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You are a boy and you have everything within arm’s reach but your own mother’s warmth. You are a boy and all you know are keyboards clicking and the smell of newly printed books that you don’t understand. You are a boy and the sound of your parents’ voice that you know is the one distorted by the TV you watch alone in your living room. You are a boy and you don’t know why you are always alone, you only know you don’t like it. You are a boy only six years of age and your eyes are pricked with tiny shards of glass and all the limbs on your body have been sliced each time you outstretch your arms and legs to the people who gave you a life.
They think pretty words can make up for it but you don’t even understand them. You’re too young. You don’t think they understand you either, even though they’re so much older and bigger than you are, and they’re supposed to understand. They keep buying you picture books where the mother bear would tuck their cubs to bed and the father stays during dinner but that’s not true. None of it is true. Bears don’t do that, you know that, but humans don’t, either. You would know if they did.
You start looking at the kids in your grade and for the first time in your life you find a puzzle you can’t solve. You watch their fathers ruffle their hair and you watch them open their lunchboxes with notes from their mothers. You don’t understand why you can’t construct the picture it’s supposed to make. You don’t understand why the picture isn’t of one child inside an expansive four walls and a roof and nothing else. It doesn’t make sense and it upsets you because you have always been smart, you have always been good at puzzles, but this you cannot solve. There are too many pieces. There are too little. You can’t look away because if you blink the glass in your eyes hurt you.
You grow out of your clothes and a maid comes to take your measurements and the next days packages started coming. They never see you wear those clothes until you grow out of them again. You grow taller and your voice gets deeper but neither can fill the empty house you’ve been cursed to. You don’t know when the realization hits you but you don’t mind being alone anymore. You don’t know when but you realize that the glass in your eyes no longer hurt you you, they help you see. You see gentleness as a lie and love as a myth and you start to understand that your parents are liars. Some of their books have ‘love’ in the title but you know words are a perfect fodder for lies, and words are not deeds. The glass doesn’t hurt you anymore but your throat is bitter and no amount of sweets can tame it down. Maybe you just haven’t had enough. They wouldn’t get you more. It’s bad for your teeth, they say. Your teeth used to clatter terribly when you were five, crying as they reprimanded you over a broken vase. But sweets are bad for your teeth. You rarely have them anymore.
You grow a little older and then you’re thirteen. Your parents warned you about this age; they said your body would start changing, that you were going to feel different surges of emotions, that you will start looking at girls differently. You don’t like to admit that they are right, but they are. The only consolation is they left out one thing; that you will start looking at boys differently, too. You’re thirteen and you no longer reach out to them. You berated yourself for being pathetic even if you were only a child. You are still a child. You still have to remind yourself of what you know now, because it would be so easy to be that pathetic little boy craving for more. You’re thirteen and your sliced off limbs have grown back now. You think it would be nice to use them not to reach them but to hurt, to punch, to say you’re angry, but you can’t. They have always been further from your arm’s reach.
You turn and use your words, just like they do, and you turn them into arrows. You’re so angry all the time and you don’t understand why, not fully, but your words are shots of venom, and you burn everyone around you. You don’t have friends, you never have, but you are no longer friendly. You don’t see the need to, and you are so angry all the time and you don’t understand why yet. You’re only a child. You’re only a week into being thirteen and your teacher pulls you aside because you are too quiet. You are too intense. You are too unapproachable. You are too different. It is a shame because you’re top of all your classes and you have so much potential, she says, it is a shame that you are not nice. You do not know how to be. You do not want to be.
You made a girl cry with your words and you punched a boy for annoying you. This time your parents come, and they ask themselves why is this how my boy turned out? They look at you like you are not their boy, and maybe you are not. Maybe you are not a boy. Maybe you are just a ghost from the empty house in a puppet of flesh. They give you their books and the words they say are the same as the words they wrote. The longer you look at them the longer you despise them. You don’t know if it’s because you know they are lies or if it’s because your parents treasure them more than they do you. You despise them so much that you start loving fire. The fire loves the books. You don’t. It’s a perfect arrangement. It works better to soothe your anger. It does nothing to soothe theirs. Your father doesn’t look at you anymore. Your mother holds your face and tell you, is it in your blood to ruin? But you really hope not. You hope it is something you grew on your own will. You hope it’s a rot you nurtured for it to fester inside you. To say it is in your blood would be to say it is from them, and you don’t want that. You don’t want anything from them.
They start dressing you up in nice suits and bring you to galas and dinner parties when you’re fourteen. Everyone looks and smells expensive but you can’t help seeing beyond the facade. Your parents tell you to not be so negative, but you’re not. You’re just honest, and you don’t understand why everyone can’t be, too. You don’t lie to yourself that the rich men in charity galas are charitable. You don’t lie to yourself that you are there, reading a speech written by your mother after refusing to write your own, because you are good and you believe in good. You don’t lie to yourself that your parents love you. Words are not deeds and money is not love and you are not their boy.
