I shouldn't be here.
Every moment I live is just borrowed time.
The weight that I have on my friends' lives the only thing that keeps me tethered to this Earth.
I don't know how I made it here nor where all that time went.
Milestones coming and going with barely even a hint of memory to pass them by.
Starting school, 5.
First big deaths, 8.
First ear piercings, 9.
First phone, 10.
Elementary school graduation, 11.
Changing school for the first time, 11.
A friend group, 12.
Teenager, 13.
COVID and online school, 14.
High School, 14.
A support group, 15.
Change finally, finally, starting. 15.
How am I 15?
Sophomore year almost over, but I feel like I'm in the same place I have been for years.
Years passing by in a stasis with the only proof of my existence being the material possessions and creations and the mental images that exist in the minds of the people I met.
15 years and I've changed but I've always stayed the same.
Something in me died years ago and now I'm nothing more than a corpse of all the possibilities a little girl once had, even as the world was always against her.
I am not who I was and never will be and the sad thing is I wish I could go back.
Go back to a time where I could still believe or tell myself I'm happy.
Go back to a time when my family wasn't all perfect, but some of them were.
Go back to a time where the most emotional pain I felt was when my friends told me about their lives, having become numb to my own years before then even.
Go back to a time where I was a person and not just a concept I exude into the eyes and ears and senses of the people I am around everyday.
Go back to a time where I could remember.
When I could say I was... ok.
And you know the saddest part of it all?
That time never existed.
I was never ok each day being worse and worse and even worse than the last.
I had dreams and books and school to help me escape.
When I couldn't escape I became numb and I forgot and never stopped forgetting to the point where I've forgotten how to remember.
People always say "the world isn't against you" but the truth is the world has always been against me, at least the world I grew up in.
It may not have been as bad as some other peoples' and I know that to be true because I least I could forget the horrors that were never really horrors when I glance at the thoughts inside my head of what could have been horrors but weren't.
If it could be so much worse then it was good.
I don't know how I made it.
The pain in my joints and the curves in my back and the small scars from scratches and mistakes littering my body and my aching muscles and cramping hands and painful chest being the only indicators for myself that I am alive.
But I can't remember it.
The only moment I exist is the moment I am in now and even now feels like it isn't real and I know when this moment becomes a moment 30 years from now it'll still feel the same because had time really passed if you have no memory of it?
Did time really pass if you can't put a measure to it?
Did time really pass if you don't know what time really is?
If all we are is memories then I am a pamphlet with a front cover and a words messily typed on the few pages inside while other people are manuals and books and dictionaries and catalogs of memories and experiences and thoughts and hopes and dreams and lives while I just pass by carried in the wind until someone sees me and decides I would make a nice bookmark.
The only memories are those in which others possess of me.
words: 692
Christmas is ok but I really don't like New Year's. I don't know how I made it this far.
~Sage 🌱 (12/22/2022)
