To: condorboy
Date: Tuesday, January 17—11:35 PM
Subject: baby birds
Connor,
I’m not figuring anything out. Sometimes I think I am, just for a few minutes, then all of a sudden the snow globe gets shaken and everything falls apart again. You think it’s so simple. You think everything can be solved by talking about your feelings and being nice to people and being with who you love. But what if talking about your feelings doesn’t fix anything? What if what you really need is to make the feelings go away?
Maybe you’re a little too skinny and a little too short, and maybe you’re too smart and too talented to fully integrate into this stupid little world, but there’s a place for you on the periphery, a place reserved for the people who don’t quite fit in but who are allowed to stick around because they make everything a bit more colorful. And maybe you’re not like everyone else, but at least you get along with them. At least you know how to smile when you’re supposed to and when to say please and thank you. At least you know when to shut up.
Of course the luckiest ones are the people with no consciousness, the ones who have no idea anything is wrong. They keep on with their small lives and don’t question what they’re for. Even the misfits and the uglies know deep down there’s a place for them, even if it isn’t at the top, and there’s security in that. It may not be glamorous, but it’s home.
The thing is, I don’t think you know what it feels like to have no home. Yes, I’m being melodramatic. I’m always being melodramatic. But the truth is, I’m an alien. I was born to the wrong family. I was born in the wrong world. I am not built to survive here. Maybe there’s some world out there where I’m perfectly adapted. Maybe there’s a galaxy with a planet that’s just a little more tilted, with a sun that shines just a little bit darker, and that’s where I’m supposed to be, where it somehow makes sense to feel this broken.
Do you remember that book from when we were kids, Are You My Mother? It’s the one with the baby bird whose mom goes out to hunt some worms, except he doesn’t know that and the egg cracks open while she’s gone and he gets born to an empty nest and he thinks he’s an orphan. Heavy shit for a kid’s book, right? Anyway, he goes around asking everyone he sees if they’re his mother. He knows he’s supposed to have one; he has some instinct that’s telling him someone’s supposed to love him, but he doesn’t even know what a mother’s supposed to look like. I’m like that stupid little bird, asking everyone I meet if they’re my mother—you, Trevor, the bartender at Linda’s, the postman, the drag queen who hangs out across the street from my school, this garbage can on the corner—ARE YOU MY FUCKING MOTHER? And just like the book, everyone just sends me away.
Do you know the feeling that everything’s wrong, that your skin does not belong on your body, that your body does not belong, period? I imagine the world without me, and it doesn’t make me sad at all. It doesn’t make me feel anything. I could just drift away from my silly little life and make space for someone who truly deserves to be here. And she will rise up from my ashes to take my place, and she will be the kind of daughter my parents could love, she will be the kind of girl Trevor will want to call his girlfriend, and she will be the kind of friend you deserve. She will call you on the phone and swim over to visit. She will brave sharks and killer squids to see you. She will give something back instead of just take, take, take all the time.
I am a parasite on this world. I suck the life out of the things I love. I multiply and spread until I’ve consumed you. And even when you’re gone, even after I’ve licked up every last crumb of you, I’m still hungry. I’m starving, Connor. I’m empty and lonely and lost and I’m starving, and there isn’t enough in the whole wide world that could make me feel whole.
Somebody shoot me. Somebody put me out of my misery. Please.
Love,
Isabel