You don’t have anything of mine except for a book I lent you when we were seventeen about a stalker, where the victim is protected by her own elusivity and disinterest. Therefore she is interesting and unattainable. Therefore she is open to a mirage of obsession. It was likely my own attempt at subliminal messaging, I suppose. But ask anyone – I wanted you.

I kept wishing you would do it, anything. You never do anything that I want you to do. Not until I’m yelling at you, and that whole thing makes me upset, because I have so much internal struggle with the idea of anger, particularly anger that is expelled onto another person, particularly and most notably onto you.

This past spring, I bought a book of essays with the intention of giving it to you because you don’t read enough of anything at all. You don’t read novels or essays. You don’t read me or the room. Especially never me. You’re a better person when I am around.

When I’d read that book of essays initially my first fall in New York, there were a few lines that I thought that you’d like, and a few that I loved so much that they felt like mine, and I wanted you to understand me in a way that was paradoxical, in a way so specific to how you were meant to perceive me – at least from my deluded perspective. Because baby I wanted you confused, writhing. I wanted you dripping in sweat, lustful. Boys Get Off All The Time, and I wanted my ambiguity to be the hottest thing about me. Textbook insecure. Desperation, all over the place. It makes sense, then, why I have placed so much meaning in things that you’ve only touched once.

My collection is both miserable and upsetting. All dirty, all used, all old. Older than they should be, all things considered. I should have trashed you and all of my shitty souvenirs of you ages ago. My room is the haunted house ride in Ocean City, Maryland, the one that my dad rode as a kid. The last time that I went on, they had added actors with chainsaws as a way of decimating the novelty, as most things go, and I was coming up on shrooms and cursing modernity and thinking about fear tactics. I was thinking about my room and all of the mementos, how this whole relationship and all of its items are and is a haunted house with terrible acting and me, terrified.

You and your bullshit have been blessed by my attention, because I am sweet and you are not, and I keep giving meaning where there is none, and I keep pouring all of my love into places that don’t even exist. It’s like that dream I had years ago where we had a baby, and I walked six miles the following day in an attempt to work off the weight of it, gritting my teeth in grief, skipping class to sob about our baby’s nonexistence and ours too. You ended it the year before, awfully, in an email. That landed me in church. I land myself now, in a bar, writing you to death. That night, after the dream, my sim had a miscarriage and I cried some more about fake things with fake meaning. Baby weight takes more than a six mile walk to work off. I starved myself for weeks after that, and my body sort of became the first memento.

The second was my sweatshirt that said Alaska. It’s red, and you love red and you’re all over it and you’re ruining my life.

Then there’s the stupid boxcutter, which exists with both profound and real meaning, standing for both our violence and mine, which is specific to every sharp bad habit that I’ve ever picked up. I always felt guilty about comparing you to cutting. The boxcutter that you reluctantly gave to me is dull and dangerous, an overtly self fulfilling prophecy, but I still touch it like the whole thing’s erotic, which it never was and never would be.

I say your name sometimes with it gripped in my hand, like I’ll find you in it or you’ll appear out of thin air and cut me with it, which would give me yet another thing to write about for years. My scars became another memento. I think that’s odd, but it’s all odd.

I am the most vulgar about you when you are unable to reach me. The second that you begin to close in, I lose everything primal about me and sink down into the floor. I am self loathing and self destructive. I am stupid and carnal, waiting to be choked out or shot. The latter spares my humiliation and finally cuts the fucking tension, where the former fuels the fire and chases me down your throat. I keep looking for something in you, some incision for me to slither into, that will finally catch up to me and meet me where I am waiting.

Jan 9th 12:30pm

Stabbed my hand with a hard sensor.

Jan 20th 11:09am

Wow. Have not written a word all year. My primary excuse is that I have spent more time at my job this year than I have anywhere else, including my apartment. Today is my second day in a row off and I am still coming down from the exhaustion that the last few weeks brought on. My nails are long and fake, thus making it very difficult to type. My computer has been dead for days, and I can not seem to locate the charger because my room is a black hole. Typing on my phone with long nails is so ungodly difficult that I am considering ripping them off along with a few layers of skin just because of how annoying this is.

A man is in my apartment attempting to fix my radiator, and I have been silently watching him as he literally takes empty bottles from my trash can to use for god knows what. Not my problem. What would I have even said, like, now why exactly are you rooting through my trash? I don’t care. Not really. He’s definitely fucking this up, and I do not care. Whatever. Just finish and leave so I can smoke and shower and rip all of my nails off and clean my room and maybe write something coherent about the last few weeks of my life. The last few weeks of my life will sound trivially boring to everyone but me, but whatever. I’ve been so well behaved. Barely any bad substances at all. I’ve been too busy to do anything bad for me. How can someone who has spent so much time working spend so much money? I do not want to know how much money I’ve spent in the last three weeks. So much. My radiator is fucked. It is leaking into the apartment below me which belongs to a guy who according to my sister I would find attractive, but bad news—he has a girlfriend. Good thing I’ve retired from being a home wrecker. Not that I’ve actually wrecked any homes. I’ve been a decent threat to a home, but I have not wrecked one completely, much to the dismay of my eighteen year old self. Poor eighteen year old Annabel. She was so horrible and desperate. I need this man to hurry up and fix my fucking radiator.

What I really need to do is clean my disaster of a room, get my blood drawn, reschedule my dermatology appointment, reschedule my psychiatry appointment, and go to all of my appointments so that I do not run out of my meds. I need to go on fucking Accutane and get prettier and skinnier. I need to get more normal. Accutane and psychiatric medication cocktail will make me more normal. They have to.

My anxiety is through the fucking roof right now because I’m afraid more men will be coming into my apartment because the man in here currently looks to be on the verge of his own panic attack. Considering offering him one of my panic attack medications. He looks very stressed. I am lounging on the couch, also very stressed, because I do not want more men in the apartment where they can see how messy I live. I am trying to avoid feeling utterly humiliated. I’m calming down. Fuck, I hate these fucking nails. Nails are only fun when you’re not writing and for a while I was not writing. But now I am. Kinda. I hope to God this man is almost done. I need to lay in the shower and make another cup of coffee and clean my room. I need to drop off my laundry. This journal entry is starting to look a lot like a to-do list. God I want to lay down. And shower. I want to get in the shower so badly. Please hurry, radiator man. Get out of my girl-partment. If my super walks into my apartment right now I will scream. I have too many clothes and they are everywhere. I need to have a yard sale. And I need to clean. I need to deep clean so badly. My life changes today. Today is the day I will deep clean my depression room. And then maybe I will have a friend over and we will all play Wizard and everything will be okay. I wish I was in Pennsylvania. Rotting in my bed and crying about meaningless bullshit.

January 21st 1:35pm

The radiator man is gone and I am in my (still messy) room. He ended up fixing the radiator, finally, and I did end up sitting on the shower floor and crying. I did not, however, end up making that second cup of coffee. I napped until 4:30pm, and then I went to bed at 5:30pm, and slept until 11:30am the next morning. What about that is normal? Realistically I know that my body is just beyond exhausted and unwell and unsure of what exactly is happening, but it’s making me feel horrible about myself. The time I’ve spent sleeping this week is time that I should have been spending cleaning and scheduling appointments and working and doing fuck all besides sleeping. Jesus. Today is the day that I get my life together. My to do list for today:

• make a second cup of coffee

• drink said cup of coffee

• take ritalin

• gather the trash around my room

• throw everything on my dresser onto my bed and wipe down dresser

• do the same thing but with my windowsill that is covered in books and presumably a lot of dust.

• try to get shit out from under my bed. throw it on my bed. organize it or something.

• try to un-break my broken bed

• throw all of my clothes that are on the floor onto my bed and figure out what is dirty and what isn’t

• throw dirty clothes in hamper and fold clean clothes

• put clothes in dresser

• maybe look at what the demonic entity has done to my closet

• maybe save the closet for another day. or maybe I’ll be super laser focused and clean my closet.

• clean the space between my bed and my dresser. probably some trash and other bullshit has been acquired down there. Who knows? Not me.

• smile.

I’m still laying in bed, contemplating when to begin this list. It must all be done before the sun goes down. Time is ticking. GET OFF YOUR ASS. Fuck. Okay. Coffee is now. I’ll be back to report on what I have or haven’t done.

2:32pm

Crying about how depressed I am. Second cup of coffee has been made. I threw some trash away. After I finish my coffee I will get up and start to clean because I know that cleaning my space will make me feel slightly better. Jared said he would hang out with me tonight, which is nice. I think I just need to be reminded of what I like about being here. Friends. Writing. Those kinds of things. There is legit no use in trying to explain this feeling to my friends. They don’t get it, nor will they ever. The only person I have ever met that understands this level of depression is Mara, and I don’t want to burden her anymore than I already have. It’s comforting to know that she exists and that she is alive and that she understands, though. Just knowing that is enough sometimes. I might maladaptive daydream for like an hour before I clean to at least attempt to try and get my brain away from a dangerous thought pattern. Like to cut or not to cut. To swallow all of my pills or to not swallow all of my pills. All of my friends are happier and cleaner than I am. And I hate them for it. I’m such a nasty, hateful person. Depression can do that to a person, and I find that really and completely debilitating. Everything scares me. Sometimes I really do think that I’m not going to last very long. My brain is so terrifying. I can’t believe that I have to experience my own thoughts everyday for the rest of my life. That is so scary. Everything is so scary. Fuck. Okay. I’m going to finish my coffee and start cleaning because this entry is freaking me the fuck out. I hate being depressed.

3:06pm

Cried for a while, still haven’t cleaned my room, blah. I’ve been resurfacing weird, out of place memories in the past forty minutes. Random things. My brain is trying to throw shit in front of my face I think to prevent me from committing suicide.

When I was eighteen I had this awful mental breakdown because I subsequently got my cheerleading coach fired because of the obscenely inappropriate relationship I had with her. Lost my mind and cut myself a lot and then because I was so catastrophically upset, my situationship at the time told my best friend that they should get me some stupid gift or whatever to make me feel better. My best friend ordered a Squishmallow and a new water bottle and my situationship never paid her back or mentioned it again even though it was his idea. She gave the gifts to me two months later and because my situationship was the king of bare minimum I convinced myself that he was madly in love with me. Did not cross my mind that he was in fact a lazy piece of shit who didn’t care if I lived or died. Still have yet to get over that situationship. That relationship legitimately rewired my brain and forever altered my concept of love and relationships. Whatever. We know. Jesus.

When I was depressed and heartbroken during my first fall in New York, I watched Pearl so many times that I memorized her entire seven minute monologue and would repeat it to myself and my sister in our awful apartment on a daily basis. Then I bleached my eyebrows and gained like thirty pounds and was truly the ugliest I have ever been in my life because I didn’t care about myself or my life at all in any capacity, mostly because a boy didn’t like me back. My bedroom in that apartment also didn’t have a window so I was experiencing a severe lack of vitamin D and looked so dead it was terrifying. I looked like an actual rotting corpse. Who was also fat and had bleached eyebrows and thought she was Mia Goth.

I’ve been writing about stupid memories for twenty minutes now in order to avoid getting up and cleaning my room. I need to pee so bad. I feel like Rue in episode seven of season one of Euphoria where she gets a bladder infection from refusing to get up and pee because she’s so depressed. That episode is Mara and I’s favorite piece of television ever. Okay, I’m going to get up and pee and then deal with my fucking room. Okay. I’m going to do it now. I’ll be back to update.

5:26pm

Eating a honey crisp apple in bed. Managed to semi-fix my broken bed, but not really. It’s a temporary fix. What I need is a new bed frame. I’ll do that when I move in May, though. Not the time, I fear. Too much else to do. I might as well go browse online for bed frames, though, just to kill time. I called Lindsey shortly after writing that last update to complain about my self hatred and ask her about school and her schedule. We have this recurring bit where every few months I express my dire need to go glamping and sleep in a cabin for a couple nights, get ridiculously drunk, and sit by a campfire. We’ve decided that maybe we will go on a road-trip, and I’m still trying to convince her to let me drive for part of it. To feel included, of course. But realistically she’d never let me drive her car, because I’m an abysmal driver and I’d probably give her a heart attack with my driving. Maybe this year I will relearn how to drive and become a better adult in that way, despite the fact that I live in nyc. I cleaned part of my room and organized some of my clothes. At least there are no longer clothes all over my floor stressing me out. I’ll do more tomorrow, I promise. Jared is coming over later tonight to keep me company. I’m so excited to just smile on the couch with him and talk about things that don’t have to do with my job. I have interests and things about me to talk about besides my job. Even though I do love my job, I really do. But I also love other things. I love swimming and dolls and the sound that baby farm animals make and jeans that are too big on me. I love when my room is clean and there are people that I love in the room. I love getting drinks and gossiping and doing my makeup. I feel a lot calmer than I did earlier today, but tired from feeling the way I did earlier. I’m going to focus on drinking a lot of water right now and formatting some of my recent journal entries into something postable, because my brain is empty and I can not think of a topic I care enough about to write a cohesive piece on. Maybe in a week or so. For now, journal entries will have to do.

