot a condom and assumed the laws of procreation bent around him. They were never really mine. Even at the naive age of fifteen, I understood the tribulations of this world in a perspective usually overshadowed by the books I read. When I couldn’t understand my life I resorted to thinking this was all a parody of late-stage capitalism. Mother only kissed my forehead at the airport when she knew people were watching. Father only called me sweetheart when there was a cashier nearby to hear it. They continued having babies because they followed only our most primitive instincts. I was born because two people were conceited in their lovemaking. Or maybe I was born to find out what happened when you pressed the bruise just a little longer than you should. When you dig your fingernail in and the skin pops open with pubescent existentialism.

And Jerry never killed Tom. That was the trick. The chase went on forever, the wounds and the previous violence erased in every new frame. I imagined myself stretched out across the gravel like Tom after a piano fell on him, flattened, absurd. Only I wanted to stay that way. No bounce-back gag. I wanted my body to stretch and stretch and touch both ends of the earth, as Tom could have. I wanted my body to be the earth itself, finite and still. I wanted the cartoon to end with me pressed against the gravel, not moving, not funny, just for real.

In the summers they were always gone, so I learned to parent myself. Dinner was cereal. Dry, most nights, because milk felt too much like a luxury when no one was there to grocery shop for me. Entertainment was a twenty-five year old boy on an online forum, me roleplaying as a nineteen year old model named Lena. He told me his parents had sucked off the clown they voted for, said they were only scared of losing their citizenship. I remember asking him, isn’t that what patriotism is?1 Better to be afraid of what you can see coming, than what you cannot.

Sleep was my mother’s Prozac. One pill a night, swallowed with water that tasted of iron. The body would dissolve into a stream of something calcific, at times lingering on my teeth. Not to die. Just to rest. Just to stop the feeling, feeling, feeling that spread over me like mildew, sour and unstoppable. I was a child measuring how many hours a body could lie still without protest.

In the morning the sun rose indifferent, as it always did. The bowls sat in the sink, the milk curdled, the pill bottle lighter by one. No one noticed. No one ever noticed.

Behind closed doors my parents made love. Loudly, recklessly. They never bothered with condoms, and I only knew this because my mother’s moods shifted with pregnancy before she ever admitted to it. There were things I understood without needing to be told: the way bodies fit together, the words boys passed me in chatrooms and hallways. NTR. Cuck. That cock was just another word for dick, which was just another word for penis. It all sounded clinical, and yet it was the rawest thing.

There was always a third thing in the room, unspoken. The silence in the corner. The watcher nobody named. Every bedroom has one, I think. Something left behind after the door shuts.

I learned that sex was supposed to leave you gasping, throat bruised purple-blue like the sky after the sun abandons it. The same sky I used to ride under with my friends, speeding down suburban roads, our bikes rattling over potholes, Frank Ocean’s White Ferrari leaking through a JBL speaker. We believed we were flying then, untouchable, brown faces glowing under streetlights, brown-nosed parents waiting at home with the porch lights on.

Before the accident, everything felt endless. Afterwards, it didn’t.

I clicked the link Dwight sent me. 1:44:31. I don’t remember blinking once. She looked like me. Brown eyes, mosquito-flat chest, hair cut too short in the front. By the end, she was in a cage. I watched closely, searching for what part of her stayed human, what gave way to something primitive. I thought: maybe this is how girls become real, when someone is watching.

A week later, he kissed me in the drama room. He didn’t grope my chest. He groped my hand, as if he were digging in the dirt for a root. Something to hold. Something pulsing. His head pressed into my shoulder while the rest of the class filtered in. That was when I realized why nothing ever felt real. If it were real, it would be dirty. Invasive. Violent. Something secret, something unnameable.

Dwight never texted me again. Still, I bookmarked the link. I returned to it often, the same way I returned to my mother’s Prozac. A tether I couldn’t cut.

The neighbours stood on the street, their arms folded, their faces quiet. I stayed on the ground, staring up at the cloudy sky. Mother ran out first, father close behind, both kneeling at my body. Their lips moved in frantic repetition—praying, praying, praying that nothing was wrong with me. But everything was wrong with me.

In the clouds, a shape. Leering, obscene. A cock, pale and temporary, dissolving before I could point to it.

I prayed too. I prayed for God to name the thing inside me. The third thing. But names flattened it. Names stripped it of its pulse. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to name my zygote sister either. Better to keep her squirming in some half-light, a secret thing under the tongue, between the legs, behind the eyes. Something that exists only because it cannot be spoken.

Fifteen. I wore black eyeshadow. My afternoons were of Tom & Jerry reruns that never ended the way I wanted them to. I biked everywhere because driving felt like a death I wasn’t ready for. I clicked on hentai links, watched animated girls bend into shapes I couldn’t grasp in the third dimension. Kissed a boy for the very first time, quick and graceless, like missing a step on the stairs. Stole my mother’s prozac pills. I ate a lot of rocky road ice cream. And I was already feeling, feeling, feeling. Feeling in the body, in the teeth, in the blur of handlebars. Feeling that made my hands restless, my chest ache, my throat hot. For what, I didn’t know. For something. For nothing. But it was there.

At fifteen, that was enough. It was for real and now, done. The transgression of my youth. Nothing is endless in the way you may imagine as a child, sitting in the backseat of your parent’s car, watching the moon follow you home. Ducking under and to the side and still, it waited for you. Nothing is endless as it may have been. When I watched the final episode of Tom and Jerry, I had like many others, misinterpreted the ending but mine was still true. Tom and Jerry committed suicide and this is true, this is true. This is true to me. Nothing is endless as it once was, not in life, not in empathy, not in youthful rebellion. I am my mother now, and I wish I could return to the proclivities of a fifteen year old but I have much to do, much to do, and I miss nothing.

I miss everything. I miss that third thing.

Journal entry turned autofiction. As always, thank you Virgins for reading. I can’t promise I’ll be posting or writing as frequently as I once did. I remember few ideas and execute far less. I don’t know where I’m going or why I’m still searching for a place to go. I just want to imprint myself some place, like an annoying rash that lingers. And it seems as though, everyone wants to be on the periphery of my life, but no one wants to be my life. I am struggling to see things through and I continue to imagine a future where nothing is as endless as it once was. Nothing is endless as it was at fifteen, and it saddens me. What to do, what to do, what to do, but keep going…

Godspeed.

buy me a prozac 'm broke