i am just a girl
standing before a boy saying:
im going to kill myself
over and over until i get what i want
and what do i want?
attention? sympathy? someone to take my face in their hands and list, not list, describe, in detail – the attributes that validate my being here. Exactly why i am good, why i am fair, what about me makes my consumption – which i know depletes better, kinder lives of freedom, of security, of peace – worth it.
Tell me i am good and i am clever. Tell me that my life means something, that I do not exist simply to take, to consume, to contribute to a system that degrades every soul in it’s charge. Tell me it will be okay and then tell me it without me begging you to.
Everyday is an exercise in moderation. Every night is attempt to retract that moderation.
I have still not cut myself, not in several months. Yippee and confetti, but still the urge remains, an urge I regard with weird disgust and lust.
It is not simply that I hate myself, I am not 17 anymore, I have not been 17 in years. It is more complex now, a weird tangling of justice, self-imposed, self-regulated. My thinking boils to this jus – if I can punish myself before any other manages to, then the insult, the hanging, breaks beneath the weight of my self-conscious.
I know I am a fool. I know that i ruin as i make, that i take as i give, you cannot tell me this, you cannot treat me with hard truths. I know, and punish myself before you suspend your propriety to.
But this has a fault – obvious and dreaded.
That my punishment, that which I put upon myself, does not lessen the need for you to punish me – I cannot stand before you, you who I have wronged in whichever way I find i do,, I always do – I cannot stand before you and say: STOP! HALT! Wait and listen, for I have already wringed her, I have taken her to the stocks and pummeled with tomatoes rotten, with potatoes green.
Leave her be, I have dealt with her.
You would not believe it, or not be satisfied. It’s in the satisfaction that punishment blossoms. Without the punishment there is no satisfaction – not for you or me.
So you must punish me and I must let you – or I must realise that you are not punishing but criticising and that criticising is not the terrible doom I think it to be. It may be kind, it may be helpful.
And someday, I might realise that punishing myself will not save me from the rightful criticism that every man is due.
Someday, I might forgive myself enough to listen and accept, I might even agree.
But I think, tonight is not someday.
But I think someday comes in rare moons.
But I think, if you will not call me a fool, if no one will – I shall do it myself.
i am just a girl
standing before a boy saying:
if you won’t kill me – then I will.