ur fucking miserable | The past, shame, sex, gender, sexuality, trust, social heirarcy, delusion

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ɪ ʜᴏᴘᴇ ʏᴏᴜ'ʀᴇ ʜᴀᴜɴᴛᴇᴅ ʙʏ ᴀʟʟ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʀᴇɢʀᴇᴛs

ɪ ʜᴏᴘᴇ ᴛʜᴇʏ ғᴜᴄᴋ ʏᴏᴜ ᴜᴘ ɪɴsɪᴅᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʜᴇᴀᴅ

ʏᴏᴜ ᴋɴᴏᴡ ɪ ᴅᴏɴ'ᴛ ғᴏʀɢɪᴠᴇ, ɪ ᴅᴏɴ'ᴛ ғᴏʀɢᴇᴛ

ɪ ʜᴏᴘᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴍɪsᴇʀᴀʙʟᴇ ᴜɴᴛɪʟ ʏᴏᴜ'ʀᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ

NESSA.

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THEN,

1989

☆

TINÙ IS the only high-school freshman at the party. She's not even sure how she got here. She was walking out by the train tracks and she must've taken a wrong turn, but she knows this house, a sweet girl named Leiah' place. A girl named Jennifer drove her here once to get weed. She had pretended like she'd ever even seen a joint not in a movie, like she'd totally smoked one. She mostly just held it and let it burn until it went out. Then she lit it for someone else.

That was in the summer, when she was still thirteen.

Now the nights are getting colder and she blows on her hands in the kitchen, near the sliding glass door too the back deck.

"Hey, honey," says Leiah's mom, a waif brunette in baggy jeans older than Tinuccia's parents. She hangs out with the kids her daughter knows, and doesn't know. She doesn't know Tinù's name, but she will in a couple of years. She says, "You cold over there? Come into the living room, there's a fire." She has a smile Tinù likes, one that is earned.

Kids and adults, but mostly people in between, grace the rooms in little pockets of conversation. Most people yell, but it is not an aggressive noise. Tinù can't stop the way the din filters through her head and scatters and breaks apart. She can taste each word and the texture of low and high tones, she knows who's joking and who's flirting dangerously and who's inexplicably sad. She sits on the carpet in the living room and tries to breathe. Her lungs feel solid, a mass of ice wrapped in tissue.

Someone calls the woman away and Tinù is alone faster than she found herself inside, but she doesn't mind, nor does she blame the woman. It's her house, after all. She holds her hand on the flat stone of the fireplace, heat crashing against her pink-painted fingertips. She doesn't like the darkness of the color, but she thinks it makes her seem cute, like a girl in a music video. She thinks anyone wants the girls on MTV with their tights and high ponytails and bright lipstick: she only looks at them to know what she should do. She doesn't look at them how a boy might.

She watches, lonesomely, the fire for a while, making no move to go home or otherwise interact with anyone around her. She stares at the flames, and when they jump too vividly at her and make her face feel as though its burning she turns away and feels cold. She looks up at the mantle and finds two abandoned drinks, both relatively full. She glances around: she sees people's legs and pants, and feels their voices, and carefully moves her head and her eyes because her vision has started to shatter, in that she notices things incongruently, whether or not they fall into her eyeline. When she looks back at a fragment of shimmering light, it's gone. When she breathlessly tries to ground herself the carpet falters like the pattern of the flames and she feels panic pull stringent up her throat, like how she's seen girls at the circus swallow swords. She cannot track movement, it doesn't work, the world breaks up like slowing down a film reel frame by frame. This is newer than the bugs and sounds that blink away or click off before she can investigate them.

When she stands, she's eye-level with the mantle and the drinks and some masks propped up that look dark and important. Huh, weird. She sips from the first cup, hit with the familiar sugary pull of Coke underdone with the sharp heat from Jack. She likes it better than whatever coconut-fruity concoction sits beside it, so she keeps the first drink, but something else holds her attention. A scrapBook bound messily with twine and stickers and masking tape. Did she notice that before? She wonders if it's real, or if it matters.

But when she touches it it stays solid as treebark, the paper just as heavy. It has random notes in the front, some empty pages, then twirling, sloppy handwriting that piece together to form poems, or stream-of-conciousness prose, she can't tell. It's choppy, bad, and enthralling all at once. The paper smells like a boy, the carelessness of one. She's never found any of them all too interesting, at least not the ones at school who have recently started competing for her attention. She's always been more attracted to the boys on TV, they seem realer.

"Hey, you found my notes, thanks."

