#50 - Dear Me

Today’s words: Standing, Commemorate, Pleasant, Chalkiness

Word count: 486

Completion time: 46 minutes

Summary: Sometimes you just need to thank the person you were for being who you are today

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I am standing in the same place, looking up at the same walls, inhabiting the same body as when I was thirteen years old. Breathing in, I can’t smell a thing, but I know that every inch of this room smells like me, past and present; if you could bag this room up and send it to a lab, you could clone me, body and soul. I kneel down onto a pile of stolen books that are still stacked by the chest of drawers and imagine that I’m 5ft 2” again. Yes, four inches do make a difference.

I didn’t realise it for a while, but now I know...I use this room to commemorate you – I never took those Nirvana posters down, never painted over the jagged lines you draw with a compass when you were angry, never gave away those stuffed toys and Barbie dolls. This room has remained the room of a thirteen-year-old girl that, thinking back, was a little shit.

You were everything I find uncomfortable: whiny, attention-seeking, sympathising with the bad guys because they were ‘cute’, using boyfriends for material possessions, claiming to be more fucked up than everyone else even though you had no idea what anyone else was going through. How pleasant. You would stand there and show off your scars as proof that the last 13 years of your life had been hell. You had no idea what ‘hell’ felt like and I can say that because I did know what you were going through, I am you!

Remember how much you wanted to stand out? So random, so creepy, so misunderstood, people would vom lol if they knew what was going on inside your head. How do you know that what you thought about wasn’t the same as what everyone else thinks about? I bet you all your pocket money that your demons’ fire could be extinguished by people you walked to school with every day; and how could you disprove that? How could you prove that you were the worst?
 

Recall the time you boasted about being depressed to anyone who would listen? That you had this big unrealistic plan to go to America once you were 18, buy a gun and kill yourself ‘like Kurt Cobain did’?

Well that’s it, you got your wish, you’re gone. 

All that’s left is a chalk outline of who you used to be. I choke a little on the chalkiness as I revisit the past and come face to face with you. 

You don’t recognise me but I’m all too familiar with you. 

Your eyes look right through me but all I can see is you. 

I don’t exist but you are the reason that I am alive.

Sometimes you need to crawl through shit to find the light; so, thank you.

One last look around the room and I switch off the light, closing the door behind me.

Goodnight.