What Would the Community Think?

For all those wonderful months spent living independently for the first time, I have acquired a misstep in my personality.

I have stopped talking.

So many things have built up quietly while I was busy listening and not trusting a soul.

I haven't spoken to my stepfather in over a month. He got in my face and told me to shut the fuck up.

So I did. My mother is furious at me with the kind of anger that only I can understand since it runs through my veins.

When she questions me, I can just feel the tears well up like the piles of my things that I have simply stopped picking up.

Along with the job that my body refuses to wake up for, the cigarettes my mouth refuses to stop smoking, the sad lonely kind of drunk voice mails from my father that collect unreplied, the friend with whom I sit and listen but never explain my own swirls of discontent.

The only one I've ever felt okay to trust, Rashka, gets older every time I run away to the north. He will be collecting dust before my diploma even makes it to the shelf.

Where Lovely used to be is a large hole of turning my head so I don't see his old house when I drive by.

I'm scared to death of my career. I am so afraid to fail.

God am I afraid.

The other night, Jersey called me for the first time this summer, and she talked so fast about her own problems that I set the phone down and smoked a cigarette. She didn't notice.


I scream out for the Shire in my sleep, but I would be just as unhappy there.

I don't remember how to talk. The only thing I remember that serves as a hot enough shower for my mind is this lunchbox.

Hopefully my brain doesn't refuse that too. Because then,

There would be no more talking.

Everything is just so melted together that I'm not even sure where to pick things apart.