She's been disorientedly coming up with voices and phrases in her head for days, so she is wary of the statement until she sees the guy--a kid, really--hanging into the room in a green sweater, light brownish hair in his eyes. "Yeah," he says, "you're reading 'm? d' you like 'em?"

Her fingers burn suddenly where she's touched the cover and the pages.

He smiles at her, comes so close she can smell his breath. Like beer and inconsistency and dog. He's nineteen and drunk, he has an easy marshmellowy smile.

She thinks he's lovely. The universe obviously thinks so, too, because she can see a pale shimmering kind of aura about him. He is very beautiful, she looks at him like she looks at the girls on MTV: without abandon, with a lurid coil of want in her stomach. Her heart jumps in her chest, suddenly devoted and drawn away from him: is that not what angels do to people?

"I do," she says, "I love them. I can see everything you're describing so..."

"Really?" His hair and the flickering glare off the fire obscure his face and his voice: for a moment all she can hear is the rush of burning like a sweeping forest fire, and all she can see is the plaintive color of his eyes, made watery with beer.

"Yeah. Real cool."

"Yeah, 's just stuff for school," he admits, and only when she feels a tug does she realize he's making for the noteBook back. "Had to write about places that're sentimental to us or whatever, you know?"

She nods, wide-eyed. She tries to make another observation, but something catches his eye in the hallway.

"Ry!" he calls, waving, and Tinù surmises she must've misheard him, but she follows his gaze and catches a glimpse of the real Ryland Chanowski, who clearly does not wish to be percieved. When he adds a jovial, "Do widzenia, dobranoc," she just glances at him and mouths a one-word answer.

When the boy turns back to her, the noteBook seems to fall from her hands and into his. She feels a loss, like seeing a dead god sprawled across her feet.

"Thanks," he says again, but the s trails off so that she realizes it's a question.

"...Tinù," she says. She holds out her hand just to touch him for real. Shaking his hand feels like a kiss, and she blushes appropriately.

"Aw, that's cute." He laughs like she's said something funny. "'M Lukas." He does not let go of her hand, and she feels a keen thrill, the taste of adrenaline. She wishes he would pull her away anywhere, and she even thinks he might do it, pull her outside into the snow and do anything he wants. Anything holy.

He holds the Book with one hand and squeezes hers with the other. "Pa, Tinù."

His steady face leaves her, and fades: she blinks in a brilliant flash of golden-white and he's gone. She smells burning, but all that really stands for is purification.

☆

RYLAN TRIES to watch a movie she found at the library. It looked old and dramatic when she saw the cover, though despite the age on the cardboard box the tape looked pristine, like no-one wanted to watch it. Now, she begins to understand why everyone else passed it up. It's in English, but the accents are strange and she can't understand them. And it's not the kind of film one can understand without words: it's all words. In a field, in a parlour room, in a carriage (that kind of old), all anyone does is talk and make minimal expressions. It feels like doing schoolwork.

She finds a loophole to make it interesting: in the corsets and curled hair, all the women look very pretty, almost ornamental. She understands that's wrong, in a way, to enjoy them like that, but that's all she pays attention to. A woman sips tea and Ry stares at her lips, full and red.

Rylan is too scared to do anything about how the actresses make her feel, so she makes toast and scoops peanut butter on it instead. She doesn't like the dryness of it, but she supposes that's the point.

She is sitting on the couch with a blanket pulled over her head so that the strings sometimes get in her mouth when she chews, firmly on her knees with her legs pressed compactly together. The untuned piano in the corner is strung with lights, with cast a strange purple and green glow up the dull walls.

She doesn't think about Leiah's house, it doesn't matter to her. She doesn't think about the things that can't touch her anymore, unless they were never hers to begin with. She doesn't like people, or being around them. She doesn't like boys: they make her jealous, she is convinced she should understand them, and when she doesn't she can only blame herself. Contrarily, she's accutely aware that girls should make her jealous, and they don't, and besides, being around them make her insides squirm. Old people usually remind her of kobiety at the church, or they embarrass her for being young; young people embarrass her in a completely different way that blithely insinuates that she does not belong anywhere, not with boys or girls, or the young or the old.

So when the windowpanes in the door clatter with knocking, she knows it can't be someone for her. It must be for pani Szmytka, but she's out. Ry's first instinct is to not open the door, but she thinks about how awkward it would be if the person at the door mentions that he or she did stop by, and pani Szmytka realizes that Ry simply did not answer it. That's worse than responding if only to say that the lady of the house isn't home: doing nothing would make her look weird.

That's the only reason she tugs her blanket from around her shoulders and pauses the film with the clunky grey remote, and forces herself to the door. She keeps crunching the toast, resorting to licking the peanut butter where it melts on the hot bread. She jerks the door open, annoyed, but promptly makes to close it.

