echeveria

You make me sick.

You fill me with so much rage I start to question who I am, because the person I know does not feel hatred like this. The person I know abhors violence and the idea of punching your face and feeling your check split beneath my fist. But I do not. I crave it. I know that my words will slide off you because you are too arrogant and unaffected to be reasoned with. I know that appeals to your humanity will be swiped away because your world view was formed atop a tower looking down. But my knuckles will stick. My boots will bruise you. You are not invulnerable. I want to make you understand what it feels like to be the people whose lives you toy with and trivialise – powerless.

You are loud but you are nothing. Your words are empty and they cannot hurt me. Your rules are not my rules and you will not contain me. You will not make me believe that my mind is inferior, that my body is not my own.

I am not weak.

You are.

When you decide what I'm saying before I've even opened my mouth, you'll never hear what you want to hear. When you drown out my protests with your own voice you'll never understand that I don't want to fight you. When you interrupt me, when you dismiss me, when you assign your own meaning to my words, you push yourself further away from the truths I'm trying to tell you.

You made me but you are not me.

We are similar but we are not the same.

It is not my fault that I learned from your behaviour and you did not.

I'm not sorry for not needing your approval anymore.

When he holds me I feel small. When he holds me it doesn't matter that I'm actually 3 inches taller and falling apart, I feel like I'm home. When he holds me I can finally stop thinking and breathe.

When he smiles I forget that I don't believe in love. When he smiles I remember that there are so many good things all around me that I take for granted. When he smiles I smile too.

When he's not here my heat beats faster when my phone buzzes. When he's not here I cross days off my calendar and embrace the mundane. When he's not here we laugh on the phone and pretend it's as good as living in the same city.

It's a strange feeling to have someone grow into a life you always thought only had room for one. It's strange to crave the irrational happiness that comes from a simple smile. It's strange to realise you were wrong for a very long time.

You are capable of love after all. Sucker.

It's a flaw of the human condition that at our lowest we continue to seek out sadness. That depression finds depression wherever it exists. It's another documentary on the homelessness crisis in Britain. Its the mental goodbyes to living, breathing love ones whose death has only occurred in the mess of my imagination. Its the desire to tally every dollar spent to give tangible proof to a poor financial situation. Its the deliberately insufficient jackets that let the cold creep into my bones as I prove to myself that I can feel worse.

But I want to feel better.

I want to wake up and be motivated by excitement instead of stress. I want to feel the joy of running with the wind in my hair instead of savoring the pain of each foot hitting the ground. I want to hold onto the feeling of being tangled in his arms smiling over the city lights from 37 floors up.

I want to feel normal.

'Perspective.' Apparently, is what I need. I need to realise that of all the problems of all the people in all the world, mine are trivial. But I know. I know, and the weight of the knowledge of all of that suffering that I am powerless to prevent is crushing. But I keep reading, watching, crying over other people's stories because I feel like I owe it to them, because for a moment I was swallowed by my trivial problems and I forgot about theirs. I could feel worse.

I didn't like kissing him, it felt like a chore.

We made out because we didn't have all that much to say to each other, he seemed to prefer it that way.

I wish I realised earlier, realised that I wasn't broken or not trying hard enough. I wish I stopped before I started losing little pieces of myself each time I found myself in his bedroom.

I loved the feeling of the red shag carpet under my feet, and the thought of sitting on it and watching a movie with the boy I wanted him to be, but I never got to entertain the thought for long before he guided us over to the bed. I wish I said something. I loved the feeling of being wanted, but I did not love him. I did not love the feeling of being with him. I wish I realised that was okay.

I wish I didn't still blame myself for how he treated me. For every time he pushed my boundaries until they crumbled.

'My neck hurts.'

'I need to be home soon.'

'I don't want to take that off.'

None of the excuses were good enough, and time after time I let him cross the boundaries I set. I never said no. But I shouldn't have had to.

He should have known after the third time I pulled away that I did not want to be kissed. He should have known by the fourth time he asked, that my underwear were staying on. He should have acknowledged my obvious discomfort. But I should have said no. I should have learned.

