postsecret

I am so livid right now. I don't think I've been this mad in a very long time, and it makes me laugh when people who know me doubt that I could ever even get mad because it feels like a constant pressure on my lungs, preventing me to breathe. My chest is heated and warm and my teeth have been clenched for two hours and my eyes keep welling up with tears but my fingers are freezing despite the fact that they keep moving. I keep listening to music and everything slow and happy disgusts me and makes me want to scream. The sound of my typing is grating on my nerves. That's how bad it's gotten. Postsecret just made me cry though. I am such a freaking ball of emotion. I hate myself for it. For being so goddamn typical. I just wrote this, I'm working on it, I literally just wrote it now so don't judge it yet. :

Everything seemed like it was more difficult for Peter than for his brother Bart. Peter was not a star athlete growing up. Peter is not in a fraternity in college. Peter did not drink in High School and get caught by the cops. You’d think that last one would make things more difficult for Bart, but it actually made him more popular. Bart is a star hockey player. Growing up he played travel hockey. Peter got dragged along to every game. No one cares about piano recitals. They’re just not as exciting as hockey. He missed his recital that one weekend they had to go to Syracuse for a game instead. Bart is a Sigma Chi at school. He plays hockey at school. He has girlfriends, plural, at school. Peter has friends, he lives a fruitful life, but things have never been as easy for him as they have for Bart. School was easy for Peter. Playing piano was easy for Peter. Making friends with the offbeat kids who hang out in the hallway in the morning doing stupid things like putting stickers on the ceiling, that was easy.
It seemed to stick to his parents too though, that was the hardest part. Bart, the otherwise fuck up who got drunk and taken home by cops, who failed freshmen history, whose fraternity was put on probation, was always given leeway. Had Peter fucked up even once, the roof was brought down. It sucked.
This one summer, Bart had spent all of his money, like all of it, five thousand dollars. And he had only made one thousand of it working his job that summer landscaping – the other four thousand had just been handed to him at graduation. He just blew it all on trips to the beach with friends, gas, new clothes, dinner out, beer. Bart would go out and get take out just to have different food than everyone else in the house. It was just bullshit. He spent all of it. And instead of their parents saying “too bad” or “your own fault,” they handed him a job working for Peter and Bart’s father’s company. Their father owned a construction company, and government jobs pay upwards of thirty dollars per hour. Far surpassing Peter’s mediocre-paying assistant IT job at a law firm that had been considered a job worth having, Bart made back all five thousand in one month. All he had to do was swing a hammer. Peter made two thousand dollars that summer, regardless of his brains and hard-work. Everything came easily to Bart. Everything was handed to him. Peter hated that, but couldn’t hate Bart. His laughter was contagious, his humor, charismatic, everyone loved him, even Peter, which made him hate himself. It was a sick cycle of hate, love, hate, and guilt, for not being named such a stupid name as Bart.
Peter closed the door to his bedroom as he had always done, and someone knocked, as they always had because in Peter and Bart’s house a closed door means an open invitation to knock, not “stay away.” Bullshit. Peter was working on some reading that he had been wanting to get done, The Fisher King, he was re-reading it since the last time he read it, he was ten and maybe didn’t catch everything. Peter had turned his stereo up way higher than necessary, who knew Simon and Garfunkle could have the walls shaking? With the music turned up and everything around him moving and vibrating through his body, Peter felt more peaceful. His ears filled with something other than Bart’s voice and his chest was relieved of a little pressure that otherwise was there constantly, pressing down, saying “not good enough” over and over. That summer Peter had stopped eating as much as he usually did. No one noticed. He stopped eating entirely, subsisting on literature and music and chewing gum. He fingered the fraying edges of his jeans and thought about if the roof was lifted off his house, the sun would shine right down on his face inside his bedroom, and that would be the most perfect. To stay right here in his safe, private room, but covered in sunshine. Peter’s limbs were always cold. He could barely feel his feet. They didn’t have air conditioning and it was eighty degrees outside. Peter just wasn’t eating enough to have the energy to heat his own body. Bart went to swim every morning, to maintain his muscle mass, then to work later in the day and came back at eight after swinging a hammer all day. Peter wished Bart would miss and hook his head with the other end, sometimes.
While everyone ran in the street and played baseball, Peter remained in his four-walled space, because it belonged to him and no one else. He went to work in the morning, he came home at night, he never left his room otherwise. He never put anything in his mouth that was not a white chicklet, smooth as an ocean-worn stone. It was not about all those girls who didn’t like Peter, he wasn’t chubby, he was a thin kid actually. It wasn’t like those girls at school who only ate carrots for lunch. It was his mouth, his body, his control. He knew the entire time he did it that that’s what it was. Even though it started as a way to see who paid attention and when the answer was clear, no one, he decided to keep going to see how far he could push. And he pushed.
Four years later someone noticed.
“Hey, what’s goin’ on with you, man?”
Hah! Now Bart cares, right? What the fuck, what’s going on with Peter, who does he think he is?
“What’s going on with me? What do you mean?”
“I mean, dude, you’re like really skinny.”
“Well Bart, we can’t all be hockey players, not all of us can work our three hours a day.”
“No it’s not even just that, you’re lookin’ for real thin, emaciated.”
“Surprised you know that word, Bart. I’m just stressin’ about school, no big deal.”
“Alright dude, whatever, your thing.”
And that’s where Bart left it. He didn’t care enough to push further, which was fine with Peter. Since he had been doing this for so long, it became his thing. It wasn’t about anyone else. Too little, too late. Peter needed someone to notice when he missed that piano recital at age eleven to go to Syracuse for Bart’s game and how his teacher scolded him at his lesson that Monday. Peter needed someone to notice that he was smart, not just a book-loving waif of a nerd. Peter’s parents had no idea who their son was except someone they didn’t need to worry about, or did they?
Peter sat in his room, where he always was. Looking through a kaleidascope, Peter discovered that windowpanes are spider webs. They trap the light, his hands, and his ability to jump. He put his hand in front of the kaleidascope and watched his fingers turn into one long finger, one rod of hand, and then a flower of flesh. Everything was so malleable, if he just lent his perception to it. Peter chucked the kaleidascope into his closet. It knocked over an old piggy bank and some pearls fell out. His mothers. He stole them once when they went out to dinner (his parents) and the strand broke so he hid them inside the piggy bank. The pearls were a comfort for that one night. Bart, who was supposed to stay with Peter because he’s afraid of the dark, had snuck out to see a girl a couple streets over from their house.



That's how I feel right now. so mad. so mad. so mad. AND I have no one to talk to, I just want the door to stay shut, I just want no one to knock, I just want someone to call me and say "I care." I just don't want to be so alone, but all I want is to be alone. I wouldn't want to be friends with this confusing mess. I wouldn't want to call someone who doesn't want a call but wants to know she's okay. I think I held my breath the entire time I was typing just now. I'm too mad to do anything except sit here and not move any body part except my fingers until I just bury this deeply inside and forget it happened so I can smile and laugh at my family later. At their things that annoy the crap out of me when I'm angry, so I can be the laura they know again. Right now though, I refuse to move. I. Re. Fuse.