In the dark, in the silvery-blue dusk off the streetlights, Tinuccia looks small but no less intimidating than she is at school.

"Hey, come on, it is you!" she calls in surprise, digging her shoe against the doorframe, wedging it open. "I just needa ask you something."

Rylan thinks she might throw up. Her reason for hating Tinù (no-one ever calls her Teresa, except for on the first day of school when the teachers don't know her nickname) is not remotely like her reason for hating other girls: she hates her because she's a bitch on purpose, all the time. And she started some rumor that Ry is a dyke, but she's not sure what that means. She thinks it's something like a bitch. She doesn't want to force the toe of Tinù's sneaker out of the house, and in her socks she considers it might be difficult, so she resorts to stamping on the girl's shoe with her heel.

"Ow, shit!"

"How did you find my house?!"

"I had'a ask, like, three other people," Tinù whines. "Guy down the road doesn' even know you live here!"

"Good."

"I have t' ask you something."

Ry doesn't like yelling through the cracked door, so she slowly drawls it open. Tinù snatches her foot back, and makes no move to come in. She wears lavender pajama pants and a tight white tank top under her winter coat. Her mouth twitches inwardly, her stark, glittery brown eyes are uncharacteristically nervous and unmoored.

Ryland makes a face she doesn't mean to, bitter and vaguely introverted. "What?"

"Good thing I found you. I saw y' at Leiah's."

She blinks. "Uh...so?"

"Your neighbors're a little creepy."

Shakes her head, leans crudely against the doorframe like a dying houseplant, like a scared cat. "Pan Sokołwina, and he is not that creepy." The bitterness bleeds into her voice like a hallucinogenic into a bloodstream. "Maybe more to you. You are pretty."

"More creepy with me 'cause I'm pretty?"

"Uh, tak, yeah."

"You are so fucking weird." She raises a finger to a goldish curl, browned by the winter shadow as a tree ages dark, and tugs at it. She knows Rylan is only saying what an older person would think, but the thrill it gives Tinù to be dangerously desired is incomparable. It is a sick, hard longing. It is wrong, she enjoys it anyway. "I saw you taking 'a that guy. Lukas."

"So?"

"So you know him. I want you d' tell me everything about him." She nods as she speaks, her white teeth at her full pink bottom lip. They glow in the offlight.

"Nie znam... I don't know him."

"But..." Tinù almost laughs. "I mean..."

"He is the son 'f a woman I know. He give--no." She thinks, equal parts impatient and reluctant to betray herself. "He--what is--gave me, uh, marijuana, you know?"

"Really?"

"That's all."

"D' you have it?"

A relenting whisper, "Yes."

"'Re you here alone?"

"Yeah. So?"

So are you gonna smoke it now? Are you real? Can I have some? Will you light it for me? You can't imagine the light I've seen.

"No, nothing."

Though she likes to pretend otherwise, to Tinù marijuana is a tantalizing mature subject. Only those kids who drive and drink are those that buy pot. It is a kind of symbol of enlightenment, like you could be a stoner, but you're not, usually. Only real freaks can be stoners, unless they're hot, then they can be cool stoners, too. She knows she's a child to Lukas, she knows he's more than old enough to join the army, which is a thing for dads and brothers old enough to, like, get married or something. She knows she sounds so childish to ask questions like hers, in an exaggerated undertone, to Rylan who has walked into the house near the train tracks of her own accord, spoke with a pretty boy she already knew, and walked out with a couple of joints. And sits alone in her house--Tinù isn't sure who owns the house--and goes back to being a loser in the dark. But Ry doesn't care about pretty boys, and she knew him from his family, which is almost worse than not knowing him at all, when they are fourteen and kids try to hide the fact that they came from somewhere (Still, a voice comes to Ry's defense, she came from no-where, so where does that leave you...?)

Every nuance twists through Tinù's head in an instant, then she feels the thoughts disband though she'd like to keep them like a fistful of feathers and examine them safe and alone in her room.

Ry sighs, annoyed by now. "Why? Do you like him or something?"

"What? Ew, no, he's like...he just talked'a me..."

"Well I think he has this girlfriend, seems very serious."

"How?"

"They, uh, go on trips together and things like that. Besides, I know about her just talking to him, about twice. So."

Tinù tilts her head and gnaws on a thumbnail, but she makes this action look pretty and intense instead of forlorn and ecstatic.

"Are you okej?"

She nods, but her eyebrows are close and her teeth make sharp noises as she tears at her nail. "I don't even know why I asked that," she admits. "I'm..."