*

'I don't think I can do this with the others here, it doesn't feel right,' I said to the next guy as he feels around under my shirt while our friends are sleeping on the floor around us.

'That makes it more exciting,' he says. He doesn't stop, he kisses me.

'This feels weird.'

'It's fine. Don't worry.'

I should have told him to stop. But I already had, and he didn't. So I told myself that I was being uptight and ridiculous, that I SHOULD want this, that all our friends wanted it to be 'a thing', that I was just nervous, and I let another guy break another boundary.

I kissed him back.

I hate him for that. And for every time after when his hands would find me in the dark, falling confidently back onto my hips each time I moved them away. For the times my discomfort frustrated him but he wouldn't talk about it, going back to kissing and grabbing instead. For the way he compounded what I had already learned to feel – that I was the one to blame for being uncomfortable and that I had no grounds to say 'no'. That I needed a reason to say it at all.

It took two boys to break me. It took one more to show me the pieces of myself I had lost. It took two years to start putting them back together.

So this is for the first two boys.

I will not let you keep me broken. I will not let you make me feel like my words are nothing. I will not believe that my feelings are second to your desires. I will not break again because I filled my cracks with iron and I will crush you if you try.

'You'll be fine, you're you.'

Honey, you don't even know who I am. You see the smile I stick on, you see the 'fine' result at the end, you spend all your time resenting the person you have decided I am because you won't let me show you my flaws or my pain. I am paralysed with fear in a crowed room and you tell me to get over myself because you're trying to worry about the new boy you like.

'Oh don't be ridiculous, you're perrrfect' 'Your life is so perfect' 'You can't complain.' 'You can't sympathise.' 'You've never felt what I feel.' 'Your problems don't exist.' Or rather,

'You don't have my sympathy because I'm jealous of you.'

Jealous of what? Of the nausea? The trembling? The desire to escape that builds up until I feel it pounding in my head and I cry and cry because it's the only way I seem to be able to let feelings leave my body? You see things work out 'fine' for me, but you don't see the process. You don't see the hours spent staring at a blank screen before submitting an assignment. You don't see the panic attack before the party. You don't see the bad days because you don't want to hear about them.

So don't fucking tell me I'm perfect. Don't tell me this means things will be fine. Things are fine because I put every ounce of energy into making them so, because you have created a perfect person that I can never be, but can't bear to fall short of.

There were over 200 postcards on my wall when I tore them all down last week.

The collection began as a protest against the plain white walls of my bedroom and grew into a ritual over the course of three years; every two weeks I walked into the library, took one of each of the free postcards by the door and stuck them on the wall. I used a string line to keep the rows straight.

Years of evaporative cooling wasn't particularly kind to the postcards and over time they they began to warp and fall as the blu-tac lost it's grip on the cracking paint, but I left them there when I moved away from home because it seemed like such a big job to undo what had taken me years to achieve.

I still don't really know what made me take them all down, part of me was sick of the now crooked lines they formed, part of me wanted to finally push away a version of myself I didn't particularly like that existed during the years of postcard collection. Part of me was mad at my parents and wanted to expend some anger on inanimate objects. And so with headphones on to block out any misgivings I had, I took every single postcard down. I peeled, scraped and pulled every piece of blu-tac off the walls. When the paint came off with it I didn't have the same lurch of fear I used to, the walls were cracking, they needed to be painted anyway.

In the height of my angsty-teen years, I wrote song lyrics on the backs of the postcards before tacking them to the wall, one of the reasons I never took them down was to spare myself the pain of cringing at my fourteen year old self. But I read the back of every postcard as I stacked them in the recycling bin and I realised that under the insecure, weak and selfish person I felt I used to be, was the same curious, anxious and frustrated person I still see in myself. A person who wanted the world to change and wanted to understand why they felt how they felt.

I left home for another city the next day, no time to feel the new emptiness of my old bedroom. It was liberating to tear down my high school self, but I can't help but feel I have left my parents with a sense of loss far greater than what I feel.