Lost at the Start

3.

"Are you freaking kidding me?" Shouting was suddenly much easier. "PERFECT? Really? PERFECT?!" I scrubbed my face with my hands. "First of all, nobody's life is perfect. Second of all, it only looks—" I stopped myself short and backpedaled a bit. "—Looked perfect, because it wasn't yours. It's easy to not see someone else's problems. It's always easy to want what Isn't yours. To want what you can't have." And why did I feel like we'd had this discussion before? "Do you know how many times I've wished I was born a boy because of my own anatomy, but then took it back because I thought about all the other ways life would suck?" Even if certain problems would disappear for me, others would very easily take their place. "It doesn't matter who's or what's life you have, there's always going to a fine print, an asterisk, some reading-between-the-lines you can't see from the outside." And I meant what I said.

Really, truly, that was at the root of why I killed myself. It didn't matter what life I had, there would always be something wrong; Some reason I couldn't be happy. And, though I'd never officially been diagnosed with anything, I was sure the sources of my unhappiness lied in my own head, in a way that can't be solved with my mother's annoying, "attitude, attitude, attitude," bit.

Jackson's eyes found me again—finally—and his bushy eyebrows drew up. "Why are you shouting?"

A little jostled, I froze and blinked slowly before composing myself a bit. "Sorry. You couldn't hear me before, but getting louder helped." I tried to resist the flame spreading across my face.

I almost jumped out of my skin when I felt his hand close over mine on Cinnamon's back.

I glanced at our hands, then at him.

"You really believe that?"

Looking away, his gaze still too intense for me to hold (as it always had been), I nodded. "I do. Remember 'The Little Mermaid'?"

He nodded and I looked back long enough to see.

"In both the Disney version and Hans Christian Anderson's, the original, she thought she'd be happy if only she could be human and marry the prince. So she made an agreement with the sea witch." Who, I should add, wasn't really all that evil in the original story. She was more of an anti-hero just trying to make a fair bargain. "But in both cases, all she did was trade her problems for different ones. Disney said Ursula almost took over and then Ariel had a whole sequel of problems to deal with, on top of the fact that she had kid in said sequel proving that Ariel most likely got a lot more than she could've thought of in becoming a human girl." Both in her anatomy and in the role of being a mother in not-the-21st-century.

"And Anderson?"

"In that story, it felt like knives when she walked, she had to watch the prince marry another girl, and then after her sisters made a deal to save her, she turned to seafoam because she couldn't bare to kill the prince." However, she did still kind of get a happy ending in the sense she became a Daughter of Air, having to work for 300 years—her would've-been lifespan as a mermaid—to earn a soul and therefore a spot in Heaven.

Jackson watched me, waiting for the connection.

Because, as much as I like him, it has to be said the boy wouldn't get subtlety if it beat him over the head. (Or maybe that's part of why I like him because I like explaining things?)

"My point is that The Little Mermaid thought she would be happy if she could be human, but that just came with it's own slew of problems, and she still wasn't happy." Technically. Though, I was realizing as the conversation went on, the original version of the story kind of helped my case in that she didn't get her happy ending until she died.