Sometimes when I am asleep, and the wind is coming in through the window of my childhood bedroom, I can almost feel you here. For a sleepover, the way we used to do all the time. It was just our clothes then, I didn’t know what was mine or yours. It was our day then, we never left each other’s sides. It was our life then, a pact that if we made it to 40 and were still single, we’d run away together and live on the beach in Mexico. I always wake up in a sweat from those dreams now. Now I live in your phone as an unknown cell number, I live in your photos as a girl you used to know. I live in that stain I left on the carpet of your truck when my bubblegum ice cream melted. Now I’m the most hated girl. For twenty-five years in a row. If you’ve never been the last choice friend, undiagnosed depression at a very young age, artsy but filled with melancholy girl, then you’ve never been the most hated girl. But I’ve worn her skin all my life. At first it was the separate group chat with 9 memb...
I’ve left a little piece of me to die with everyone I no longer know. It’s been the hardest feeling I’ve come to terms with in this lifetime, and probably the next. There are dead pieces of everything all around me. Pieces of myself that I miss, pieces of people I loved, pieces of memories I can still feel, pieces of hurt that I carry in my pockets. Every so often I visit the graveyards. I grieve my people and all of the places I’ve been with them. I mourn all of the bridges I burned because of the girl I used to be, the attitude I used to own, the emotions I used as a weapon. I visit and I hurt myself by imagining a world where all of these things were still alive. Here lies a girl I knew once: There’s this theory that with every decision you make, a part of you breaks off and continues in the other direction - creating an infinitely long line of different pathways in life. Many of mine lay here. A version of me who got that one job and left that place, a version of me who got married...