She might've gone on to say any number of things, she might've said how scared she was in the moment, how she desired almost to destruction an affection that bordered on grotesque, and how she would've taken it from Ryland were she able to give it--she was sort of like a boy, anyway. As much as everything about her disgusted Tinuccia, her desire for a splintering devotion was greater than her revulsion. She might've said that she knew the sky was full of a million golden tiny bells which rattled when she walked down the train tracks, and eyes could follow her anywhere, blinking into existence from oblivion. She should've said something, and therefore things could've been different.

Ryland says, "Not to be a dyke or anything, but you can leave now?"

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THEN,

1993.

☆

[ She thinks this must be what it feels like to see one's life play out from above. She thinks this must be what it feels like to die happy. ]

IT WAS a week after New Year's Day, Tinù straightened and loosened the phone cord.

She has been lured by false promises deep into her own head, which acts as a parallel--and a portal--to somewhere she can't describe. The sky is always purple with dusk, the stars are never alive, just reflections of old promises. She stays in her room and thinks, and ignores most people.

At night, she writes chapters and chapters of pages in many diaries so that she runs out of room and has to use the empty pages of her regular books. She has incandecent musings scribbled across the inside of Exterminator! and Visions of Cody, the incoherence of which rival Burroughs himself. When she bites her teeth she tastes metal and rust, convinced her saliva has oxidized her roots, but when she looks in the mirror she sees nothing. Her mother says she might have a cavity.

She cuts apart Fragments of Perseus and pastes the narrow poems into collages, which she throws away anyway. She is always moving her foot or her hands or twirling her hair, but she only goes out in the evening when the streets are indigo-dim and no-one will call her name. No one from the sky calls her, either.

In the mornings, she sleeps on the wrong side of the bed. At eleven she drinks coffee and looks for memories in the grinds at the bottom, like reading tea leaves. Around two in the afternoon she starts feeling guilty, but by four she is renewed with senseless compassion. She sits in the backyard with her legs crossed and watches the wind blow the trees, hoping the dead branches might scratch the clouds. Then it starts to snow, and she remembers she cannot control everything.

She frightens herself, but she is the only person available to decode the (perceived) disasters melting wax in her head away to expose the right-sided glistening tissue.

Nonetheless, she called Ryland.

"Hello?"

She heard the static of their sigh into the phone, she imagined it as many crushed stars.

"Hi," she said quickly, "you wanna come over?"

Ryland hesitated. "Why?"

Now, Tinù raps her gloved palms on the steering wheel, but she tries not to make it look impatient. Ry is carefully avoididing where the snow has scattered in icy patches in the parking lot, but when Tinù looks into her face as she opens the door for her, it is not the expression of someone who is solely concentrated on a physical task. Ry looks apprehensive, and her anxiety is tinged with a type of sadness that is unfamiliar to both of them.

"I just wanna talk, I guess," she admitted. It sounded dull to her own ears.

"You have not been. For...two weeks."

"I know. I'm sorry."

Rylan half-lies. "I don't know. I'm a little tired."

"We can just watch a movie or something. Please?"

☆

Tinù's bed is satin-soft, curls of pink and white and black. Ry follows the pattern of the stitching with their finger as they watch her close the door. They don't know how to start, or how to think of a normal sentence that is not some regurgitation of Why are you avoiding me? What happened? Did I make it up?

"I didn't mean to," she says quietly.

They blink. Did they say that or can she read their mind?

"Disappear like that, I mean." She drops her gaze to her socks as she steps on the bare spots of the floor, where there is not books or pens or cut-up paper. The rest of her room is a disaster, too: clothes and markers, empty cups and mass amounts of little figurines, varying in structure and type. "I just needed'a be by myself," she adds as she sits behind them, on the other side of the bed, so that she is staring straight out the window and Ry is facing the closet, but both can see the other's expression clearly.

Ry, through her jeans, works her left pointer finger along the outer metal part of her brace. Her leg sort of hurts, an ache from the inside, but it's better than nothing. She will use the cane when it's finished, and when her hip stops hurting when she moves--but this will never really happen, so eventually she will just switch whenever she feels like it. She sighs through her nose, she wishes Tinù would say something bad, she wishes she could yell.

She has gone to sleep with her face buried in her pillow and her heart rocketing against her breastbone so badly she feels as though she is shaking, counting every terrible thing she's said and done. She always ends with the last one, and it always makes her cry.

Aside from that, she is confused. She breaks up the rectangles of the closet door in her mind and listens to Tinù's breathing. "I don't understand," she says.

"I've just been feeling...no, that's not right. I been... Ry, I dunno how t' say it."