January 21st 5:46pm

At the point in my boredom where I’ve started obsessively checking the spam folder of my email to see if I missed some giant love confession from ex-situationship who I hate and who hates me. We hate each other—what the fuck is there to talk about in an email? I think that getting blocked on my email is one of the funniest things to ever happen to me. He will never speak to me again and I will never speak to him again. That concept is the bane of my existence, seeing as never once in my life have I ever gotten over anything. Not fully. No, everything haunts me. Bad. I need to get off of my phone and close the email tab and lock in. Maybe I’ll go on a date next month. I’ve sworn off of dating until my acne clears up, which means if I have any desire to go on a date I’d better suck it up and go get my blood drawn so that I can finally, finally, go on fucking Accutane. Jesus, is it that fucking hard? I need to grow up and get a grip and stop being so fucking lazy. I have such a bad headache. Probably from not eating today and just vaping and doing fuck all. Drinking a shit ton of coffee and laying in bed and moping about how much I hate my life. I’m going to get up soon and shower and prepare for Jared’s imminent arrival. We are going to smoke and talk and I will smile, genuinely, I hope. When I was little I always had a smile on my face. People always used to make comments on it too. It was an abnormal amount of smiling. For such an anxious child, I sure did smile a lot! I’ve got to get back to that. Just smiling about fucking everything. In one of those eras where looking at old photos of myself makes me ungodly upset and guilty for absolutely destroying baby Annabel’s life. But God, I am only twenty two. I’ve got so much time. I HAVE GOT SO MUCH TIME. RIGHT? Right. Okay, I’m going to go shower and I will be back to report on what exactly I’ve accomplished. Probably nothing substantial. We’ll see. I cleaned my disgusting room somewhat, though, so that’s something.

Okay so I haven’t gotten up to shower yet but that doesn’t really matter because it hasn’t been a significant amount of time since I stopped writing the above excerpt. Maybe like ten minutes. In those ten minutes, I’ve been thinking about ex situationship because whenever I’m depressed I think about ex situationship because it is an easy path to take. Easy and horrible, of course. While a big part of me believes that I am crazy, the more rational part of me knows that to some degree I have experienced a lot of healing in regards to that relationship. For one, I have absolutely zero desire to ever go back to that place where we met. I’m done giving identifying details. We all know who I’m referring to and what place I’m referring to. Yeah, I’m pathetic and redundant and can not write anything without mentioning him. He’s such a fail safe for me. I have ZERO desire to go back there the way that I did a couple of years ago. I also have zero desire to ever try to contact him again. Even though last spring he got engaged and then almost immediately unblocked me (fuck my life that was so fucking EVIL), I do not have a desire to reach out. To be completely honest, which I will be, he scares the shit out of me. Like truly. I have never been so scared of a person I knew before. He actually sends my nervous system into outer space, with the way I get whenever there is a threat of him being around. And I’d never be able to have any form of conversation with him again either, because I wouldn’t be able to breathe at the sight of him. I genuinely believe that I would be so caught off guard, and so utterly terrified, that I would have to turn around and leave wherever I was immediately.

Sometimes I do fantasize about running into him and what I would say, but I know that in reality I would not say anything. There would be nothing constructive or beneficial to be said on my end. I do not owe him any apologies, or hellos, or anything. I do not owe that BOY anything but my absence. And it’s been so long, he no longer owes me anything anymore. Maybe a couple of years ago he had still owed me an explanation or an apology or something, but not anymore. Too much time has passed. If he’s miserable, fine. If he’s happy, fine. Either way it is not my problem. Giving him the time of day now to write about him is pathetic. It’s truly so fucking sad and I feel bad for myself and if he were to know that I was still writing about him he would probably feel so humiliated for me that he wouldn’t even have the decency to call me crazy. He’d just shrug and be like, poor Annabel, I hope she finds peace. Which by the way, is far more humiliating to me than being called crazy. I know that I’m crazy. What I can’t stand being thought of is an embarrassment.

A few weeks ago Kai told me that he had blocked me on Instagram in October so that I wouldn’t see him posting about his upcoming Halloween party, because he didn’t want me to go and embarrass him like I had done to him many times in the past. Oh I was soooo mad. And fuck him, by the way, because he’s embarrassed me in front of my friends more times that I can even count. Talk about being a fucking embarrassment. Whatever. Anyways, that was humiliating. This was also after I had asked him why in his birthday text to me (sent one day late only after I confronted him for texting me about some stupid album without wishing me a happy birthday) he had called me a good, good, alright person. He told me, and I quote, that I was not like, a beacon of light or anything. I needed that, to be honest. Kai is truly hell bent on making me flinch, because he is always telling me something so fucking obscene and horrible about myself. Sometimes I think that I keep him around as a reminder to myself that I am not a good person. It helps humble me, I think. He’s also just a big part of my history and my life and I can never properly let those kinds of people go, despite what they say about me and to me. I don’t even want to imagine the awful things that he has said about me to other people, given how cruel he tends to speak to me to my face. To be fair, I say a lot of awful things about him, too. Maybe we deserve to stay in each other’s lives forever, because we both need to be reminded of our awfulness.

Honestly I don’t have the energy right now to be dissecting my relationship with Kai. He’d kill me with a hammer if he knew I was writing about this, but when we were like fourteen or fifteen or so he used to learn songs from the Stranger Things soundtrack on the piano and send me videos of him playing them. That was so sweet. He used to be so sweet to me. We were such good friends. But I, of course, was horrible to him for most of the time that we’ve known each other. I don’t blame him for the things he’s said to me and about me. God knows I deserve it. After all, what nice things have I done for him in all of our history? Literally nothing of significance. Now I’m getting the undeniable urge to text him something cryptic. I will not be doing that. I’ve got to let this desire for being cryptic and weird die in 2026. It’s got to die. Okay I’m going to go shower now.

8:49pm

Ate fucking slop for dinner only in order to kill my horrific headache. Eating did absolutely nothing so I swallowed a few Advil and am hoping for the best. Nothing like time on my computer to surely make me feel 100x worse. I have showered, oiled the ends of my hair with Olaplex, moisturized, and brushed my teeth. And ate slop for dinner. Also vaping a lot, which is probably one of the instigators for my headache but who cares? Not me. Now it is time for me to organize a few of my journal entries, mostly from today, and post them so that a bunch of people on the internet can read them and wonder how and why I am still alive if I hate myself and my life so badly. The truth of the matter is that I am far more melancholic and dramatic in my writing than I am in real life. Okay now I am second guessing myself. I am a pretty sad and dramatic person. Whatever. I’m sadder here than I am there. Blah blah blah. Okay, getting to work now. I will probably be back to write more later.

I have class in eight minutes, here’s what’s going on. I am a bad girl and I like to be online! When I look skinny I feel like God. The closer to the floor, the closer to God. God does not require a podium, but I sure do! Nobody wants to listen to a twenty two year old girl, but everyone wants to listen to God. What if God was a twenty two year old girl? Would you kiss God? I think Christianity has at least something to do with kissing God. I am not a good girl. I have not been nice since 2023. During 2023, I was thirty pounds heavier than I am now and I was twenty years old and wanted everything and everyone so badly that I wanted nothing at all. All I did was mold clay into baby animals and listen to the same song two hundred times in one week. During 2023 I was not angry at all, just sad. And overly sentimental. In 2023 I got the last word, and cried for weeks. I got a new tattoo and a new piercing and plucked my eyebrows too much and got really upset over everything. But I was a nice girl. When I got mean, I began thinking a lot harder about God. It was rough thinking. In between thoughts about God I was flinching and bleeding. Leah from partial hospitalization told me once that she was a construction zone. I am a CRIME SCENE. Leah, you are a work in progress and I am over! I am ready to be processed by men in hazmat suits who swab my blood. God is in me, fucking up the evidence and contaminating the scene. He is ruining my shot at being remembered for something bigger than my ending. I take what God hands me, I swallow what he tells me to, I will be good. God does not like bad girls. Listen up, I am twenty two and misbehaved and here is my testimony to myself. It is okay to sleep for eighteen hours. There is not anyone under my bed. When the sun starts to go down, it is not the end. All that it means is that the shadow behind the doll on my bookshelf will be visible. That’s all that it means. When nobody takes advantage of me even when I expect them to, that is a sign from God. I don’t always deserve to be miserable. Only sometimes. It is not the scariest thing in the world to speak out loud. Boys are much scarier.

Feb 1st 8:04pm

On the train after work. This has been the coldest weekend of my life. My hands are dry and horrible and cracked and Josie found seven grey hairs on my head today. She pulled each of them out. She told me that it was stress, which can’t be right, because what do I truly have to be so stressed out over? My life is marginally easier than most people’s, and I’m lazy, which should make me significantly less stressed. So be it—I am stressed. I took a 50mg of Hydroxyzine at like 4pm yesterday and almost fell asleep standing up at work. Pussy. Over the summer I was popping three a day. Now I can’t even handle one. At least it slowed down my perpetually racing heart. Our heat is broken in the new store. The curse of the broken heat has yet to die. From one store to the other, and still no working heat. I am cold. I’m going to eat ramen for dinner probably, because it’s easy, and then I am going to hit my new pen that tastes like cereal milk a bunch and then fall fast asleep. Therapy tomorrow! And I have absolutely nothing to say. Nothing to say lately. Hence why I haven’t written anything remotely interesting since the new year started. New year, boring girl. Unhappy, boring, horrible girl. Accutane is imminent, I just need to finally suck it up and get my blood drawn. I’ve been putting it off for months, in fear of my results coming back as fucked in every way. I’d rather just not know, to be honest. Once I am on Accutane, I will be the happiest girl in the world. I’m so sick of acne. Still checking my email pretty periodically. I need a fucking TMS booster. One shock to the brain should kill off that desire.

Feb 8th 3:22pm

My life sucks so fucking bad. It feels like -2 degrees outside and the heat is fucking broken at work. My hands are dry and cracking and my acne is flaring up and I look horrific and my hair sucks and I hate my fucking life. Would it be the worst thing in the world for me to move back to Pennsylvania for maybe a year? Learn new, clean habits. Walk on the trail everyday with my stomach out. Learn how to not be scared of driving anymore. Fix my skin. Cut my hair. Get really fucking skinny and beautiful. I’d just be unemployed for a few months, I think. God, that would be so bad for me. But I just can’t function. I’m not functioning and I’m off my meds and it’s so bad that I’ve gotten too depressed to have the energy to book a fucking psychiatry appointment and get my medications refilled. I seriously need to stop going off of my meds. Ever since getting put on meds that actually work, going off of them has turned me excruciatingly self aware of my issues and behaviors and patterns. I am actually crazy. And I know everyone says that and doesn’t actually mean it but I mean it. It’s bad. It’s really fucking bad. It’ll be a miracle if I survive the winter. I am actually seriously going down. Laura and I talked about our futures this morning and I started crying. It’s too cold for this. I’m way too cold. It is 58 degrees in here, according to the thermostat. I wish I was in bed. I can’t stop listening to Hard Times. Holy shit. Hard Times on repeat, metaphorical gun in my mouth, dry hands, evil, evil brain. I’d like to be a different girl. No, I’d like to be no girl. I’d like to be dead. But I’d like to have never existed in the first place. This is so fucking awful, Jesus Christ. How do people enjoy this? This is not fun. This is stressful, and I am scared. Everything freaks me the fuck out and I’m doing badly so I’m thinking about ****** and I keep fantasizing about him walking into my job and just staring at me with his hands shaking. And I react differently in each fantasy. Sometimes I burst into tears. Sometimes security escorts him out. Sometimes I point in his face and scream. Sometimes I pretend he doesn’t exist. Sometimes I just walk right past. Sometimes I look at him back and wait for him to speak and he never does. Sometimes I look ugly and sometimes I look pretty. In every fantasy I look emaciated and tired, because all of the times that he’s been soft with me were when I was tired or sick or upset. Seeing him when I’m happy is pointless. It wouldn’t matter because I wouldn’t care. I only fantasize when I’m sad and he’s only there when I’m sad and he only matters when I’m sad. Fuck this is so bad. It’s been five years since we met. Over five years. And I still fucking care! Fuck!

Feb 11th 3:02pm

I am officially going down. This period of severe depression has been, well, bad. Like, really fucking bad. I feel incapable of doing literally fucking anything. I am not writing, I am not trying, I am not putting any effort into anything and I do not even fucking care. Whatever. Life sucks and I’m probably going to end this week dead or hospitalized. Not kidding. Not at all. It’s time for something huge and catastrophic to occur, because I seem to have reached a dead end.

Feb 12th 10:39pm

Today was not the worst day of my life, or even week. Thank God! I was getting very close to the end! My god, I was getting ready to kill myself. By no one’s surprise, work has lifted the veil. I think it probably mostly has to do with the fact that the heat’s working again. Working with no heat truly might have been what sent me spiraling in the first place. I can not get ahead of myself—there is much work to be done. However, I think I can confidently say that I will not be ending the week dead, unlike how I previously had thought. The psychosis is definitely still present, so, I’m dealing with that, obviously. But I am somewhat cognitively aware. Of some things. Not all the things, or everything, but some things. I’m just proud of myself for going to work and smiling and doing my best at my job. Yay. Sushi for dinner, then pen, then bed. Working all day tomorrow but I am going to be so well behaved all day, I promise. No crashing out, or breaking down, or crying, or getting mad at meaningless bullshit, or whatever. Just fucking, behave. Jesus.

Oh wait. Just remembered. Laura’s ex situationship from THREE YEARS AGO broke no contact last night—so help me god. If I was in a deluded and psychotic state I would probably be thinking to myself, oh so this is a FUCKING premonition. It’s so fucking annoying that I am in fact in a deluded and psychotic state at the moment. Fuck my life, like actually. Fuck my idiot horrible life. Can it get any worse? Unlikely. Fuck.

