Spare tires and other imaginary character flaws.

(How fucking ironic is it that someone so used to taking orders cannot give them (I have said so many sorries and pleases and pardon mes when I should have said do thises or stop thats) or make them at your fine restaurant establishment. She is ordering linguine with pesto and I am ordering numbers and percentages and quotas and sauce on the side which is pretty fucking ridiculous for pasta and I'm probably the first one to ask for this. There is never a “single sliced apple” option on these menus, no “eggplant parmesan zero” and I feel like my brain is eating itself from the inside out and I am trying to climb out like a lobster in a pot of boiling water but the claws of my own kind are dragging me down again. This feeling is virtually nonexistent when I wake up and snowballs throughout the day.)

It's grey and frigid and sleeting and I can hear each drop as it smacks against the car and I think about the spider on the window and wonder if to him they look like asteroids. I imagine a world where arachnids pay bills and file insurance claims and cheat on their partners.

Today has been dark enough to use highbeams for hours but my father stares at me behind those ridiculous rose-tinted sunglasses and stands with me between our cars and rephrases the same idea several times in order to explore his vocabulary in the external world. I am cold and hungry and irritated and broke and there are so many things I want to ask and say but probably never will. I cannot remember the last time he spoke to me about something that didn't involve a paycheck or money or banks or where is your pride and are you eating because you look sick just eat something what did you eat are you crazy.

And maybe sometimes I am because I am slowly self-destructing like I have been since I was fifteen and fourteen and thirteen and six. They tell me that I am committing the slowest suicide possible, gradually withdrawing deeper and deeper into myself and my thoughts and my worries and my guilt and my shame and my memories that I don't want to be true until they kill me or I snap and finish the process myself. 

 I don't want to die, no, but I want to refresh undo restart CTRL-Z something to where I am not walking a tightrope of sanity over a fiery canyon of homelessness and self-starvation and cardiac arrest and substance abuse and eventually death and parent-dragons beat at me with their massive wings and those gusts sway the tightrope and my vulnerable crystal glass infantile hope swings like a hollow anvil trapped in my ribcage.