everywhere i go

24

I always want to make some kind of statement about what's wrong with me, but I find it difficult to do when I feel like I'll be ignored. I feel like I could say anything and no one would react.

I'm not a private person. I don't hide my emotions. I laugh all the time, i'm always making jokes. I'll discuss my feelings if I'm asked. I'm an artist for fuck's sake... I write poems, I make things and they're all true things. I cry in public more often than is really appropriate. I'll cry anywhere in front of anyone and I won't really try to stop.

I've watched and learned the theater of concern all my life, participating often enough. In middle school, two of my best friends were cutters. another friend of mine was hospitalized for months because of an eating disorder. For 7th and 8th grade my best friend and I never ever ate lunch. I don't really know why.

Anyway, what's a darker harbinger than seeing blood or bones? I've been a supporting character in the concern theater since I turned 12. I told our school counselor that y friend was hurting herself, and she made me stay there in the office while she called my friend down to talk to her. I cried when I had to talk to her, because I worried she would hate me and I was exhausted. After I had to intervene for a second friend the next year, I laid on my parents' bed and cried to my mother. I don't know if she understood what I was trying to tell her when I cried that I was tried of having to look after and care for an concern about my friends. She rubbed my back and told me I was mature for my age. I cried harder because that was not what I wanted to hear.

There was a girl that sat at my lunch table for a little while around sophomore year and everyone just hated her. She told us she didn't believe in calories, so she would not eat meals anymore. It felt familiar, taking up my role in the cast of her concern, and a party was made up to speak to an adult on her behalf. I can't remember if I went with them, but I feel that I didn't or at least I didn't want to... not because I hated her but more because she really did exhaust me with her nonsense about calories, the loudness of it... anyways she's alive so I guess the calories must have gotten to her somehow.

There's one more story that I hesitate to tell, but the last story is about another friend of mine who suffered almost professionally, how quiet and graceful she was about it, for about a year before her organs started to fail. It all tortured my friends for months, there was a year of concern over her.

The concern theater operates like a constant world-dread for me. I feel like an actor that died on stage. I feel like when I perform nobody can see me. Like you'd have to be looking for me to see me, and nobody's looking for me.

I'm a crier. I cried in front of whole hundreds of people this summer, five times over. I feel like a recurring child, a child that comes and goes, ogbanje, demon as i am. I feel like I remain in an emotional infancy. I cry about silly things, like homework and being alone but I miss my first infancy when I would cry and someone would always come.