january 1st 2024

i have almost always been a strange and unnecessarily difficult person. no one knows what to do with me. what is there to understand? i come from a line of bullshit-eaters and i’m their dumb yapping animal daughter. i never learned to keep myself inside the house. as a kitchen knife i am an object that poses no real danger assuming the shape of one that does—i don’t like to fight, but i aggravate, teeth catching your finger on the way down. i did not grow up, i grew in, and my being is unbearable, interminable. i can’t see outside of the scope of my physical bounds. i spill everywhere i contact. at least i am not a shit-eater, at least my world is mine, castles of delusion and skeptical obsession and all that comes with them. at least i know what i am, at least i have the heart to warn those who will listen. this is how i tell you that i have fallen ill with sickness of myself. yes, i was born deformed, and raised kicking and screaming. the playground children knew. my beady fear-loving eyes, the way i’d heave over nothing at all. i am a natural evolutionary mistake. there must be others like me, but i don’t know where they are.

my mother says i was a very obedient baby. i slept through the night, never gave any trouble. when i was about five i started chewing on my collar. she did not say that. 

i use them like a stake to drive it in deeper. i self medicate with them. i self immolate with them. why, why? mirror at myself: we are two who never should’ve been, not in the first place. irina, nineteen and compromised, held them close under the siberian sky and then surrendered them with no artifacts. i do not know if there was snow but they like to write it in. i read over their nonfiction assignment—not meant to be formatted as poetry, but they made it so—and wondered what the blood symbolized, and they said the blood between them is insignificant, because we all have it, or something like that. we never should have been: alexandra died at two months. did she reincarnate in me? in elementary school i ruined someone’s birthday party because i wouldn’t stop telling people, if alex was here, i wouldn’t feel like this. gillian took me into the corner of this girl’s backyard and talked me down from whatever i was doing. what was i, eight? i nicknamed a sister i never knew because i struggled to feel like this— what i was feeling, i do not know, i never remember the details of things, it’s all lost— and of course, i could not settle down until everyone knew and it was also their problem. i wonder if she would have been good. would she grow out instead of in? she would not treat me tender because i would not be alive, i’d be forgotten in my mother’s womb. three is enough. she died so i could… what, what is it that i do? their birth was a miracle, but mine was an accident. never meant to be. 

they called me pathetic. not this time, but one of the others. i am an insect drawn to light. it’s more than pathetic, i’d call it a dangerous shame. i’ll find another: it never ends. there were others before who i can’t remember, but they must have been the same. everything is a lamp— i can’t move without burning. i am a lamp. i dig into my chest to the red pulsing object. i’d kill myself to look at myself, to finally know what they see, or imagine what they saw. what kind of process could lead someone to accept me and my kamikaze episodes? i’ll find another, but it will not be satisfying. i figure this world has too many shit-eating grins who couldn’t take me as i am. an untouched plate is a rare sight. in the meantime i’ll write and i’ll sharpen my teeth. when do i get better? love is not happy. i don’t like who i am. there must be a reason. there must be a reason.