Feb 14th 3:38pm

Happy Valentine’s Day! I am angry about nothing and sad about everything! When it’s all over it’s over. That’s it. Everything sucks! Tomorrow is Sunday—I will have survived the week. Nothing feels real at all. I keep thinking something might happen to finally explain this deep feeling of dread that I have been experiencing for days, but nothing is happening. Everything is the same and I’m upset and jealous and angry. I want to be a different person. I want to be a different person so bad. I can’t write or read or consume any form of media because everything makes me feel ill. I am thinking about what I would have done in every situation that still bothers me and the past is haunting me and my faulty memory is going to be the thing that finally kills me.

Feb 20th 12:59pm

My hands still shake. That’s habitual, that stayed the same. There is nothing new about my cracking red hands, not the torn up nail beds nor their incessant tremor.

Lucy told me once that the only way to truly get over somebody is to humiliate yourself in front of them. And I tried that method, more than a few times. In their absence, I turned inconsiderate and deluded. Very adamant on expelling my suffering onto them. It tortured me to do that, over and over and over again.

Feb 21st 8:08am

Unhealthy and horrible. He doesn’t think about you. It’s been four years. Are you fucking stupid? Why would he think about you? So he unblocked you after he got engaged. So what. That is literally the only evidence that you have that proves that he’s still thinking about it, but either way, he’s BOTHERED by the concept of you. He does not MISS you, he wants to HURT YOU. Don’t you get that? Given the opportunity, he would hurt you again. Why can’t you get that through your brain? If you were to see him in person again—he would want it to hurt you. He’d want it to hurt. He’d want a reaction, he’d want you to flinch and run away. I need you to understand that he has never been and never will be good for you. NEVER HAS. NEVER WILL. If he had truly wanted you, he’d have shown you that. He wouldn’t have dragged you along the way that he did. Love isn’t like that.

If I keep writing about it, it will never end. Don’t you want it to be over? Wouldn’t you like to be clear minded for once? Wouldn’t you like to see him eye to eye? Wouldn’t you like to kick over that pedestal and face the fact that he is just a person who hurt you? And it wasn’t even fully intentional, what he did. The issue at hand was that he did not care. He did not care about your feelings back then and he sure as hell does not care about them now.

4:26pm

Busiest day ever. PLEASE GOD do not let me get stranded in nyc tomorrow before the fucking blizzard I am begging you please. Let me go home where it’s safe and warm in my Pennsylvania bed PLEASE. Please please please. Let me win. Please? Please.

10:36pm

Well everyone can go FUCK THEMSELVES AND DIE BECAUSE ****** JUST BROKE FOUR YEARS OF NO CONTACT AND I WAS FUCKING RIGHT.

And I should be writing but I’m not writing I’m texting him and I’m thinking about how the last time I spoke to him he had pretended to not know who I was and what the fuck am I doing? Gibson said to lock my phone and go to bed but I just want to tell ****** all of the ways that he fucked with my head and all the reasons why I can never let this go, I can never let this die. And I used to tell myself oh but if only I had ******. If only I had ******. But he is texting me and he is telling me that he is unhappy but that I am enjoyable and that his entire life is in flames and I feel so embarrassed for him, so embarrassed for him. And embarrassed for myself because not only is my life worse, but also because I am once again consoling him despite him never once consoling me. Where were you when I was in the hospital? Where were you when I needed you? You said that before today if I had run into you that you would have said hello. And fuck you—like actually, fuck you. I call bullshit and you say well, it would depend on if she was with me or not. I wish I’d just die, because this is a humiliation ritual, that you so easily say such horrible things and I so easily slump down into a terribly redundant submissive state, where I am sluggishly receptive to all of your hideously masked attempts at flirtation. I am an idiot, idiot girl. You are just the worst. You haven’t changed at all ******, nope, not one bit. Fuck. And I still miss you regardless. You never want to know about the things that I want to tell you. Or you just don’t have the courage to ask, but now I’m starting to believe that I never even knew you at all. Maybe you are just another heartless boy, with a facade of anxiety and cluelessness. And you put no effort into getting to know me, because you never asked me anything. And you text the same and I feel like I’m eighteen, that neither of us have grown up at all. I feel like you’ve been missing me this whole fucking time, but you will never admit to that.

AND I JUST SAID IM SORRY OH I AM SOOOO FUCKING STUPID FUCK I AM SO STUPID

I am so afraid of waking up in the morning and none of it being real. I’m afraid that I am so depressed that I have completely hallucinated my dream scenario. Like my brain has made it all up and I’m still dreaming. That’s how bizarre this is—I’ve convinced myself that I’ve truly and utterly lost my mind. ******. Jesus.

Feb 22nd 4:15pm

Nikki goes “you’d think that he’d have some… humanity,”

Feb 23rd 11:12am

My therapist agrees that he sort of ruined the last four years of my life for me. When stupid, pragmatic, clueless ****** comes crawling back into my life to hit the refresh button on my grief, I am not angry enough. Because I should be writhing in agony. I should be ecstatic at his entire life going up in flames, but I am not. And I had to ask if he was sorry, because he of course, would never say that to me unprompted. I don’t think that he’s sorry. I think that he’s selfish and desperate. And I am even more selfish, and even more desperate. And the things that I have said to him in the last twenty four hours are between me and fucking God.

A blizzard hit New York and I’m snowed in at my parents house, taking phone call after phone call, receiving lecture after lecture. I don’t know why everyone suddenly believes that I have self restraint and self respect. Wasn’t it always glaringly obvious to everyone how much I hated myself? What is it about him that turns me into a spectacle? I am a fool.

What if I get better, though? What if this helps me gain back some control? What if humiliating me is the way to get me back on track? And it just might be true, because I will do anything to prove to everyone that I can come out of this fairly unscathed. He dug up this grave—not me. It was not my decision. Once again, all of the power and control are torn from my hands. Fuck it, I like to be reckless. I like when it’s bad. I don’t do things that I don’t want to do. Self sabotage feels so fucking good in the moment. It feels so fucking good. I’m writhing in pleasure, my heart in the pit of my stomach. Completely unreachable. My therapist says that my inhibitions are down, that I won’t be able to control myself if I let this escalate. She’s probably right, she usually is.

Feb 24th 12:05pm

It’s self harm. What I’m doing. Entertaining him, inadvertently consoling him over someone who hates me and someone that he loves. And he doesn’t love me—never has and never will. I am receptive and accessible and that will always be the reason why he chooses me. I understand, I get it, bullshit. So much bullshit. I don’t understand anything about his choices and his behavior. I don’t understand why he ended his engagement and texted me the same day. I don’t understand why he continues to deny having any feelings for me, he swears the last time was when he was seventeen. He is a fucking liar.

Talking to him feels like a bad trip. It feels like I might be the craziest person to ever exist. I fucking forgot about that feeling, I completely forgot. But I remember it now. He is so fucking cryptic and weird and hearing his voice sliced through me like a blade, and yeah, I’ll make the cutting analogy!

March 1st 10:03am

Last night I lathered my entire body in Jergens natural glow bullshit that girls have been abusing since it was invented, and surprisingly this tan looks better than any other fake tan I’ve ever done. I used to fake tan weekly back in high school because I was a competitive and high school cheerleader, and that was just how it worked, I guess. Anyways, this morning I woke up and felt my stomach growl and I smiled to myself, because I have hard launched myself into a catastrophic restriction relapse. It isn’t even fully my fault, because my Ritalin kills my appetite, and so does the untimely arrival of ex situationship who has made it his mission to ruin my fucking life with his BULLSHIT and his LIES. He is so fucking obsessed with me.

He allegedly got drunk at some college party last night, which embarrasses me because I know that he got fucked up because he doesn’t drink regularly. I wonder if he was drowning away in the sorrow of calling off a wedding, or drowning in the sorrow of me cutting him off. Probably the latter, because I have a god complex and he’s obsessed with me. He might have loved her, but he was obsessed with me. Still is. It’s true, and that’s why I don’t have a problem with writing that down. It doesn’t feel as self absorbed when it’s completely true information.

Here’s my to do list for today:

• Wait in line at the bus stop

• Spend three agonizing hours on the bus (hopefully, hopefully in a window seat please let me win please please please)

• Get off of the bus at Port Authority and take the ACE to the L at 6th Ave, and ride the L all the way back to my apartment.

• Carry my suitcase up four flights of stairs and collapse on my big blue rug.

• Sob in relief

• Unpack my clothes

• Do my makeup

• Go to the weird department store near me to try and find a scale under $20 (fuck my life I know I know I know)

• Go home and weigh myself immediately.

• Cry, presumably

• Get ready to go to Trivia in the East Village and ponder about whether or not ex situationship is fantasizing about me

I’ll probably do half of what is on that list, but I will be back home in New York, where I rightfully belong. I was so wrong about wanting to spend a year in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is hell. It’s all just a sore reminder of how I let myself be treated. This year must be different. I will be so much better than I was in the last four years. I will be so much better. Maybe I’ll finally get my blood drawn tomorrow. That would be downright miraculous.

March 12th 1:55pm

EVERYONE KEEPS TRYING TO RUIN MY LIFE

(ME INCLUDED)

• I LIKE WHEN IT’S BAD

• I LIKE WHEN IT’S BAD

• Is it… entertaining? Annabel, it’s asinine. Totally and completely foolish. HELP

• Stop writing your weight down in your notes app. UNIMPORTANT, STUPID INFORMATION. This is not the hospital!

• Annabel, get UP!

• Annabel, lock in and do something about…all of it. Do something maybe.

• Get your fucking bloodwork done you fucking imbecile. And go to the dentist. Stupid bitch. Fuck. motherfucker.

• Fix tooth, fix skin, stop weighing yourself.

• Eat in the morning, lock in, west village walks

• Lemonade, coffee, water, seltzer, NOT white claw

• Marianne in sweden…

• Fuuck my life? Yeahhh. Yeah

April 4th 4:25am

Max asks me if I’m going to write about our conversation that we’re having right now at the bar that we’re at, and I tell him yes. Because it’s true, and it’s because that’s the answer that people always want when they ask me that question.

April 8th 9:11pm

Everything is horrible. Why lie? I am off the grid. I am inaccessible and unhappy. Everything is rotting and I am probably dying. All of my bad habits are eating me up. And maybe this is all just one big lesson on self respect, but god. God, my self hatred is so blatantly evident in the way that I look and treat myself and my space. It is so obvious that I am miserable and careless about everything. What happened to who I used to be? I was such an alive girl. I was so alive. What happened to her? I look like a corpse. A terrifyingly disgusting, awful, emaciated version of myself that scares the fucking shit out of me. I don’t recognize myself at all. All the things that I hated about myself at fifteen, I hate now. I hate even more now. I hate almost all of it. This is so fucking terrifying. I have got to get out of this never ending loop of horror.

April 14th 9:18am

Looking at my April playlist like it’s trying to tell me something. I thought maybe I had outrun that vicious vat of avoidance inside of me that existed when I was eighteen. There’s no outrunning my inability to come to a single conclusion about how I feel about anything, and that is why I am a writer and not a wife.

Your voice could split me in two, and I will NEVER love you.

May 1st 3:44pm

I feel sick to my stomach and I can’t write about it. He’s a fucking torture labyrinth. Tell me that this makes you happy.

May 6th 11:10am

Everything is changing and falling apart and coming together all at the same time. If I were nineteen I’d have dug myself a grave by now. Maybe I’d be stupid and complicit in my teenage bedroom writing love letters and accepting the bare minimum because what’s a little attention? What’s so wrong with feeling good for a short amount of time? What’s wrong with getting high?

May 16th 11:13am

I’m hungry all the time and I want everything all at once. I want money and stability and love that feels good in a way that doesn’t scare me,

5:22pm

I don’t want to be sad or mean or awful or bad. I don’t want to be bad. And I want to cut so bad.

11:42pm

Can you talk to me forever? I could do this for ages. I could do this for years.

May 28th 7:08pm

My window is open and I leave tomorrow. Not New York, obviously, but this apartment. Kara and I drank gin in bed last night until midnight while dissecting my boyfriend who’s not actually my boyfriend and who will never be my boyfriend. I like calling him that though, and I like calling him.

June 12th 2:36pm

I don’t even want you to think of me anymore. That in and of itself feels unfair to me. It’s just not fair that you get to think of me. Everything feels degrading when it comes to you and I’m sick of being degraded. I never want to see you again. I don’t want to be a ghost and I don’t want to exist to you anymore. I wish we could both get memory erasure and move the fuck on.

July 7th

8:18am

I can not write my way out of this. Perhaps I am just too angry.

July 15th 10:59am

Just me and my Dunkin iced coffee against the world. Sitting in my sort of new but sort of not room, which is trashed, obviously. Dolls on the floor. Clothes on the floor. Bullshit corporate iced coffee cups on the floor. So depressing. I will not write about the current state of my life in detail, because I will likely start to cry. Which is precisely why I have not been journaling daily the way that I used to, because to write about the reality of my life at the moment is just horrible. It makes me feel horrible, and I already have to be this person with this life, why would I make it worse by writing it all down? Not writing, however, is bad for me. I must find a balance. I am wearing my little cropped red t-shirt from Urban with my Free People sweatpants that I will live and die in. My hair is a mess. My skin is a mess, but accutane is happening FINALLY on July 25th. All that I need to do is get my blood done (difficult), and ask my psychiatrist for written permission (difficult but not for the same reasons). If I don’t get this ASM position I will throw myself off a tall ledge. If I do not get an apartment, I will also throw myself off a tall ledge. What the fuck ever. Everything sucks and then you die. Huzzah.

