Notes from my Diary, Revised

I am sixteen years old. Life hums at a frequency intolerable to every one of my senses. I have no compass, and the only god I've ever prayed to lives in my car, cradling me tightly as rot seeps from my skin. She offers rest while the lies drain out of me in an exhausting crescendo. The nylon seats surrender to me pathetically as I mutilate them with an X-Acto knife. I have long hair and I know very little about the world.

I let the aspiring Tomi Lahrens of my high school battlefield gun down their friends, and I stand idly as they bleed out. I wonder who the fuck I am to be any better than this. On a Monday I become the obliterated party as the wrath of an angry teenager finds me in the locker room. I deserve every drop of poison I am fed, and my shield of indifference does not reflect how I crumble inside like stale bread. The butter substitute I am given at home does not piece me back together, and I am left a beating void.

My bathroom floor is no stranger to the dysfunction, its cold tiles a salve for the aching hands I batter on any surface that will hurt. I understand viscerally what it means to be 'reduced to tears,' having long been unable to go a day without crying, and knowing that, when I am not crying, I would rather be crying.

I peer through a sheet of bath water at an obscured stipple ceiling. Maybe when I am here, I no longer exist; but I am too weak to stay. The books in my bedroom bring warmth back into my hands, each containing a character who battles something criminal. I do not understand yet why their darkness feels so akin to my every waking moment. I hold smoke in my lungs until an unbearable burning coughs it free. I am an Adderall smoothie train wreck; a dispensary of inauthentic garbage; a surplus of undressed iceberg on a desert island. I am an athlete searching for the ball but finding hatred for myself where it should be. I learn nothing and I give back just as much. I am alone.

I am a broken person who breaks people as broken people prey on me. I am ugly. I am sick. I find emotional paralysis on my lunch plate and feel my insides twist into cartilage when I open my mouth. On the outside, I am light, but I seek laughter so deep I pray it might drown me. At seventeen, I drown.