Discomfiture

When I was younger, my father drove me deep into a national park in the middle of the night—somewhere between one and two a.m.—because I couldn’t sleep. I suffered from a kind of insomnia that felt more like a quiet haunting. When we got there, he smiled and told me to yell. Just scream. As loud as I wanted. So I did. I was surrounded by hectares of bushland and dark trees, the quiet static chirping of insects folding into the silence. My nose was red, inflamed; my eye sockets dry with tears already shed. I remember how my fists balled up—not in fury, exactly, but with the kind of ancient tension that doesn’t know where else to go. My voice cracked against the cold night air, pushing out into the emptiness, into nothing.

Now, at twenty, I find myself pacing my courtyard, mimicking the gesture, only silently. I feel humiliated by it—by myself, by this pitiful repetition. And by my hamartia: the terrible, private flaw of never being able to feel satisfied.

Earlier that day I’d been visiting the cows and sheep behind the electrified fences along the main road through Noble Hills. I thought about lying down in the grass, wondering if they’d approach me. I wasn’t after anything profound—I just wanted, briefly, to feel part of a story I’d invented. The right playlist, the right breeze, the right angle of sunlight. I imagined I was in a getaway car, blood smeared across my shirt in Pollock streaks, someone next to me in the driver's seat. I couldn’t picture his face. My mind offered no photograph, no silhouette that held. I decided this was one of fantasy’s bitter laws: when they turn to face you, there’s nothing there—just a blur of longing shaped by lack.

Later, beside the fire, I watched powdered sugar fall from a marshmallow and dust the sleeve of my hoodie. Strawberry and vanilla, speared on a metal stick. I started to cry, not dramatically, just enough. Enough to notice that so much of what I’d been holding onto was make-believe. Not just the image of him, but the scaffolding around it—the imagined conversations, the roles I’d assigned us, the atmosphere. A deeply constructed fiction. It’s embarrassing, in retrospect, how easily I disappeared into it. How far I’d let myself drift from anything solid or reciprocal.

So I said something. I know we weren’t ever official but that didn't matter. There was suggestion. A rhythm in the messages, a slight shift in tone, a hope I shouldn’t have let root. Saying something filled me with guilt. Not because I didn’t care. I cared so much I wanted to make sure I didn’t poison the ground. I needed time to figure out what’s real and what’s just a story I tell myself to feel safe. I needed to stop assigning myself roles I never actually wanted. Roles that made me feel “better”—stronger, in control, desirable—but that left me exhausted and hollow.

And I hadn’t even noticed the caterpillars.

When they come, the garden doesn’t die. But you can’t pretend they’re not there. You have to wait it out. There’ll be a cold morning—fingers gloved, slightly numb—when you go out and start picking them off the undersides of the basil leaves, where they twitch in their sleep. You rebuild from there. Leaf by leaf.

None of this means I don’t care about him. It’s the opposite. I care so much it hurts. I just didn’t want things built on false dynamics. On implication. On timelines that only exist in our thoughts. I didn’t want to become someone’s mirror, or monument, or mistake. But still, I kept doing it—pushing myself to say something clever, to make a gesture, to embody something I thought might get a response. And then—God—it’s humiliating to admit, but I’d judge his responses. Rank them. Compare them to the weight of what I gave, and feel this awful, hollowed-out thing inside me.

To say any of this out loud feels like a confession. Like a crime. Like I'm owning up to being the person I never wanted to be: someone who is never satisfied. Someone who hurts others just by existing at full volume.

The worst part is hurting someone else. It always is. Which is rich, I know, coming from the so-called “psychopath in the making,” the “relentless bully” of my small town. But I hope it ends up being okay. I hope it doesn't sour. I hate being honest. I hate how honesty feels like laying yourself down on a slab and handing someone the scalpel. But I’d rather do this—be raw, be wrong—than disappear. Than ghost. Than pretend.

I have exams in less than a week. I’m sniffling at my desk like a wet dog and wondering what’s wrong with me. Why I always break at the worst possible moment.

Maybe I need to abstain. The way former alcoholics swerve around the glitter of liquor stores. The way ex-smokers fold their yellowed shirts and toss them in the bin, beside their ashtrays and crushed cartons. Maybe I need to give up romance altogether. Because maybe I will never be satisfied. I’ve known people. I’ve touched them, cried in their beds, memorised their yawns in the morning. And still I feel like a husk.

Maybe 15-year-old me was right. Maybe the most important thing is how many flashcards I finish. How many experimental studies I can memorise.

This whole interpersonal thing—God tell me—maybe I was never built for it.

Back to the flashcards.