I have therapy in an hour and I need to pee and I also need to wash my fucking bedsheets ASAP. I am going to eat an apple.

July 18th 9:30pm

A year ago today I was writing an essay about my fear of all my teeth falling out and how it was a metaphor for feeling out of control and violated and how no matter what I do it will always feel Degrading To Be A Girl Who Wants Something Badly anyways now I am eight months clean and I know now and not everything I want is going to be good for me and I should’ve known, but when does anyone know anything when they’re supposed to know it? Anyways I’m walking home and it’s raining and hot, it’s humid and horrible and I hate bushwick but there are THINGS THAT I HATE MORE! And the irony is that I got everything that I was begging god for the second that I made that good decision. For once I made a good decision because I have enough scars on my body and enough damage and enough self hatred and I’ve just had enough. I’ve just had enough and in a month it’ll all be different and how fucking great is that?

July 20th 9:01pm

I don’t know, but I think there’s intimacy in ripping apart my cuticles when I’m anxious until I begin to bleed. And maybe that’s just because I’ve always been that way and no matter what I do and where I work, I’m always searching for a bandaid, a bloodied hand held out, shaking. I think that some things never change and whenever I have a bandaid on my finger I think about the same thing everytime. That entire process, the picking and scratching and hurting, it all feels the same as it always did and does. Will it be at my heels forever? Will I always be able to feel it? There is a lot that can be intimate and maybe it’s excuses and fruitless idiotic rationalization, nothing more and nothing less. Maybe I’ll never forgive you and maybe I’ll always be stupid. Two things can be true.

10:22pm

On another note, there’s always going to be Steph and I, side by side on her pink couch. Where I have napped and cried and posed on. We are listening to THE STUPIDEST MUSIC EVER and SOBBING about EVERYTHING. I like consistency and rituals, because I am an anxious, stupid bitch.

Aug 10th 12:34pm

Nine months clean today. I am at work and exhausted and I haven’t wanted to cut myself in a few weeks now. It’s summer and I just cannot. No matter how much I may want to. The good news is that right now, in this moment, I do not want to.

The problem is that I am regressing in a potentially more detrimental way, though.

Yesterday Jo watched as Kara and I read my new dialogue piece out loud that I don’t ever see myself posting because it feels too personal and intimate. That concept, something I’ve written being too intimate, feels so fucking idiotic, all things considered. I don’t know, I just think that sometimes when it comes to that relationship, there are certain things that I want to hide behind me for the rest of my life in order to keep them mine. Writing them down helps, though. It’s not even a real conversation. It’s a fake one, one that never would have happened. The conversational style that I used was so familiar though that the entire thing feels uneasy and uncomfortable. A lot of that relationship made me uncomfortable. I’ve been in a lot of relationships that have made me uncomfortable. I told Jared last night that I missed him a lot, and he told me that I didn’t miss him or love him. He says that I am in love with being uncomfortable. I guess I do have some twisted tendency to remain traumatized for as long as I can help it. Not one of my best qualities, I suppose, but I’m not even sure if that’s something that I can help but do. That’s just how my brain works. Unfortunately. To my profound dismay. Ugh. I definitely have been possessed by a demon.

I am such an insipid, foul mouthed fool of a girl. On Sunday, Jo and I pass my vape back and forth in an empty fitting room while I stand with my back to the wall, arms crossed, defensive. I recount the last couple weeks of my life to her while we take our grossly Gen-Z and mildly depressing retail version of a smoke break. Jo nods in sympathy while I mutter mindlessly, mostly to myself, about how I cannot bear to even look at myself in the mirror much these days. How despite my deeply narcissistic tendencies, I am experiencing an astounding amount of self hatred. I blame it all on him, the idiot boy who shall remain nameless, because I refuse to acknowledge the alternatives. The more emotionally intelligent part of my brain knows that what really is to blame is my own redundant self destructive behavior, that lead to me letting him back in my life in the first place. I’d rather lean into the former, where in my head he becomes someone who was sent to kill me. That soothes a lot of my internal drama. I’ll face those repercussions.

My mantra, as of recent, is that I can not eat when I’m in love and I don’t write until it’s over. All of my efforts lately to behave normally and think rationally are rather futile.

I can be an idiot if I want to be. Don’t they say that the happiest are the naive? I’d have sacrificed my wits if the consolation was his hand wrapped around my leg. I hate myself! I hate him! I want to be a smart girl, not a dead girl! And I wish I’d never met him, I wish he’d never wandered in and triggered all of my incessant and undying teenage bad behavior. I have run out of excuses, I have done this to myself. What about him makes me so sick to my stomach? I can feel the love between my ribs, where it’s easy to see what’s underneath the skin. Bones, baby, bones. I’m gonna snap in two pretty soon if I do not get this under control. Ending it was the first step, of course, and at the very least I did that. It’s time to get my head clear, if it weren’t for this relentless heat. Much ado about nothing.

Summer is, while a lot of things, typically an overwhelmingly ever-changing period of time for me. Always is. Summer is also, predictably, very hot. Everything looks and feels a lot like monotone mush–dinner, bedsheets, leg hair, what-not. Boring, trivial, the same, annoying, persistent, wet. Ending my relationship with him makes everything else in my life seem boring. I am without care and begging God to take away all of the violence. At least I ended it. But regardless, I am still, unequivocally, such a fool. All of my broken dreams and chipped teeth and aching ribs have found their meaning in this idiot of a boy who I can not say the name of without feeling nauseated and dizzy. I can’t even bother to use the pseudonym that I have created, because even that name gives me terrible anxiety now to write down. The more that I grit my teeth, the bigger it becomes. It’s so grueling and stupid, watching myself run circles around the same boy who broke my heart initially as a teenager. I’ve become pretty resigned to that feeling, the physical ache that stems from sheer exhaustion. Frustration. Irritation. The past four months have felt like a funeral. Everything in my big new room is dead and dull. I miss my sister.

Kara and I have a new bit–we add things consistently to the made up list in my head of the things that I’ll be forced to do when I die and go to hell. Relive the last four months of my life, yeah, add that to the list. Ride the un air conditioned Megabus hungover from Baltimore to New York, sitting in an aisle seat and suffering. Listen to voice memos I’ve sent while drunk, bitching about my life like he is not the primary source of my internal misery. Pretending like he’s good for me and good to talk to and good to listen to and good to have around. I’ll be a busy girl in hell.

My legs are sticking to the subway seats a lot these days, in the height of the heat wave, and I feel disgusting when I’m thinking about him. Tell me it feels degrading just thinking of me, tell me that it feels misplaced and wrong, tell me it’s not just me. And I don’t want this to make him miserable and I don’t want to be something that he thinks he might be able to fully have to himself, and I don’t want to ever leave New York because I know where I’ll end up. Does he actually want what’s best for me? I think he wants to nail me down and I want to get myself out of this mess sometime soon. Does he really think that I’d survive the decade with a ring on my finger? I’ve got a stomachache that will not quit. I’ll be doing damage control on this for years. Add that to the list of reasons why I’ll never forgive him. While I’m at it, add it to the list of things I’ll be doing in hell when I die.

I hit eight months clean, which is both miraculous and terrifying. I don’t think that I’ve ever been eight months clean. It’s so ridiculous and comical that it happened while I was in contact with him, because I knew deep down that the only reason why I wasn’t cutting was so that nobody could blame a relapse on our relationship starting up again. I wouldn’t let that be a reason in anyone’s head, let alone mine. I don’t cut while I’m in contact and I don’t write until it’s over. And it’s over, right?

He told me last month that he may have been in love with me the entire time, of course in his own words that reflect lack of detail and are more or less just intended to confuse me. I can fill in the blanks though, and here is what I have discovered. He would have married her knowing that he was in love with me, and that is asinine. What an absurd and idiotic fucking concept, and what an even stupider thing to tell me over the phone. What makes him think that knowing that information will get him anywhere with me? I was throwing up in my mouth all of June, thinking about how much more he would have hid from me had I not gotten coked out on my sister’s last day in the city and called him screaming about what a liar he is. Maybe I’ll always be dragging my dead seventeen year old’s body around behind me. Maybe I’ll always reek of what could have been had I not been so self destructive in my adolescence. I think that forgiveness is important, but I can not forgive him. Part of me wishes that he had stayed a liar and suffered those consequences instead of the ones he receives from being honest with me. I imagine he’d have suffered more as a liar than as somebody honest. I wish that she would have been less stupid and not gotten caught cheating, so that he would have stayed with her and married her and left me alone. He’d surely be suffering, but since when is that my responsibility?

And I am such a fucking fool. For going back and for giving him access and for answering the phone and for getting so consistently drunk all of spring just to give me a reason to forgive my future actions, and I am so embarrassed. His sudden and brutal honesty last month, maybe, might have been the final nail in the coffin. That may have shaken me up in a way that is hard to undo. We haven’t talked since. Not for lack of trying on his end, but I do not think that I can go any lower than I already have. Unless, of course, I fucked him. I feel as if telling him that I had been in love with him was already pretty detrimental. It can always get worse though, which is a fact, that while slightly horrifying, has been somewhat of a comfort to me as I make my way through the aftermath.

Earlier in June, Bella and I took a trip to the beach. We were drunk before we even left Manhattan, and were doing lines under her sweatshirt through a green straw that she had cut in half only an hour after arriving to the beach itself. I get messy, tired drunk, getting sand in my hair and in my eyes. Bella wipes the tip of my nose and lets me lick her palm, so as not to let anything go to waste.

“We just need to get you, like, fucked,” Bella says, and sips her drink. Shrugs. As if it ever worked as simply as that for me. But I agree, vocally, and internally. That getting laid would probably, definitely, benefit me. Of course it would have to be from somebody that didn’t torture me for half of the time that I’d been a cognizant and self aware teenager. Imagine that? Rockaway Beach doesn’t give a fuck what drugs we were doing or weren’t doing, so we take full advantage of our first day off in over a week, and celebrate my new era of no contact with the devil. And as Bella so generously puts it, there are no rules on beach day. Being off the clock and out of the store that we spent a majority of our time in lets us act the way we wished that we could act on the clock, and Bella and I both have the tendency to bite our tongues the most frequently. We’re angry. Perpetually, it seems, but that feels normal. Retail breeds anger, I guess. So do boys, men, dogs, whatever. It was a good day, and I didn’t feel the urge to text him until we were walking back towards the train, hungover on sea-legs, miserable. Briefly I recall how I miss him the most when I am uncomfortable, but before I can go down that rabbit-hole, I fall asleep on the L Train back to Brooklyn, coked out with a dead phone held in my twitching hand.

It may be some time before I can write about this all in a way that is fully and completely transparent, emotionless. Perhaps when I am thirty or so, then I will have more to say. Back in May, Faye and I speed walk through The West Village with a bottle of wine each in our water bottles, talking our relationships (or rather, embarrassingly so, situationships) to death. I throw my free hand around in the air saying, I don’t write until it’s over, and it won’t fucking end. Will I ever write again? Will I ever be able to exorcise this stubborn, unrelenting demon of mine, that is killing my creativity? This demon—that I seem to be humiliatingly, and much to my agonizing dismay, in love with. Will I ever stop being such an embarrassment to myself? And it never ends, not really. Not in the way it should, when both him and I still have and probably always will have these insurmountable feelings involved that keep continuously derailing our lives and each other’s lives. I feel bad for him, I really do, and that empathy is ruining my life too. Why am I so sad over his failures? Why am I not sad about my failures? Why can’t I seem to care about all of the self sabotage that I’ve been inflicting upon myself since February all because I can’t cope with the fact that I am in love with somebody who dysregulates my entire nervous system? Everything is so terrible. We have not spoken in a month, and my skin, miraculously enough, has begun to clear up. His misery still seems to make me quite upset.

Coherency is not in the cards for me right now. I think that the fact that I am even able to write at all right now is probably a good sign. Despite my erratic and misplaced ramblings, I am writing. He would have married her still in love with me, and I do not find that romantic at all. He would have gone the rest of his life without ever telling me, and I do not find that consoling or comforting, to know that he loved me for so long in silence. No, I find that cowardly, and I find him to be quite gutless. Have I mentioned yet, how angry I am? Does that come across at all in my words, or do I just sound like a sputtering, desperate mess? I am very angry. This summer is a funeral. Why is it that he gets to fuck around while I’m drowning? And he can not see what he does not want to. I wish he’d wake the fuck up and realize that I am also just a desperate, pathetic loser with no self respect.

Late May again, and Kara and I are drinking gin straight from the bottle on my mattress, because I snapped my headboard in two the day before, and now I have no bed frame. We lay with our feet hanging off the side, and I am so much closer to the floor than I have been in a while. We dissect my relationship with him, and wonder what he sees in a girl who he hasn’t really, truly spoken to in years. I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve forgotten how to write, or maybe I just don’t want to hear about it ever again from my awful, lying mouth. Pretending and pretending and pretending like I don’t want to throw myself off a cliff just to be able to look at him again. Like that isn’t the most terrifying desire I’ve had in years. Kara says six years makes it love, and that throws me so off kilter that I can’t feel anything but vaguely offended. I don’t want it to be love, I don’t want it to be love. He must hate himself so fervently, to never want to be in the same room as me again. I must hate myself too, all for the same reasons. Is it ever going to look good for me again? Had he not been such a terribly insecure pathological liar, would it have ever become a real thing that I could have touched? I wanted to see him sunburnt. I wanted to see his room a mess. I wanted to see his hands shake at the sight of me. I wanted I wanted I want. Why do I always want what I’ll never have? Why did he always have to be so dumb? Why couldn’t he have told me that he wanted me so badly? Am I really that terrible?

