How long will I have to wait, still? We take it minute by minute but every minute is spent staring at the mirror, wondering how we could reconstruct our jawlines. I want to be tender like a wound, you know, but I’ve already healed many times over, and the glass becomes sharper underneath the yellow light of the bathroom. I’ve never put bandages around my chest, but I have run while compressing it. I think I’ve stopped caring.
Hey, God! Lean down a little so I can punch you; see: you made me smaller than I needed to be. Sure, the jokes are funny and I laugh, but the glass grows sharper, you know? I try to touch my skin but my fingers go straight through it. My laughs are all hollow like skeleton bones and the knock against a door you don’t want opened. I like walking down hills but my feet sink right into the path. Guess I’ll never be real.
The worst thing about dying is dying slowly. I’d rather the heart stop completely than fade out. You know, every day a little piece of me returns to the earth and everything beyond it, and I let it do that. The body doesn’t feel good, but I get used to it. Listen, the body isn’t a car to crash. You hold onto the ride as much as you can, you sit in the passenger seat with your seatbelt buckled tightly while a person you don’t know cruises the car down the highway at two hundred kilometres per hour. But hey, at least you can put on your music!
The thing is, I’m not broken. I’m rebuilding slowly, like a tower of Jenga, able to tip over any moment but putting my trust in the hands of people who will try their best to keep it safe. I look in the mirror and a strange urge to punch it rises up inside me, but I remind myself to save my punches for God. When I stop to take pictures of the sunset with the most beautiful girl in the world, isn’t that healing? And when I watch dumb movies while holding hands with my best friend, isn’t that love? And when I walk down the hill with the best things that happened to me this year, isn’t that happiness? And when we lift our drinks up to the skies and curse the ones who put us here, isn’t that reclaiming something, anyway?
Listen, I think the skies are better where I only walk around with one shadow. The horizon is more stunning. Loving somebody is hard when you don’t really like yourself, but I try. The thing about me loving is that I fall too fast. I tell my friends I love them every single day. I focus on the hollowness of the collarbones and the smile that outshines the sun of people I cannot have, of people who don’t love me back. My entire foundation is built on loving. I wish I could be tender like a wound, but I’ve already healed many times over. But healing many times over equals getting hurt many times over, and fuck, if I don’t know a thing about hurt.
Happiness was stolen right out of my hands. The reason I want to punch God is because they made me just a little shorter, my chest just a little bigger, my jawline just a little duller. I try to have everything, but sometimes you have to be satisfied with your phone not capturing the sunset properly and people not saying the right name. It’s the thought that counts.
So I suppose natural happiness was taken away from me. Years of my life were stolen from me, given to a person who doesn’t exist, who I’ve already shot dead and buried in an unmarked grave. People tell me I’m steady and quiet, that I’m kind and give good advice. The thing is, most times I stare at the sunset and want more. I want to finally be happy, I want to scream my name from the hills and tell people that this is who I am! This is me! But there are times where I stare at the sunset and a certain kind of happiness—one I’ve wrestled out of God’s hands—rises up in me.
I’m strong enough to do this. My boyhood was stolen, all right, and I still stare at the mirror and try to change all the things I don’t like about myself, but skipping down hills as the sun is setting is a feeling I want to fester deep in my bones. I don’t know where home is, but I’ll figure it out.
The sun will rise tomorrow morning. And it will hurt, but it will be alright.
