Seventeen.

There are train tracks that lead out of town.  I am seventeen years old.

I would walk them forever, except for the bugs.  I feel like smoking keeps them away.

I like smoking cigarettes and wearing makeup.  I like being alone.  I don't fit in, but I'm not like you think.  I'm poor and unfashionable, I wear a size 16.  I've never played soccer, not even in Kindergarten.  I don't care about boys in baseball uniforms.  I don't care about school dances or reaching my destinations.  I drive around a lot in cars, take a lot of walks.

I have a best friend who is pretty and thin and blonde.  People think they know things about us, but we're misfits.  I spend my time with another girl who thinks she's a witch.  She reads my palm and we drink scotch.  She lays out a labyrinth of tarot cards in front of me, lazily flipping them over and predicting my death.  She lies a lot.  Maybe I do, too.

I feel like a liar, because nobody knows me.

I am seventeen years old and sometimes I spend all afternoon on the floor of my bedroom, sobbing.  Once, my mom came quietly into my room and sat down next to me.  The faint outline of a cross gleamed on the wood of my door.  She spent a lot of time trying to anoint the things I touched.  She put her arms around me and started to cry, too.

The Cure was playing on my stereo.  My mother, in her tuneless voice, sang into my ear, "However far away, I will always love you.  How ever long I stay, I will always love you."  Instantly, I didn't want to cry, anymore.  Everything slippery and red inside of me turned black.  I felt the corners of my mouth pulling up in to a smile.  She wasn't trying to be funny.

"Get off," I said.  "God."

My family thinks of me as a trouble maker.  I don't pray.  I don't believe in prayer languages.  I don't believe in god.  I get mad a lot.

I gave my dad a copy of Catcher In The Rye, because I believed it told the story of me.  I wanted my dad to love me.  I wanted him to know that there was something inside of me.  I didn't mean to not believe in god.

I was sitting in the kitchen with my little sister and it was Christmas time.  We were baking something and drawing shapes in the spilled sugar on the table.  My dad came bursting through the door with my book in his hand saying, "I don't know what kind of idiot decided that kids should be reading this book, but it is really retarded."

I do that same thing to him, too.  If I find out he likes something, it's like a seed of meanness gets planted inside of me.  Knowing that he cares for something makes me hate it, and that hate bubbles inside of me, delighting me and also giving me pains.  I choke on it, trying not to let it spill out, but it is something bigger than me.  I don't know if he's ever wanted me to love him.

I roll my eyes a lot.  I reread sexy parts in books and wear eyeliner.  I want a girlfriend.  I want to live in the desert and shoot guns.  I don't really want anything.  I spend long hours on the phone with a girl with blue eyes.  I want her to fall in love with me.  I have a boyfriend with long, dark hair.  He talks about himself all the time.  On a blanket in a field, naked to his waist, he talks about the shape of his own ribcage.  Nobody asks me anything.  I am locked up tight and burning inside.  I don't know anything, but I will explode this way.

ps. this is a non-fiction piece, if you're here from RemembRED.

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