Britney

Fun facts:

  • I write the same poem over and over again. Sometimes it feels as if I have never written anything outside of one poem, this shapeshifter with different skin and the same blood. But there are memories, of other things and people and places and I must find my way back to them. Or maybe that is the problem: I depend on what has been and pass over what will be until it has been and I scramble to remember, to prove that I existed in those moments.
  • It has been four years since high school began, four years since middle school ended, and seven years since middle school began, and I am still faced with the gnawing estrangement, the feeling that I have lost what used to love me or I used to love. Or what never really loved me. Sometimes I trail off into vague assertions and my therapist says, “Don’t do that, you know what you want to say,” and I agree but I still don’t know.
  • I am rendered a loose ball of nerves by many things and this angers my family. They tell me that there is no reason for me to be panicked, or afraid, or nervous. I remember when my mother would tell me to stop crying. I did want to stop crying, to scream, “I’m sad! Let me have a few minutes of spillage!” Now, my life is spillage, acts of malaise that ought to be carried out in private but seep into any available corner.
  • There are 43 days left of telling people I am a high schooler and I feel like each of my limbs is bound to a different horse, ready to sprint in different directions at a moment’s notice. Last night before bed, it hit me—so hard that I stopped breathing—that this really will be a memory one day. It will be far from me, and details will cease to exist, and I will curse what I did not do and lament the chances I trampled over and flay myself in a way that will sting more than skin would. I do not want this. But there is not much to want or to choose: I live or I don’t. Hobson’s choice. Generalizing big things is my only talent. ♦