Britney

I don’t remember the exact date and time; it could’ve been when my mother died (12:13 A.M., November 26, 2014), it could’ve been when I realized once and for all I’d spent years falling in love with the wrong person and it had finally come to bite me (sometime in June 2015), it could’ve been right before I went to the hospital again, it could’ve been a gradual amble to my demise in which I lost bits and pieces of myself and didn’t realize until I came face to face with the void. All that matters is: I died. (“In order to be reborn, one must first die.”)

There are pieces of my past life haunting all the rooms that I myself have come to haunt in my 16th year—heart shaped boxes, pictures taken with disposable cameras from years past, old cramped handwriting, dirty backpacks, dog-eared books that I don’t remember owning. I hear songs and remember who I used to be. I don’t miss my old self.

“I have been to hell and back.

And let me tell you,
it was wonderful.

I am home and I have returned to a world where I do not exist. The feeling is comparable to, say, watching your own funeral from beyond the grave and realizing that no one showed up. The only friend who I could be vulnerable and full of love and tenderness around has been ripped away from me in an awful, Heavenly Creatures-esque fashion, and I’m so sad that I could die. I feel as empty as I did when I left for inpatient and no meds or psychiatric treatment can change that, no matter how many people try to force it on me. I listen to Lana Del Rey and the Doors record I got months ago at a flea market that I see in my dreams sometimes, and cry. I am not pretty when I cry. I revel in such an open display of ugliness—there’s something reassuring about the vulnerability in the crumpling of my face, the spilling of tears across my slip, the dry heaves in the dead of night. ♦