Happy Almost-Fucking Birthday To Her

Happy Almost-Fucking-Birthday to Her.

She laid there on the surgical table, her skin peeled off her body like an open book. Maybe it was melting. That’s what it felt like but she wasn’t quite sure. There were strings, attached to hooks, attached to her skin, holding it in place, off her exposed organs. She could feel the blood spraying and pouring out of her insides like a boiling pot. “Best fucking birthday ever,” she thought to herself. She didn’t say anything to the doctors (were they doctors?) about being conscious (of the fact that her guts lay before her)… she just held her tongue. That was the beautiful thing about indifference. The simple act of not caring, the apathy. And what reason did she have to care? “None,” she noted. Devoted friends, disappeared, just showing they lacked the devotion they claimed to have held. From Loyalty, Compassion, Dependability and Trust, her friends names had become, “Manipulation, Intolerance, Deceit and Abandonment. These muses played heavily on her heart. “Oh, god it burns,” she thought. Burning flesh. God, my flesh burning. An old wound causing present pain? “Put pressure on it,” she contemplated, forgetting her situation at hand. “Maybe it will stop.” It wasn’t even fall yet when she was presented with a foreshadow of what to come. A single cigarette burn. It never occurred on purpose but the scar was still there. She looked at it in her misery. A constant reminder of those she called friends who only repaid her friendship in ounces of stress and on-setters of depression.

She instinctively pushed them away just as they seemed to have done to her. Similarly, she knew his intentions. In truth, she always knew. She woke up next to him on a Saturday morning not to long ago and asked him if he loved her. He didn’t say anything so she knew. She didn’t even really need to ask. In fact she knew the answer in the same kind of way that you know someone is staring at you from behind your back when you are standing in the subway. Its innate. He had torn her to pieces in the same way that girl he dated before her, tore him to shreds. That cannibal. That flesh-eating mongrel. He transferred his apathy onto her.

On a very recent trip to Las Vegas she came upon a Hopi Spirit Master. This decrepit old man, whose eyes glistened of many a moon, told her that her spirit animal was, and I speak only the truth, a skull. Yes, a dead human bone. A piece of a person who is no longer alive. White and hollow. Lacking all things that make a person human, the heart and the brain. The compassion and the thinking power. Numb and dead. And it made sense. She became stagnant. She was not changing nor growing, emotionally. She just was.

Before this moment her hands were constantly sweating with worry, contemplating decisions, life, future. But at this particular moment they were as cold as the winter weather outside, cold like her personality and cold like her heart. Every decision she made felt wrong. Even this decision. She wanted to go home, drink, drink, drink, and collapse. The year was wasted, wasted, wasted. She loved to get wasted. The numbness was helpful. She is only on her 19^th birthday and she already fears life. It’s like breathing and not wanting to. It doesn’t matter what you want, you have to. You grow older and you can’t help it. Her mind told her, “You will never get older. You, alone, will stay young forever.” If she could have only been so lucky.

Some birthdays you hope never come, like when you turn 20 and you realize two things. 1.) You are not a kid anymore. And 2.) You have ten years till you are 30. Or like when you turn 50 and all you have before you is retirement and death, and what lies behind you are your years of empty success or sweet failure most of which are unfulfilled hopes and dreams. Her apathy became anger. And so her solution: to become a totally different person in and out.

If they couldn’t love her as she was. She would change. She would play the part just as long as….well, that is irrelevant.