You could love me if I knew how to lie.

I need to validate my existence.

And I don't mean validate my existence by kissing that boy when I shouldn't, when I don't even like him, but I want to know that I am here. I don't mean validate my existence by sharing my opinions, which just serves to give me anxiety attacks, that make my heart feel like it's going to explode.

I mean I need to validate my existence through something that makes me feel like I'm more than just some girl who is too damn young and running out of time. And I am running out of time, because the longer I remain uncertain, the more looks I get and the more my heart feels like it's going to burst out of my chest.

Let's not even talk about my lungs.

But while my lungs are a mess and my heart is worse off, I think my brain's the most messed up out of all my body parts. And I mean really the most messed up, because despite my aching fingers and my sore ribs, and the burn in my thighs that makes me feel alive, my brain is still so confused about so many things and reprimands me too often for my sanity.

All I really want to do is kiss a boy with freckles and talk about the things deep in my soul that I won't feel safe about until they're settled. But maybe that's my problem. Maybe my soul is never going to be settled, because like my philosophy professor says, there's the soul and then there's the body and they're two very separate things.

Maybe my soul is just too separate from my body and has never really been connected at all.

I'm starting to think my soul isn't anywhere at all. It's not in my body, it's not in my words, it's not in my paint. It's in all those things. It's in the dents I leave in my favorite pen when I'm thinking too hard. It's in the smudges of ink on my fingertips when I've written too fast. It's in the kisses I left in his head that made him like me more than I've ever liked him.

I don't know if I'm proud of my soul. All I know is that I want to make it something I can be arrogant about.

Because what's better than a devastatingly beautiful soul?

Bearing the holes in the soles of her shoes.

PART ONE
IT BEGINS
            , 1995, 9:16 A.M.

A baby is born, c-section because she had a fever and they were worried.
Her body is red and she is crying, covered in blood.
Her mother holds her, glad to finally have her child after the nine months and six hour labor.
She is glad she is not blue, like her brother.
She is glad she is there, in her arms.
The baby won't walk for at least another year.
The baby won't talk for at least six months after that.
She is a bundle of potential, finally in the world.
She exists.

PART TWO
BEFORE AND AFTER
March 3, 2013, 11:39 P.M.

A girl sits in the dark, hiding from the nightmares.
Her hair is dark and unruly, like her father's.
Her nose is small and round, like her mother's.
She looks at her bony wrists and her tiny hands, crippled and wrinkled just at seventeen.
The joints aching like an old woman's, and no one seems to notice.
She doesn't know where they came from.
Her days are slowly deteriorating, she can feel it.
Like the acid eating away at her bitter insides.
She's already escaped death a few times now.
She knows it's only a matter of time.
She waits.

PART THREE
IT COMES TOGETHER; IT FALLS APART
January 18, 2020, 7:34 A.M.

A body lies broken, cold and dead on the ground.
It is pale and silent, covered in blood.
The time of death is recorded after it is discovered her heart is quiet.
The accident is reported with diagrams indicating her collapsed lungs.
It is counted as a tragedy, the life ending so soon, at just 24.
The funeral is full of mourners, as it should be.
It is a closed casket, her body too mangled even for viewing in that false, plastic perfection.
Her mother cries. Her father doesn't say a word.
Her brother retreats further inside himself.
People move on, living their lives.
She has left behind only memories.
She ceases.

I never meant to block your sunshine.

When you're in that city with those lights and you stand in the crowd and close your eyes and you can hear all the noises and all those people, when you start to feel the people living and breathing and moving around you, you begin to hear that silence. The silence beneath the city that comes from being alive and where whispers are held and secret gardens are quiet.

That is a kind of love.

When you're left broken and weeping on the floor with the mess they've left you, when they've beaten you down and you're picking up the pieces they made of yourself, when you start to realize it was for the best, that you didn't need all those bad things, you begin to remember. To remember the good times and you feel the littlest bit ashamed that you could want someone that badly, that even after all the bad things, you almost wish you could have them back just so you could have the good.

That is a kind of love.

When you're sharing a secret with yourself so large and big it eats away at your insides, but you keep it, this secret because you know if you share it, it would reveal a web of lies and deceit five years deep, and you'd lose her, him, her, him, them and that scares you more than anything else in the world. Scares you so much you hang on the thinnest threads of trust you've managed to forge over the lies and cry when even without the truth, they walk away.

That is a kind of love.

When you're sitting up at two in the morning talking to that person who makes you feel like you're flying and nothing could ever be above you and you're sipping at that drink they've gotten you and you're laughing at their stupid jokes and telling them to shut up when they say something that tugs at your insides and insecurities, but the right way, the way that makes you blush because it's something you've always secretly wanted to hear but didn't ever dare hope for. They make you smile so much your face hurts, the way no one has ever made you smile and you try to fight it because you're young and you couldn't possibly care about someone so much it hurts.

That is a kind of love.

When you're listening to your favorite song and close your eyes and forget the lyrics and just listen to the base music, the minimum of the song, the instruments and the tune and the melody, harmony, you're listening and you've never heard it this way before and your heart swells and a smile crosses your lips because you've found something new it something you thought you knew better than anything else. You discover it inside it, this new thing, and you want to almost keep it to yourself because it's so precious and it's yours, your favorite.

That is a kind of love.

When you mix all these things up together inside yourself and get a dirty, broken mess, a thing that is wholly and completely you, individually with parts that you yourself and others have made together with all these different kinds of love, all the pieces come together in this jumbled thing that's your life, you start to think about some of the negative things and forget some of the positives, and maybe even start to dislike or hate yourself a teeny bit. But then something happens, something your hate didn't count on; you start to remember and suddenly, you might start to like yourself a bit. Maybe even love.

That is a kind of love.

And soon, you realize, your life is love.
You are love.

Everything is just love.

How to say goodbye in robot.

I breathe, and it makes me remember; even though I'm heaving through corrupted lungs, I am alive.

I bleed, red blood. Dark like love, thick like bitterness. And it means that I am real, even if most of my feelings are dead or gone.

I love, bright and hot, and it makes me lucky. Because I know I'm bitter and hateful, but there's still that little spark even if none can be spared for myself.

I have scars that prove all this and more. Scars he left on my heart, scars she carved through my trust, scars they left on my body, scars I sliced into my skin.

My bruises make me more than just alive, they make me more than real. They make me here.

They prove I don't know what I'm doing, that I am biased and angry and feeling, even though sometimes I forget that I can feel anything besides hate.

I forget and I hate myself and I forget more.

Because forgetting makes it easy, because it's hard to remember.

It's hard being real and alive and here.

I see the scars and I remember and I see your face and I remember and I think of who I am and I remember, remember, remember.

It hurts. It hurts, hurts, hurts, as if I'm setting my insides on fire.

But.

But then I breathe and it makes me remember.

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[I am human.]