His made up memories are going to derail him, and his insensitive assumptions about what I can and can not handle were well on its way to becoming what killed us. I had to end it. I feel pretty much the same about myself in regards to him. False footage, and avoiding what’s both real and demanding to be acknowledged. Everyone is so sick of my never-ending drama revolving him. I am not beautiful the way that he thinks that I am, and I am not invincible the way that he wants me to be. Does he realize, at all, that to me he’s just parasitic? And I’ve got a wet mouth and a racing heart thinking about his hand on my leg, my head ducked so that he doesn’t have to look at me. And I’m up and insecure, tracing his bullshit words inside of my bullshit head, thinking when did he get this fucking bad? Baby, we’re nothing. I’ve been broken out into hives since the winter. I’ve got prominent ribs and cracked lips and a hunger that might destroy me in the end, but I don’t listen to my body and what it wants or what it needs. I’m so ritualistic with all of the things that can hurt me. I just kept fucking around like I could do it for the rest of my life, trying to prove that he loved me while he was actively looking at me, and not just remembering me.

And looking back and looking down, I think that if he tried, even a little, that he could have been good for me. Maybe. But I know just as easily that I am just a complacent, avoidant bitch, and that I’d have never let that happen. Why does it always have to feel so bad? When will it ever feel good? Would he ever have learned how to make me feel good? Not that it’d have brought me any comfort at all. I wish that God would fix me. Why is it that I am unable to feel comfortable with desire? It’s all misplaced. I remember that other mantra from when I was nineteen, to call or not to call? To cut, or not to cut? To cut or to call, to call or to cut? He’s self harm, I’m self harm, it’s all self harm. This entire relationship is a sharp object daunting me, and I am such a fucking fool for thinking that my desire to be hurt has died off. I am even more of a fool, for enjoying it.

And I’m telling you now that I don’t like myself and what I write, not at all. And maybe at an angle in a dark room with my hair covering half of my face, he’d find me truly beautiful. If you squint, you’d miss it, I think. That look on the visible side of my face that looks a lot like an idiot animal in the face of death, unable to move and do anything substantial except wait to be shot. I realize now, while it’s hot and bright out, that I was never really actually able to hide my lack of self preservation—he just wasn’t looking for it. Men lack something akin to object permanence, in a way that makes them unable to see what they’re not looking for. If he were to tilt his head and back up until he hits the wall, maybe he might find what he’s looking for in me. Perhaps when he is far enough way, my scars disappear and my hair untangles and I look less like an innately suicidal animal, and more like the girl he made up inside of his head that sort of has my smile, and mostly has my eyes. Because let me tell you, who he thinks I am and who he wants me to be is not who I actually am, or ever will be. I think that he thinks that I was born to be messed with, born to be loved, etcetera.

Human beings are innately self protecting creatures. They flinch for a reason. They don’t go looking for fires to throw themselves into. I often wonder what part of me is missing that everyone else has, that makes me such a self-destructive calamity. What he and I are, basically, is just another one of my damning indulgences that both hurts me and excites me. I have become so disgustingly protective and insecure about all of my indulgences. I can not ever forgive him for doing that to me. He will always make me sad and I will always hate myself when he’s around. I am eight months clean and I can’t eat when I’m in love, and I don’t write until it’s over.

If it were all less of a mess I think that we’d have both gotten bored rather quickly, which feels lame and predictable. Violence, baby, violence. That is what we’ve got in common. I hate him. He never asked to read my essays or to see me naked. He never told me to get home safe or stay off the train late at night once I’ve had too much to drink. He thinks to himself that I am tough and well off. He thinks that I am a force to be reckoned with. Well, I think that he’s a coward who will be haunted by my half dead body for the rest of his miserable life. I doubt that I’m actually in love. I think I might just be fear conditioned and desperate to prove that I felt anything at all. Maybe I just like to be scared. What a waste it would all have been, had I never actually felt anything real at all. I think that I will write something that makes more sense soon, once I come to my senses.

Life is hell, but a six year situationship is heaven. I will, presumably, leave my apartment for the second time today at around 6pm to go get a preroll. Not because I deserve it, but because I am experiencing the stress levels of a complete idiot who has wasted her life away the past two years, and is paying for it now. I must find a full time job by May. Impossible when you’re me. Impossible when getting out of bed is sometimes, a lot of the time, the hardest thing in the world. Drinking my large McDonald’s fountain sprite and sucking on my vape while I type, curled up in the corner of my perfect bed. My perfect, unclean bed. Oh well. Tomorrow I will go to the laundromat to pick up my clean, perfect sheets, and I will have an actually perfect pink bed again. My room is unusually clean right now, because I’ve been stress cleaning all week in hopes of a clean environment resolving some of this extreme turmoil that I am experiencing. Honestly, writing has completely disinterested me lately. It’s just another reminder of my lack of value in this world. I am the mayor of Patheticville. God fucking help me. Maybe I’ll do my makeup for the dispensary man who I have a weird relationship with, meaning he knows that I am a regular and occasionally mentions differences in my appearance and occasionally mentions my new and interchanging bag charms. So mundane, yet so anxiety inducing. For whatever reason.

Last month, I was mid-shift when I went to check my phone, only to realize that not even two minutes prior to me tapping on the screen, ****** sent me an Instagram DM. ******. Like, ****** who hasn’t spoken to me in almost four years. ****** who rewired my entire brain chemistry with his twisted behavior. He obliterated my self esteem, and turned me into someone with absolutely no self respect. And I mean noooo self respect. ****** has been the everlasting gun in my mouth for the last four years. Loaded and metallic, my lips wrapped around it tightly. I am unable to remove it. Something about being consistently suicidal, and perpetually obsessed with self sabotage. Predictably, I lost it. Called Lucy from the office, my hands shaking. We decide to wait until we’re together for me to answer, and I do wait, but only until we’re in our joint uber home. We meet up outside of Barnes and Noble, and I hang up on Lindsey only to immediately jump into conversation with Lucy as we speed walk through Union Square, giggling and me throwing my hands up in complete disbelief, because this was unprecedented. Never in a million years did I expect him to reach out to me. Lucy thinks that he broke off his engagement, and I think that he’s an idiot. What little self respect I had left dwindles down into nothing the second that I respond. He tells me that he had ended his engagement earlier that day. Was he expecting to pacify me with this information? It is so comically him to be a constant perpetrator of a hit and run. Fuck her over, and turn to me for relief. He will not turn me into a consolation prize, when he is such a fucking loser. But I still respond, because who wouldn’t?

I’m getting off on all of it. Knowing that I am where I should be, from his perspective. Knowing that I am in New York, where I belong, and that he has not left Pennsylvania. Knowing that he thinks that I am God, when I am not. It might not be fair to make those kinds of assumptions about him, but I am almost certain that they’re true. And it helps that I have him on a pedestal too. In a different way, of course, but still on one nonetheless. He is so ridiculously predictable. So fucking boring. Such a loser, yet I am so enamored. I want him to ask me for nudes just so that I can deny him of it. I want him to beg me to see him, just so that I can say no. I want to tell him everything that I’ve done and everyone that I’ve done it with, just to watch him writhe in agony. But he wouldn’t, though. He wouldn’t, because he has mastered nonchalance, where I have not.

The week that I spend with my hands attached to my phone, telling him all of the things that I should not be telling him, I lose ten pounds. By now, I’ve probably lost fifteen. Evelyn implies that I look sick when I see her after that first week, and I get off on that later that night, drunk and upset and basically twitching in both misery and pleasure. My bones are jutting out and that’s on him, and all of it is everything that I have ever wanted. All of it is making me unhappy, and it’s such a profound betrayal–what I want being what’s terrible for me. I eat his words for dinner and stick three fingers down my throat an hour later in order to rid my body of all of it. The more that he does not call me beautiful, the less that I want to eat. I feel fifteen. I’m pinching the fat on my stomach while the other hand holds the phone to my ear, listening to him attempt to dissect a part of my life that he doesn’t have any right to dissect. He thinks every guy who’s ever touched me is an asshole. He thinks that I know that I’m attractive but I don’t know that. He refuses to give me any indication that he still wants to fuck me. But he wants to talk on the phone at two in the morning and I want to pull the trigger on the metaphorical gun in my mouth. I am such a fool.

When I finally work up the courage to ask him why he finds me so frightening, he hesitates for much longer than what is necessary before calling me pretty. Within its layers of innate embarrassment, my idealization of him bulges and pulses. It had grown twice its size after I realized that he’d never call me beautiful. I can’t bear to attempt to kill off my never ending self hatred. So when he hesitates to call me pretty, I ask him if it had killed him to say that out loud. He laughs, obviously.

It turns out that he is more tangible than what I had made up about him over the years. It takes being reminded to allow myself to come to terms with the fact that he exists outside of me. But I’ve always been self absorbed. And he has always been so obsessed with the idea of me that it has fucked us both for life.

He wants to know details about the life that I’ve lived in his absence? I’d like it if he guessed. I’d like it if he told me a few stories about things that I’ve probably never done, and I would lie about doing them, because I want to be who he wants me to be just as badly as he does. He wants me to exhaust myself telling him all of the ways that I am better than him, because that is how this works. It’s how it worked when we were seventeen, and it’s how it works now, because he says that it feels the same now as it did back then. That makes me sick, you know? What he means to be complimentary is something that I’d have to be tortured to admit.

But I like it when it’s bad. What kind of person am I to him, I wonder? He has a very intriguing perception of me. I want to hear every adjective that he can think of to describe me. I’d really like it if he wrote me a list of all the things that he likes about me. Is that sick? Am I sick? I shouldn’t be doing this, entertaining this, entertaining him. Inadvertently, maybe, consoling him over his horribly embarrassing breakup. Fuck, I hate that. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be comfortable or consoling or gentle. Not with him. I am not scared of him anymore. I am not. He does not scare me.

I walked seven miles the other night. Stephanie and I braved the west side highway on the first warm evening of the season, and I was predictably pissed off about everyone’s walking speed. Steph packed us a bag of grapes and we laid in the grass talking our insecurities to death while eating grapes, me hitting my pen over and over and over. We both knew that I was going to text him again soon. There was no use in hiding it, it was obvious. No self respect, I know. None. None at all. I hate myself—that should not surprise anyone. And everyone knows that a girl who hates herself will run with her arms out to her worst demon, grinning all the way. Pathetic, yeah. Yeah, I know.

It’s Wednesday night and I’m tired and I’m desperate for something and I’m not sure what. I sabotaged my attempt at securing some form of attention the other night at the bar when I started bawling at the bar over what Evelyn had said. The bar I was at is usually where I get whatever I need and whatever I want. It’s fun to be a regular at a bar. Except for when you’re drunk and crying because you look emaciated and not in a hot way, because you can never do anything right. I hate my life, but I am so addicted to the constant drama. I don’t like anything until it’s something bad. I am the worst 22 year old girl in the world, and nothing can stop me from texting him! Not a single fucking thing!

It shouldn’t feel the same, but it does, because I am so incessantly full of shame, in the same exact way that I was back then. I have got to get out of this mess, and he has got to grow up. I am childish, but at least I’ll admit it! I can forgive my naivety, but can he forgive his? Why is he treating me like somebody that he knows?

Mara’s closeness disturbed me when we were younger. It was careless and practiced, as if she’d done it before, like she was used to infiltrating somebody’s existence and burrowing down until she encompassed it. Mara had gentle fingers and rough words. And it seemed as if my jealousy for her was innate, with the quickness of its arrival and its inability to dissolve. But the way I loved her, it was hazy, an inebriated delusion. Drunk on admiration, my throat was always full of words that I wanted to say to her to make her like me, see me, listen to me. Words that I couldn’t find and that I never had. Adolescence for me was wanting to–needing to be heard, specifically by Mara. Nobody else we knew ever felt that way about her, even though for years I had assumed they did.

I, of course, can not ever be truly honest about myself or Mara or anything in between. If you were to split us down the middle, you’d end up with Mara’s tangled hair underneath my fingernails. You’d find my blood in her throat. When I am around her, she turns me to melted tar. I become viscerally potent, downright calamitous. She used to cut my bangs for me; I remember thinking that had she cut my forehead, I would have let the cut bleed right into my mouth. I’d have clamped my jaw shut, swallowed the blood, and swallowed my words. When she stuck that ink covered needle into the side of my wrist during October of our junior year, I thought tattoos were supposed to hurt that badly. Turns out, she had gone too deep and the ink bled, staining my wrist blue. To us, the matching tattoos were just another excuse to push something sharp into our skin. It was just another attempt at trademarking ourselves as one. Mara used to repeat that old mantra, beauty is pain. Modernity has made its attempt to abolish sayings like these, similar to the one about nothing tasting as good as skinny feels. She liked that one too. But to us, beauty was painful. And nothing was more beautiful and more painful than what we believed existed between us.

