Britney

The doctors at the hospital taught me how to speak in numbers. Each numeral carried a separate pain and a separate pill. I wondered from my bed if the number 10 would even be able to speak. Sheets of blood came to mind. A 10 could speak for itself, I decided.

I smell the sickness before I can name it. It stains my sheets, the pillows that I have not slept on in 48 hours, the lining of my clothes. I have an infection and dark marks pop up without warning; I lose feeling in my right pinky.

School starts on the 9th. I wish someone would come to my house and tell me why every time I get relief, get some sort of understanding and even appreciation of the worst things in my life (see: 95 percent of it), something else drops onto the pile. Actually, let’s not even glamorize it—my mother has been dead for almost two years, my father is in a completely different half of the country, I live with someone who cannot stand me, I had maybe a week of bliss because I am not a person who is allowed to like someone and have it work out because that just isn’t me, that isn’t how my life is allowed to go, I was run over by a car, my one respite—skating—has been ripped away, I had a month of summer before it ended for me, I broke my phone, I lost my glasses, I lie in bed all day with intrusive thoughts and fruit flies, I live in a city full of people whose awfulness you should be glad you cannot and should not be able to fathom and so even if I could go out I would be submerged in what can only be described as an abyss of complete unfeeling and uncaring, and last but surely not least, I now have diabetes. I don’t need another person to tell me what a great tragedy I have for my college essay.

How can you possibly think not giving up is a good idea when God Themself whispers into your left ear, Drop dead? ♦