You are fifteen and your parents don’t try to convince you that they love you. They despise your clothes, your tone, your intensity, and your reputation. You are not the boy they planned. You are not their boy. You don’t mind it, but they lock you in your room and they don’t let you come out for dinner and your father raises his hand sometimes. You don’t mind not being their boy but you don’t understand why you are hurt for it. You don’t lie to yourself but you begin to understand how powerful a lie is. A lie traded for a dinner, two lies traded for a night’s peace, three lies traded for months worth of solitary.
You are seventeen and you just want out. You don’t mind not being their boy but you are so tired and you are so angry all the time. For the first time in a decade you feel a sense of sadness creeping, and you don’t know what to do other than squash it down. There is no room for that. You look around the empty house. There is no room for that. You don’t cry because you haven’t cried since you were eight. You ruin things because that’s all you have always known to do. You’ve ruined your parents’ perfect life by being born and you’ve ruined their dream of a perfect sweet boy by the time you are thirteen. You make girls cry and you always nearly break boys’ arms by the time you are fourteen. You walk into a room and all the previous joy and ease dissipate and you have ruined everything by the time you are fifteen.
They give you more books to heal you. They say you need to reinvent yourself because bitterness doesn’t pay the bills nor does it sell well. You say they’re full of shit and you want to burn those papers but the fireplace is off limits to you now. You do not want to reinvent yourself. You do not find the need to. You take up a marker and the only thing you reinvent is those books, because you cannot change your parents but you can desecrate what they hold most dear (and it is not you, it has never been you, you have never been held dearly.) You say they’re full of shit and you cross out their words to create something else and you like that it is both ruining and creating. They have not won over you. They will never, you promise yourself.
You are eighteen and you are out of that empty house and you are free of their scrutiny. You don’t know what it’s truly like to be happy but you know what it’s like to have an anger so heavy it weighs on you like rubbles. This does not feel like a heavy anger. You don’t like your roommate but you know you’re smart. It doesn’t take long to drive him away. It’s almost too easy to have him pack his bags and get away with it. It’s almost too easy to make you smile.
You’ve never fallen in love before. You have looked at girls and boys and thought they were beautiful, you have wanted something out of a few, but nothing stuck. No one has been interesting enough. You don’t think this is love, the feeling in your chest every time your a glimpse of her strawberry curls. You don’t even think love is real. You are nineteen and you have never felt love or affection, you don’t know what any of those words mean other than empty cases, excuses to demand devotion. You don’t know anything about love, so you don’t think this is love, but you enjoy her presence. You enjoy listening to her and being listened to. You know she doesn’t love you. She doesn’t even love the thin blanket of lie you’ve put around your core. But she likes you enough to stay, and you like her that way, at arm’s length.
You’ve never fallen in love before, but you are twenty and your new roommate is looking at you like you are the first mirror he’s ever stumbled upon and you forget how to breathe. You have always known he’s a liar. You have always known he has a demon in him. You did not know that the one you have inside you would find its twin flame in his. You’ve never known what it’s like to be seen until he looks at you like that and never once looks away. You’ve never fallen in love before but you have never kissed someone because you were drunk before. You have never woken up sober and missing the taste of the boy’s lips, the smoothness of his hair in your hands, the warmth of the skin on the back of his neck. You have never wanted something to happen twice, but you do now. It never happens again.
You are still twenty and you don’t need to experience betrayal before to know it has happened to you. You have been hurt and forgotten ever since you were born, it doesn’t hold a candle to this. You’ve never fallen in love before, you don’t think you’ve even ever loved anyone. You don’t know if you love them, you don’t think you do, but you can’t know for sure. You only know the betrayal runs deep. You only know it leaves you alone again. You never minded solitary, you tell yourself that, but it doesn’t hold any damn weight. You only know they’ve hurt you. You only know the boy took away your first friend and the girl took away the first person to see you and made you feel less alone. You only know that a part of you hate the both of them. You only know you’re spinning out of control, and it does not feel good.
You are twenty one and you think about your mother’s words, her cold fingers like claws on your face, asking you, is it in your blood to ruin? You think that it is in your blood now, but you know it isn’t from them. You know that it is the rot in your chest, the rot that is your very own monster, seeping into your bloodstreams. You know your monster is in your control. You don’t know for how long. You think about the boy and the girl being tangled up in each other’s embrace and you wonder, how long? The boy is taking away all that used to be yours and you wonder, how long? The girl is taking away the boy you’ve worked so hard to skin alive and you wonder, how long?
You are twenty two and the girl is dead and the boy has just shot you three times. Twenty two years. You lasted that long. It almost makes you laugh, but you can’t. You’re asleep now.