We had the tendency to take everything too far. Where a boundary should have existed, was instead a pathway to something that made us closer. Close was not close enough. And because we hated ourselves so fervently, and because we had melted into each other, we hated each other too. There is no one in the world I had ever loved the way I loved Mara, and no one I quite hated to the same degree. She and I were the worst parts of each other, and I never wanted it to end. Leaving her bedroom was always a cataclysm. I wished we could be sixteen forever.

Every night during the summer of the pandemic, I slept at Mara’s. Mostly to soothe my codependency, to not miss a second of her existence, and sometimes just to remind myself that she was alive. Even though I slept in Mara’s bed almost as equally as I slept in my own, it wasn’t even ever truly comforting. What soothed me also spent me. She was an erratic sleeper, tugging the sheets off of me without even realizing, and throwing her limbs over my body unconsciously. Even though she had a king sized bed, she stuck to me like I was a pillow or some other protective source, which I wasn’t. It felt awkward and uncomfortable instead of comfortable and easy. The lack of touch that we had both experienced growing up may have done Mara right–but it had done me wrong. I was cold and unwilling where she was desperate and wanting. That didn’t mean I didn’t try, but it all just upset me more than it should have. So I rarely slept on those nights at her house, but it never stopped me from going over. Instead I lay paralyzed with overt awareness of her warm body against mine, her heat and breath and skin slick with sweat and I despised her for it. I despised her for needing me so badly even though I knew I needed her more. And despite that, I wanted to be the type of person who was agreeable and open to intimacy in the way that she was. It was worse knowing I wasn’t, and that I wanted to be. Later on, a boy told me that I flinched whenever I was complimented, and I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about how much Mara would have agreed.

On her seventeenth birthday, I took a photo of her in the grass of my neighborhood’s park, with her beat up Air Force 1’s kicking up towards the sky. We were both in conjoined depressive episodes that day. We were talking about suicide and coffins, cremation versus burial. I said Mara, you can wear me around your neck like a collar when I’m dead. Something about being seventeen. Something about feeling possessive of something that you can not own. Mara says I am her favorite person, who she loves to every planet and back. Who she loves in every universe, who she will never tire of. I remember twitching in synchronicity on acid and our joint suicide attempt three weeks later. Pills, and more pills, and more pills. Mara getting caught, and me waking up. Mara’s attempt counts for something; mine counts for shit. Mara in the hospital, a charcoal mouth and an angry sister. Me, dying my hair back to brown and trying out for cheerleading and driving to school and then H-Mart and then one of those carnation stores with cards and flowers and chocolate. I remember buying Mara a card and an American Horror Story t-shirt that she never wore once.

That summer was the one where I thought I was possessed, and death had rolled itself into her room. It slipped through the floorboards and leaked through the carpet. What’s another stain on the rug? I remember days after she got home, we wrote each other eulogies just in case it happened again. Just in case it worked for one of us and the other was left in shambles. Mara and I agreed that if one of us succeeds, the other would stick around for the funeral and then end it afterwards. We agree that if one of us goes, so does the other. And so we did, write those eulogies. We stood in front of each other in my dad’s dark office, and read them out loud. Mara cried and I laughed. After all, I was the writer. I could elicit an emotional reaction when I wanted one. Mara knew how to make me laugh.

But you have got to understand, I love Mara in an animalistic way. It is unwavering and exceptionally stubborn, all that love. And when it finally ends, it’ll be when we’re dead. We will die with cuts and bruises and blown out hair. And when we’re dead, there will be over a decade of damage to control while we’re lounging on clouds, kicking our dirty feet up into the air, the way Mara did on her seventeenth in the grass.

January 30th

Class is awful. It’s not really, but it is. We give introductions in Great Works of Literature, and when the guy before me is giving his introductory spiel, I bolt from the room, running to the bathroom to hold my hands under cold water in order to calm my definitely-not-normal heart rate. When I return to class, they’ve finished with introductions. I dodged a bullet. God forbid I have to say my name and major out loud, that’s nightmare fuel. That’s enough to give me a panic attack (it did). Later in class we work in groups, and present the part of the syllabus that we’ve been assigned to. I speak aloud with minor anxiety. My brain doesn’t make a single shred of sense to me. In the library Liz and I talk about the pleasure of lying, and how even in our journals we’re just saying shit to say shit. It’s the joy of writing. I tell her about what Lucy told me the other day, how I could completely make something up in my pieces and I’d be allowed to; it’s my blog, my essay. Mine mine mine. We sit at our computers, scrolling through our old writing docs trying to find something to fix and elaborate on. Every few seconds we groan, gesturing at our computers. Why would we write something that abysmal and think it’s good. I have only one poem from high school that I deem worthy. I wrote it after cheerleading ended, and the mom of one of my teammates started bad mouthing me on Facebook. It made me think about how much I dislike being a teenage girl, because teenage girls get ridiculed for doing anything well. They get ridiculed for having it right, for doing something brave. Shut up and twirl your hair, that’s allowed. Pull down your skirt and quit acting like a stripper on the basketball court (says the emails we get about our hip hop routines every year). If I had a gun this would all be easy. I would have written that poem, the one from high school I wrote with a pink pen in my pink journal with pink nails and bloody fingerprinted pages, and I would have shot myself afterwards. There, take that. My final act of revenge. An already bloody page covered in my guts. Romantic. Tara, you can go fuck yourself, and fuck your daughter too. The poem was about being a girl, and it was somewhat ironic. I was pretty proud of myself at the time for coming up with something like that. I remember my hair being in a ponytail; I was wearing my red tank top that showed too much cleavage. I was drinking pink wine in my room, using the wine glass Lindsey had left there a few nights prior. I was girling it up.

February 8th

Jared comes to the city this weekend and stays in our apartment. To prepare, I do a terrible job at cleaning, doing the bare minimum–the bathroom, the dishes, the floor, barely. My room gets tidied, but I push a bunch of trash and random bullshit under my dresser. Whatever I can’t see, I don’t care about. He comes with weed and gives me a hug, calling me bunny and dancing with me around my living room floor. We smoke immediately, and I get horrifically high. Recently, I haven’t been drinking a lot or really doing any substances, because I spent the last few months getting electromagnetic shock therapy, therefore I wasn’t allowed to. At the time it was just about the worst thing they could have told me, but I was surprisingly fine at the whole abstinence thing. It was easier than I’d ever thought it to be. Plus, I figured I’d eat less and become skinnier and that won me over more than anything else, honestly. We’re both high, curled up on one of my small couches together listening to Jared and Dan’s joint playlist inspired by “Delete Forever” by Grimes which is one of my all time favorite songs that I listened to religiously when I was sixteen. I think music must be just about the greatest thing of all time. I don’t have any epiphanies or come to any realizations or write something profound. All I do is sit on the couch laying my head on the windowsill thinking about how much I love music. We order Chinese and I eat wonton soup and crackers, still feeling hungry afterwards and hating myself for it. I am so insatiable and unable to be pleased. Later Jared and I lay on my bed as the playlist drones on from the other room on the TV. He flips through my sketch pad and asks me for a pencil so he can draw me. After I find one and hand it to him, I try to lay as nonchalantly as possible, scrolling on my phone looking at nothing. He sketches me with all of my stuffed animals and pillows, laying on my pink bed looking like a bitch with no responsibilities. We go to this AI DJ set that night that normally is the kind of thing I’d hate, because fuck AI, if not for the open bar and free coat check. I could flaunt my body that I hate, drinking free cocktails that tasted horrible, and be really utterly miserable about it. At one point Steph looks at me and comments that “Annabel is having so much fun”. I was thinking about how dinner made me bloated and I’m wearing a tank top that’s too tight because I didn’t know what to wear. My hair’s unwashed and I’m not wearing makeup and my face is covered in acne because I ran out of my topical meds and I feel weird because I’m still half high and wanting to listen to music that isn’t so electronic. I want to relearn guitar and be good at it. I want to have a nice singing voice, so I can write songs about boys and sing them and get a hundred thousand likes on TikTok.

March 18th

It’s probably a result of me staying out until 6am this morning, but everything feels horrific. At work I tell Claire that I feel so paranormal that it’s scaring me, that I don’t really even have words to describe how I feel. I took a ten a few hours into my shift and sat in the back and sobbed, angry at myself for doing these things to myself. For saying too much every time alcohol enters my system and continuously letting alcohol enter my system. Last night before we went out, I laid in Madison’s bed with her and told her about a bunch of awful things that happened to me, because I’ve been feeling really lonely lately and needed someone to confirm to me that these events were in fact really traumatic. It wasn’t really a fair arrangement, but I was too sad to really even care. We get free drinks all night and talk to a bunch of ugly men who keep asking us out in really pathetic ways. Des DMs me and calls me pretty around 4am, which I don’t see until later that morning. I drunkenly respond and tell him that I miss him, and ride that high for a while until he likes the message and doesn’t respond. I tell Claire that I’m going through a divorce and that nobody should bother me. My hangover makes me feel really maternal towards things like hard security tags. Claire says the store is experiencing paranormal activity and I laugh really hard.

On the train home I cry a little, holding back vomit with my head in my hands listening to a bunch of fucked up unreleased Ethel Cain that’s only making me feel worse. Ramen for dinner makes me nauseous. I take a nap and wake up defeated, just fucking crumpled. It makes me wish I still had weed just so that I could exit this headspace for even just an hour. I feel very suicidal, and I know that it’s a result of going out two nights in a row, but I just feel very frustrated at the fact that I can’t function like a normal person. I’m considering dropping my second class just so that I can lay in bed more and not do anything. I almost wish that I wasn’t clean anymore, just so that I could have an excuse to run back to Pennsylvania, bloody and crying. But there’s no excuse, I’m just extremely lazy and extremely self indulgent. Zack invites me to see his new apartment on Friday, which I tell him looks very Patrick Bateman like, which probably satisfies him. He makes me a bunch of drinks that I swallow very quickly, trying to numb my anxiety that I’m experiencing. We walk down to the nearest deli so that I can buy him a case of Stella for his housewarming gift. I had considered buying him a bottle of wine, because that seemed like the nice thing to do, but I was too tired to go to the liquor store after work and he wouldn’t have drank it anyway. His roof is my favorite part of the apartment, and when we’re up there I consider jumping off but decide against it. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about suicide. It’s all passive, but it’s there I guess. Not that it ever really goes away. Being twenty one has been really disappointing so far, I feel very worthless and exhausted. Re-reading Normal People was a bad idea, but I really like Marianne and her inner thoughts. Marianne in Sweden feels very familiar to how I’m feeling now, as if I’m just dragging my feet everywhere and nobody can actually see me and decipher if I’m alive and real or not. I throw up a lot in Zack’s bathroom and then uber home and feel really guilty about it, wishing I was dead.

April 3rd

Yesterday was my ninety days clean. I’m indifferent about it; everyone keeps saying they’re proud of me and I guess I must really need to hear that because I keep telling people just to garner a reaction. In reality, it might as well be my first day clean because I almost relapsed the other night. With a razor blade gripped in my wet hand, I paced around my bedroom sobbing like a wild animal, trying to convince myself to do something–anything at all. In recent days, I’ve been spending a lot of time either working or laying in bed. Writing has not been coming easily to me at all the way I wish that it would, and it’s driving me crazy. My suitcase sits sprawled out onto the middle of my bedroom floor, half packed, because I’m leaving for Pennsylvania this weekend. I’m going to be there for a while, probably over a month, because I’m doing my evil electromagnetic shock therapy again because I decided to go crazy and drop all of my classes. My idiotic excuse was that I couldn’t handle it, but really it was just because I was lazy and didn’t feel like doing anything. I really like when I have nothing to do in a day, because then I can put on an inappropriate looking outfit and show off my body to the mirror and the camera. I love looking beautiful for the camera, and then showing those pictures to nobody. I am dragging my feet, one day into another, with no aim or purpose or really any will to live at all. Eating is a nightmare. I wish I could survive solely on caffeine, but that concept bit me in the ass when I passed out in front of Starbucks yesterday morning. Nobody stopped to help me, and I’ve been cursing the population of Bushwick ever since. In a seven dollar three second uber ride home, I thought about dying, and what would change for everyone if I was dead. It was rather unproductive, and led to me feeling more depressed, so I got out of the uber and legitimately crawled up my stairs because I was too light headed to walk. Dan brought me mango and midol and I felt better, even though everyone kept telling me to go to the doctor. I found the very idea of having to get up and walk to urgent care immensely exhausting, so I abstained. Instead, I rewatched The Hunger Games for probably the 200th time and fell asleep. I wished that I had weed, but figured that was probably a terrible idea anyway. There have been a lot of terrible ideas showing up in my head lately. I really wish that they’d stop. I want to be normal, I want to be a girl without a rotten brain and a rotten mouth. I want to see Sam one more time, just to scream at him for something he’s probably forgotten that he’s done, and make his guilt rise up again. I think I just want to make somebody angry, and that desire manifested the other night when I snapped at Lindsey for something that I didn’t even care that deeply about. My anger was just at the surface, waiting for a reason to expel itself. After hanging up with Lindsey, I cried a little and felt super guilty for yelling at her when she didn’t deserve to be yelled at.

May 28th

Ultimately it’s my year of rest and relaxation. I wake up just to stay in bed all day, reading on and off but mostly and most notably, I am sleeping. Sleeping off weed hangovers and taking hydroxyzine to escape my night time anxiety. Everything about myself renders me so speechless in disappointment. What a fucking disaster, jeeesus christ. How did it get to be like this? Am I a bad person for what I did to you? I am one hundred and twenty five days clean.