"'F you won't tell me I can leave."

She jolts faintly. "No--no. I've never said it out loud."

They follow the trail and tries not to falter. They swallow their words though the pressure threatens to break. "Said what?" After five second's worth of silence, sticky and elastic, they click their tongue. "Seriously. You are kind to me. Then we...are friends. An' you talk t' me all the time and we both like it. When you stop, what am I supposed to think?" She feels her breath rush, and it is like the itemized list she held like labeled stones in the back of her mind scatter. "I don't know if you're still playing your little game, if you think that by screwing with me you get your friends back, and the world, and whatever else you want! But you don't, so all I can imagine is that you do mess with me just for fun, because everyone hates you. You cannot get any of it back, so the only point you have left is to go back to fucking wi' me 'cause that's the only think you will ever be good at. I don't know what your problem is, maybe because you are so scared of yourself, or you hate everyone else, or you are just stupid. But you do not get to toy with me anymore. Your problem is not mine."

Their blood feels embarrassingly hot, they can taste the workings of their own mouth. It is too soft.

"Tinù?"

They can hear her gasping at first, before it evolves into a less structured jumble of sobs.

On her own side Tinù pulls her feet up onto the bed, face against her knees. If she could speak, she would, but her lungs are fresh bruises with panicked tears and they are stringent and heavy and empty. "I'm..." Maybe she was going to apologize, but that doesn't seem right, or enough. She has never done that in a way that matters. Though she still faces the opposite directionshe shakes her head. "No, I wasn't...being like that. I wasn't, I promise." Her voice, distressed with weight, sounds crushed and lost, like she is grasping for a script that cannot exist for her. "Look. I don' know how t' say it. There's something wrong with me."

Ry's posture lends itself to suspicion, their right hand freezes on the bed. "Right?"

"I've been...I write things down. I write everything down. And now I'm waking up, and I look at it and I can't understand anything that made sense the night before. I can't...breathe, I can't think. I don't remember things I do, or what I think I know. Everything's all...broken up, and I think I did it, but 'm not sure. I don't feel real. And I know I'm not, and it just weighs there in my head, knowing I can't do anything that matters, because I feel like I haven't been born or lived or anythin'. That 'm, like...just fuckin' an outside with no insides. It's better when nothing in the world feels real. When it goes away, it's easier." She wipes at her numb lips with her wrist.

They can't possibly know what to say, they listen.

"Why do you think there is something wrong with you?"

"Are you listening?"

"Very much."

"Then there--there it is."

"Nie, myślę... So your head does not work, the way it should, that's not a problem with you. Personally. That's just how it is."

"That doesn't make it better. That makes it worse, I'm stuck like this."

"But it's not your fault."

She wonders if she can believe it like that. Tearfully, she admits, "That's not enough."

"I wish there was more. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say that stuff before, too. I was mad."

She lifts her head. "I didn't realize you'd think that. It makes sense. I'm a bitch."

They shrug. "You were. Once."

She keeps crying, but she's not as desperate or frustrated, only mourning something private that Ry understands, but cannot describe how they do. They can't possibly touch her, or say anything fulfulling. They listen for what feels like ten minutes, but it must be longer.

"I know what you mean, when you said you feel...unreal."

She giggles miserably. "Y'know what? I thought you might. I guess it's why I kinda hated you, like, you didn't seem horrified by anything anymore. You had ti all figured out. I never said that 'a anyone."

This feels false, this statement seems absurd. "No-one?"

"No-one would understand. It's crazy."

But you had so many people, they think. You have this beautiful house and everyone around to listen to anything that happens to you, and to rush forward and fix it. They would force themselves to listen and to see you, at the same time. Anyone would do the impossible for you. Well, maybe Ry would.

"I'm just so scared. And tired. And tired of being scared. You were right." She tugs at a bracelet on her wrist, tightening it and loosening it.

"Well. You remember that night you came, to my house?"

She sniffs. "What?"

"You remember? asking me about some guy."

"Jesus," she whispers, "I sorta convinced myself it didn' happen."

"Well, then, anyway. I assumed then, that you...were like this."

She asks, "What gave it away?"

"I saw this delusion," they mumble, "dying in your eyes when I didn' confirm what you thought. You looked so sad. But I didn't care."

"If I was you, I wouldn' care either." She shifts to her left and leans back onto the bed so that she can look up at them. She is astoundingly pretty and delicate like that, red eyes and blackened lashes and flushed cheeks. "God," she whispers.

"I'm sorry it frightens you." Dully, bring their hand along their brace again. "It's not fair."

"'M glad I told you."

"Me too."

"Do you wanna smoke?"