Four months of treating my sobriety like it’s a gun to my head. Nothing’s worse than that first month. Absolutely nothing worse. What a sore reminder to a girl who is trying and failing to quit vaping for the second time this year. Sobriety is a marathon that I am still running.

On the brink of ninety days clean I let my mom cut a bunch of my hair off. She cuts herself over a dozen times with the hair scissors and I bite my tongue.

Tms feels like a woodpecker pecking my skull. It hurts but not in an overly painful way. It’s more so irritating. Every 10 seconds it pulses, and then starts. Dana says I can read and write during TMS but I feel too anxious most of the time to do anything but sit quietly with my wet hands in my lap wiggling my toes and watching my stomach get smaller and bigger with every ragged breath I intake. I’m swallowing too hard, I’m moving my head, my heart rate is too high and I am going to have a panic attack that leads to a seizure. Ever since going off of gabapentin, I’ve been having these panic attacks that are seriously starting to scare me. The panic attacks started while I was on gabapentin, and I had a feeling that since I was now hard wired to have a panic attack in every single social fucking situation, going off of the gabapentin was not going to fix me. And what do you know, it doesn’t. I am on the verge of a panic attack and there is some machine drilling at my head like a bird and it’s uncomfortable and I’m uncomfortable. The room is dimly lit and smells like Dana’s candle warmer. She’s playing her music, and I almost want to ask if she can play mine but I’m too nervous and I feel like opening my mouth will give me a seizure or a panic attack. I just moved my fucking head. Now it’s probably drilling into a different part of my brain that will lead to a seizure and then I will probably die because I’ve spent years manifesting my own death. Worrying about the same things every day. Something’s got to give, that’s what I keep telling people. Dana tells me to stay far away from my evil ex situationship who unblocked me. Dana doesn’t know shit about what’s good for me. I drank peppermint coffee for breakfast this morning, sipping it while my dad asked me what pills I have that might be good for his recent Shingles diagnosis. He says he didn’t even know that he had chickenpox as a kid. I had a lot of weird illnesses as a kid, one morning I woke up and I couldn’t walk, he tells me. This seems like something more than trivial, but he tells it as such. I go down the list of pills in my possession, he settles on Gabapentin and Hydroxyzine. I feel like a pharmacy. It’s raining, and I convince him to make chicken soup that I’ll spend the next week drinking out of mugs in my awful bedroom. Dana says that Pennsylvania is a poor reminder of me doing badly, and I tell her honestly that the worst reminder is my ex situationship. How pathetic. She thinks that I’m pathetic. Sometimes I truly believe that I’m only capable of writing about Sam and mental illness. But then I remember that I’m only twenty one and I still have a lot of living to do. It doesn’t matter that he unblocked my Finsta and not my main–it doesn’t matter at all, because he’s engaged and I’m a hopeless train-wreck.

June 10th

Drinking a raspberry white claw by myself in my room on my last night sleeping in my Pennsylvania bedroom. Earlier today Dani took me out to lunch and paid for my two strawberry margaritas and caesar salad. We sat outside in the wet heat, the kind that attracts flies. We wear sunglasses to bat them away. I’m happily tipsy by the time our food comes out, so I sort of eat it, sort of pick at it, listening to Dani dissect another one of my friendships for the millionth time. It’s one of our favorite things to do, perform non consensual emotional surgery on somebody that’s close to me. Our topics and subjects diverge a hundred times, but what’s nice about Dani is that we have no boundaries whatsoever, which makes it effortless to keep up with her. Even though the other night I said something awful to her, she forgives me and I only let my guilt bother me for a day before deciding that I can’t not speak to her, not when another person in my life is doing something fucked up that warrants a text to Dani.

I said a bunch of awful things to Lindsey this weekend, awful enough to bring her to tears. A few months ago I wrote this piece about Lindsey, how I can vividly remember the last time that she cried because of how infrequently she lets tears fall. So stoic, so admirable. Crying for me is always the catalyst to my enormous feeling of patheticism. I never cry about the right things. I cry over emails and boys I never dated and dinner plans and having too much to drink. I cry over hangovers and headaches. It’s really pathetic how much I cry. But I was awful enough to make Lindsey, the best friend that I have ever had, cry. That’s a different kind of humiliation, and I wanted so badly to take it back, more than I’ve ever wanted to redact something in my life. The other day I told Nikki that I just wish I had never met him (horrible ex situationship), that I wish that I’d never done anything at all in regards to him, but this is worse. Much worse. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so embarrassed by my behavior than I did that night. Stupidly, I grab some hideous man in a baseball cap by the arm and throw my arms around my neck, telling him some bullshit that makes him touch me all obsessively, I don’t even remember what I said. I remember stupidly kissing him a bunch of times and letting his hands wander and doing nothing about it. Lindsey says she couldn’t even watch. And then of course we stumble back into her apartment and I start my rambling. My evil, sadistic, fucked up rambling. I don’t know why I said such awful things to her. I really don’t know why. Lindsey is one of the few people that I never have a bad word to say about. Constantly I find myself gushing over her to everyone I meet, bringing her up every chance that I get. There was no rationale behind why I would ever say something to upset her purposefully. It made me wish that I was dead. It made me want to tell her to tell me to pack it up and get a ride home, because there was no reason for her to be around me for a second longer. Lindsey does not deserve my evil self. It’s sick how I treat her. It really is. Sometimes I really wish that she’d just tell me that she doesn’t want to be friends anymore. It would probably be the worst thing to ever happen to me, and I would probably break things and scream and sob until I’m red in the face and sweating, but at least then she wouldn’t have to put up with me any longer. She’d probably call up my horrible ex-situationship and bond with him over my awfulness. She’d go to his wedding and applaud him. She’d say I’m glad you got out just like how one of my coworkers told him that after he broke my heart. Annabel, she’s just so fucking evil, he’d say. She’d nod and agree. She should, at least. That’s what I would do if I had to put up with me for almost 12 years. Jesus Christ, the poor girl. In the car on the way back from Pittsburgh, I was even more awful. Screaming and sobbing about meaningless bullshit and threatening a relapse right to her face. I am such a gaslighting freak show. Such a sick, manipulative bitch of a friend. Everyone is always telling me that I need to be nicer to myself, but I don’t really deserve that when people are so wonderful to me all the time, while I’m just constantly a burden. No fun. Sucks the life out of a room. Horrible. Just so horrible.

In retaliation to my twisted behavior, I treat myself to a white claw and a panic attack when I get home. My anxiety burns a hole in my stomach and crawls around and spits all throughout my body. I feel so disgusting I want to die. All that I can do is suck on my vape and douse my body in alcohol. I’m not an alcoholic, but I really should go sober. All of my friends are going to read this and then talk amongst themselves, tell each other that they’re worried about me and that I’m being self destructive and that not even fucking shock therapy can fix the rot growing inside of me. I really should just end it all, but I’m too lazy and too tired of hurting people against their will. It really would be the nail in the coffin to kill my self. Idiot Annabel, so awful that she had to kill herself and make herself even more awful. I’m selfish. I’m sorry. I’m sad. Guilt really is the best punishment for evil people. It’s the perfect prize for the ones who are done wrong. Now I’m crying, great. So pathetic. And to make matters worse, as if they can’t get worse, this is some truly terrible writing. No effort. No care. Whatever. It doesn’t even matter. I’m so ashamed of how I talked to Lindsey. I’m so sorry for being so evil. It rains the entire drive home, washing everything clean but me. Being soaked to the bone wouldn’t wash away my sins. It’s so bad I’ve considered praying. What’s another bruise on the knee? What’s another desperate cry for help?

June 11th

Abusing my prescription drugs and yelling at my mom for doing nothing wrong. It was my fault too, our missing my bus. But instead I scream at her face that she fucked everything up for me and it’ll be her fault when I have a seizure tomorrow during TMS because of the stress I am under from missing my bus. Dramatic. Shakily I pour a few hydroxyzine in my palm and swallow them dry, immediately regretting it. I already took two this morning. That puts me at about roughly 300 mg of Hydroxyzine in the span of 2 hours. Not my best decision, but I was so loose lipped and rabid that I figured the best course of action for both my mom and I would be to knock myself out. We’re on I95 heading towards Baltimore and I’m curled up in the passenger seat choking back tears and feeling dizzy. My head is pounding the way it always does when I send myself into a tailspin where I start screaming and crying and blaming people. If I had something sharp on me I probably would have cut myself in front of my mom, and then we’d have to turn the car around and head back towards Towson, so that she could drop me off at the psych ward—have at it doctors, she’ll surely be ridiculously misbehaved this time around. And I’d sooner cut myself in front of my mom than whip my vape out and start sucking on it, which frustrates me immensely. I wish she could just be normal about her kids growing up and doing things they shouldn’t be doing. For God’s sake, I went selectively mute in the fall and landed myself in inpatient, but I can’t hit my vape in front of my mom. It’s truly so disturbing. She’s driving sort of recklessly now, probably to scare me because I hate being on the highway—famously.

Being alive is so embarrassing. It’s all bullshit. It’s all meaningless and a never ending humiliation ritual. Bushwick smells like piss but I’ve missed it like a mother misses her baby. Bushwick is my baby. I am kind and gentle with her. Even if she’s insufferably annoying. I love my apartment with its big blue rug and small blue couch (and pink couch). I love my piles of unwashed clothes that I sift through periodically, trying to find at least ten things to get rid of every time I find my hands digging through it. I love my broken bed (my fault) and the blood stains on the mattress (also my fault). I love everything! Everything sucks and I’m dripping in love! It has soaked me to the bone, it has washed me clean, the love. The love, love, love. I hate my life! I love everything! Banana bread for dinner. Leftover Thai for breakfast. Coffee in the morning, shock therapy in the afternoon. Girl, Interrupted is on the shelf of my doctor’s office and I think about asking her why she would have that book here. I guess it makes sense, but it seems sort of on the nose.

July 5th

I am just about as brave as it gets. Turning to mush in my hometown with the bedroom door shut. Today is a nightmare, I can’t tear the vape from my mouth; this habit is infantile. I like re:stacks and Fuck Me Eyes. I like lots of alcohol and lots of weed. Turning to mush in my hometown living room, someone calls out bingo because on our made up board for this trip is Annabel has a nonverbal episode and I can’t even be offended by it because I’m so predictable it’s comedic. Annabel is smoking too much and not smiling enough.

My hands do the stupidest things, they touch only to hit, only to scratch. They can’t make contact with my skin without digging in. Annabel does not like eyes on her because they all can see my pores and bumps and cuts. Annabel wants all eyes on her because then they will jut out their lips, they will say glad you’re doing better and I am really sincere when I say thank you. Thank you for pretending to care for just a few seconds, thank you for placing a hand on my wrist as if in an effort to stop me from grabbing something sharp. Once you learn to love a sharp object it loves you back. It loves you like I love my friends. Annabel—who is luckier than a lot of people—is predictably sad over the Fourth of July. My skin makes her gag. Retaliating by burning it. Somewhere along the way I decided to love the Fourth of July like it’ll disappear if I take my eyes off of it. The Fourth of July is my favorite day of the year. I like an outfit change, an excruciating amount of hard seltzers. All of the love and all of the friends.

Turning to mush in the third row of the rental car. One foot on Dan’s big speaker, another curled underneath myself. Viciously carsick but trying not to be. Writing about it to distract myself from potentially vomiting and ruining everyone’s day. My own day was ruined on the third, because I don’t know how to process emotion. I’m so angry and brave all at the same time. Bravery shines through my anger. My anger cuts through my bravery. This combination turns me to mush while I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth while I focus on not throwing up. So fucking angry. I’m tired of writing about what I do to be able to breathe. What makes me shake, catch air in my throat and trap it, is just about everything outside of my bedroom. I love the Fourth of July so much.

When I get overwhelmed I get cruel. When I get angry I get mean. When I relapse I get bitter. Nobody to blame but myself, but I’m pinning it elsewhere for a few minutes a day to give it air. Self inflicted resentment will kill me one day, if God doesn’t get to me first. Gibson says I’m getting better because it’s been six months either way, and I’m not doing it everyday. I know I’m getting better because the thought of it makes me wince. Turning to mush on my bed, my right leg extended. Slow breathing and a rag to my leg. I’ve made such a mess of things, everyone was right to keep me away from the drugs this weekend. I stick to weed and alcohol. Jared says to act like I’m pregnant, I tell him my brain doesn’t work that way. I wish I was pregnant, then I’d have to stop drinking and smoking and cutting and sucking on my vape. Then I’d have a real thing inside of my body, sucking on me. I’d have a baby, a soft one. A smooth one with no scars and no cuts. She’d be perfect, and she’d be a girl. I’d have a good feeling about it and I’d be right. A real baby would fix me, probably. A real baby would throw out all of my razor blades and kiss me goodnight. A real baby would love me like no one else would. If I had a baby I’d love her so much. I’d never cut again. I would be soft and I would be strong. I’d smile for days. Anyways, I’m trying out optimism. My summer is not ruined. I am not evil. God loves me more than anyone else does. But everyone loves me a lot. I’m a writer. I’m a mother. I’m a perfect daughter. Optimism feels sour coming out but I’m optimistic towards optimism. Everything will be okay and I know how to write like I know how to breathe. I never turn to mush or forget how to feel things.

August 12th

Last Friday I spent nine hours getting my hair dyed blonde. I’m a natural brunette. I’ve got brunette thoughts and brunette feelings. I’ve got the face to be brunette. It’s natural. So naturally I went blonde, because what else is there to do during the death of summer and what feels like the apocalypse. My life is a wasteland. There’s always too much to do and never enough stamina to get it done. Everything was easier when I was seventeen, briefly blonde, and a drunk. So I’ve never gotten over being seventeen–who has? Who’s surpassed that feeling, and how do you get rid of its hold over everything that follows?

But now I’ve got blonde thoughts. I am twenty one and on top of the world. Today my psychiatrist approved me for accutane and told me I was in a better spot than a year ago. I almost cried. He didn’t mention my blonde hair. Blonde thoughts are fun. They’re all about what I like. I like wired headphones and vaping. I like wet bathing suits and summer. I like the heat. I like dog eared pages. I like light pink lipstick. I like blonde hair. I like taking pictures of myself and I like myself. I like when it’s over and I like goodbyes. I like my hairbrush and my room. I like my pink bed. I like my bunnies. I like my mom. I like pink things and small things. I like toast. I like mango seltzer. I like cursing. I like swimming. I like my fake Miu Miu sunglasses. I like my white ballet flats. I like my red ballet flats. I like the nonsensical. I like the mundane. I like getting high. I like hair clips. I like earrings. I like 7pm. I like horror. I like postcards. I like being tan. I like bringing wine. I like white claws. I like matches. I like water. I like punctuation use and pessimism. I like letters and numbers. I like nose rings. I like horses. I like stacked things. I like things that are in piles. I like duvets. I like mirrors. I like medicine. I like dresses and I like jeans. I like my hair dryer. I like a lot of things.

Sept 28th

Stoned and sitting on the little blue couch trying to decide on if I’ve gotten significantly dumber in the last year. Unfortunately, it’s most likely the truth. I figure some part of my brain had to pay for all the shocks and treatments and therapies and medications. I think I have never been so vulnerable on the internet than I have been this year, and that’s also probably making me dumber. Intellectually, I guess. Finally I got my promotion at my retail job, which although a seemingly small win, is a win nonetheless. All of my positive energy lately has been channeled into this job, because I don’t know how to work a job I’m not obsessed with–literally. I don’t know how to contain my obsessive personality. It manifests in the weirdest ways. My work. People. The past. Dates and numbers and time. Lindsey pointed out this last one the other day on the phone. She thinks it’s probably some form of autism. I think we tend to throw that word around a lot. Either way, this one I find profoundly intriguing because it makes absolutely zero sense in regards to the rest of my personality. I am criminally type B, or whatever the messy lazy one is, to an extreme fault. Yet I give an absurd amount of fucks about what the date was when some random event occurred. And even worse–at what time it happened. It’s truly so strange. To me, at least.

The other day I was telling somebody, I forget who at this point, that I have trouble writing with the present because I don’t want the people in my life reading this to know how I feel about present situations. Sometimes I wish I had just made my Substack without telling anyone. But I do like that my friends read my things. Most of the time. Once enough time has passed, I truly could not give less of a fuck about who will read pieces I’ve posted about them and a specific event or situation. I also just find it very therapeutic to dissect things after they’ve happened. And if I don’t get my thoughts and feelings out of me they’ll haunt me forever. It’s a purging.

I’ve been working on this essay for months, coming back to it every so often and working on it until I get so upset that I have to abandon it for a while. It kind of reminds me of the process of writing my grocery store essay, which I truly never believed I’d ever finish. Somehow this one is worse. Substantially worse, actually. It would be a terrible idea to post it, but I’m so impulsive and self destructive that I know the second I finish it I’d probably post it. So I’ve come back to it again the last week or so, and as expected, I feel awfully depressed. The topic is a very scary thing to me. I’m being very intentionally vague. Who knows, maybe the more I write about this the more will spill out of me. A sour slew of confession will splatter all over my life. I can not stand to think of the fallout. It makes me sick. And more on this topic, how am I supposed to reconcile with something I’m not sure even happened? I feel so angry about it sometimes that I could burst. Everybody saw it for what it was except for me, and everybody let it happen. I just feel so guilty, and so upset. I never thought it’d turn into this despairing realization that I have come to. That I was always going to come to, one way or another. Fuck.

Oct 8th

Three months clean–again. It feels as if all of my attempts at staying clean are futile and fruitless. I will inevitably cut again. That’s how I feel, at least. But then again, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll never cut again. Ever. I’m so tired lately. Tired of the same boring, lifeless and trivial topics I circle around and around, writing them in different ways because I’m too lazy to think of something new. This morning I swore that I would never write about you again. You will never have my full attention ever again. I swear it.

I’ll break that promise in three days. Absolutely. No doubt about it. I also must stop writing about being seventeen, because there is nothing spectacular about it, nor was there ever. It was all just heavy romanticization and nostalgia for the last time I had no real problems to worry about. Really, all that I cared about when I was seventeen was cheerleading. Nothing of note there. All I know is now that I should have cared less about cheerleading.

It’s all almost silly to think about now, and then dead serious when I investigate it further. Once again, I am being intentionally vague because every other attempt I’ve had of writing this down has been extremely conscious minded, and I don’t do well analyzing that situation with a fully conscious mind. There’s more to it, of course, but the further I dig, the more I uncover, and the more upset I become. What do I have to gain in getting upset about it? What about it would change if I were to face it head on? Nothing. Nothing will change, because what happened, happened. No going back.

November 17th

I need to be more anonymous, I’ve been realizing. The past year has been one really long streak of self destructive patterns and behaviors. In reality this streak probably started back in 2020, and has been developing and growing worse over the past five years. So I have been doing a lot of self reflection, and come to the realization that I need to get re-screened, because whatever is wrong with me goes deeper than just being morbidly depressed and anxious. Something much more sinister is at play here, digging its nails into my brain and whatnot. My first step in the right direction, apparently, is deleting everything I have ever posted on Substack, because I have convinced myself that not only am I a terrible writer, but I am also probably a narcissistic and deeply manipulative lunatic. Everything I write, or have written, in the past year, has either been a thirst trap, or a desperate attempt at a confusing and lack of context confessional. It was all so horrifically dramatic and monotone. I sounded like a broken record after a while, and I am wondering why nobody ever commented on the fact that I was clearly off the rails and needed to do some inner work on myself and spend less time trauma dumping on the internet. While the internet has a tendency to be malicious and cruel, the internet also could not give less of a fuck about a 21 year old girl who believes herself to be quite literally, the saddest girl ever to exist. And I’ll give myself a shred of credit here, and that’s the fact that every 21 year old girl believes herself to be the saddest girl to exist. That’s just part of being alone in your early twenties. There is nothing particularly special about my sadness versus everyone else’s.

The only writing that I’ve been doing lately, ever since my realization of the fact that I am not a very good writer, is my end of day email at my job. This, as you can imagine, is not a very good outlet for my supposed creativity. I stopped working on all of my fiction pieces months ago, because I was getting too wrapped up in the characters’ lives and too displeased with my own life. Writing, as much of everything else that I love, was becoming deeply depressing. If I am to continue posting on Substack, I figure I may need to make it less unhealthy for both myself and the people in my life. The concept of anonymizing any part of my work never occurred to me before, but then I began writing about the people in my life in a somewhat negative and unfair way. Because honestly, my viewpoint in the moment consisted of a complete lack of care for the other person in which I was absently name dropping and ridiculing. And if the person were to read it, I really would not have been bothered by it. After all, I was a part of that situation too–wasn’t I entitled to speaking about my own experience? It was an extremely selfish mindset. This is not an apology letter. It is really coming off that way, I fear. No, this is more like a journal entry but with no malicious and evil vendetta. Today is Monday, and my day off. It is almost seven pm and I am drinking wine out of a disposable Dunkin cup that I rinsed out from earlier today in order to avoid doing a single dish.

December 10th

I do feel that age old nostalgia for high school, but not the way that I used to. In my opinion, you either miss high school or you don’t. Two types of people. And most agree that the ones who miss high school are the ones who peaked in high school. And God, maybe I did. At least back then I wasn’t so uncaring and useless. No, back then I had the kind of drive for success that not everyone has. I knew what I wanted, that was always evidently clear. What I wanted was to move to New York and to be a writer. I was not a very good writer in high school. At least not in the way that I wanted to be. An academic essay was easy for me, but what I wanted was to be so talented that it spilled out of me. I wanted jaws to drop and skin to crawl. I wanted to be so on point with what I was trying to say that it was terrifying. I wanted people to read what I had written and come to an epiphany or leave with their life altered. And I wanted that so badly, so badly. With it, I wanted everyone to know it. Everyone would say, oh Annabel, she’s that incredible writer. Or, conversely, have you read that essay Annabel wrote? Of course nobody was saying that, because nobody gave a fuck what I was doing, let alone writing. So I searched for praise in teachers and adults that found me wildly untalented and more so a kiss-ass. Dark, too. My attempts at being brutally honest in my work came off depressing and uncomfortable—and not in a good way. I’ve read discomfort done beautifully, and I was not doing that. No, my writing was a 2012 Tumblr rip off. It was trigger warning central, fourteen year old angst ridden. What I was writing at seventeen was so pathetically embarrassing that even though I used to swear against deleting anything I’d ever written, I wanted it wiped off of the face of earth. With how embarrassingly bad it all was. I still don’t find myself to be talented, or very much of a good writer, but I still want the same thing. I’m still trying to be what I always wanted to be. Because things like this never come naturally to me. All of my life, I’ve lacked natural ability. But before the last couple years of my life, I had such drive and passion, that it didn’t matter. I’d work harder to make up for my lack of talent. I’d prove everyone wrong. So yeah, I miss high school. I miss my shitty notes app entries and notebooks filled with stories, because at least I was fucking writing, and at least I was fucking trying. Whatever. It’s been a hard year. I wish I was less self deprecating and awful. I’m going to try really hard to be better next year. I really am. I swear it.

Did you know that everyone has a bite that is hard and violent? Did you know that my slack jaw and sore teeth could never hurt you? What scared you so badly about me? Couldn’t you tell that in every moment where I looked at you I went soft? We forget that the worst parts of ourselves are our hands and our teeth so I bite my nails to quell something that I can not name. It’s not my job anymore or ever to have been responsible for any part of you or your pain or anything else. I would like you to remember that, and I would like you to close your gaping mouth and stop threatening me with all the ways that you can still hurt me. Because I was never able to weaponize myself in order to hurt you. That hand always turns inwards. And yeah, sure, I’ll admit to it. I am so obsessed with the idea of your life and what it’s like compared to mine. I would like you to suffer less than I do, because if you were suffering I would want to fix it somehow. There’s no way to decode the part of me that wants to help you. It’s depressingly Sisyphean. No way out or through.

Do you remember how to calm me down? Do you remember what I like about you? And I hope you know that I did like you a lot. One of my worst qualities is wanting to know what everything looks like from your perspective. Is what is picturesque to me picturesque to you? Did you ever watch me from the corner of the room, wishing I’d do something drastic for once? Wishing I would make a decision? And if you read a word I have ever written I hope you know where to look to find yourself in it. And if you find yourself where you shouldn’t, I hope you remember all the awful things you did that I forgave you for almost instantaneously. I hope that helps you to forgive me. Sometimes I wonder if Gemma ever told you what I said to her once, that afternoon in my car. About how I think I’d let you hit me if it made you feel any better. How I think there’s nothing you could do that I wouldn’t be able to rationalize. It was such a sunny day when I said that, how cruel is that? Can you forgive me for letting this drag on and on and on? I promise you that if I could stop, then I would. But my memory is tricky and hazy and I think that had I known what you were going to do, I would have done everything before that anyway, just to be able to talk about it.

My teeth have been fucked since I was just a baby, and you were going to be around to meet me and hurt me no matter what. It drives me crazy how I can’t hurt you like you can hurt me. When I was convinced a few months back that my teeth were falling out, it felt like how it did when I realized there was no dragging you back. You were limp and heavy and I am not strong or persuasive. My desperation drove you away and I bit through my tongue on the drive to New York because I didn’t want to leave and everything that I have ever wanted means nothing anymore because you don’t want me anymore. My mouth is soft and useless until I want to hurt myself. I’m all backwards and turned around, all bite no bark. Not a word I could say would turn things around. I wished somebody would pull each of my teeth out in a way that guarantees pain. There’s nothing special about a high school heartbreak or rotten teeth. When there’s nothing left to bite with, when it’s all over, I will still be pawing at my empty mouth with a hangnail that I can’t bite off, looking for something to catch you with.

Gemma says I broke your heart. Gemma thinks I am badly behaved and unworthy of love. Gemma tells you dirty things about me to reel you in, and I don’t care because I’ve said worse. Gemma is crazy but so am I, so I am not even really all that mad at her. I can’t be mad at someone who’s crazy. And on that note, tell me, what’s the worst thing that you’ve ever said about me? Once the walls are down and your muzzle’s off, I’m sure that you can really get so creative with it. Do you theorize with your friends about what I’ve done to other people? Do you call me psycho with all that confidence that you don’t fucking have? I bet you see me everywhere. I bet you think about me when you see a collared dog with dull teeth. I will not hurt you, and you don’t care either way. I’ll care until everything is gone and dead and all that’s left is a made up memory of the time you called me pretty, where I smiled with my crooked mouth and you weren’t scared at all.