The calendar that hangs on my white brick walls has been empty since the day I moved in. I don’t plan anything from day to day. I load up my year, usually in January. I fill it up with different colors, louder sounds than years before. I made a vow, or a dozen. I lost count after a while. I lose my train of thought real easily, and I find my progress derailed once a week, twice if I’m in a slump. But anyways, I fill my year up in the Winter when the frost pierces my brain and I’ve dirtied all the dishes in the house already. By March I’m hungry. I switch it up. Even louder sounds, ones I’d never heard before, ones I barely could because they grew so slowly, I grew impatient, it took time, like that Madagascar Palm plant I read about 3 nights in a row without stopping. I hyper fixate on plants and people that promise even a glimpse of hope for me, it's pathetic. I got off track, oh yeah. It takes 100 years to flower, and once it does it dies. I thought I would do the same in March, sometimes I still do. Sometimes I want too. I take so long to grow that sometimes I forget that I still am. Back to the story, I switch it up in March. I get itchy for Spring flings that will defrost my bones and this year I remember counting every hour for a week straight, not in minutes but in ways I was alone. I counted each day in stomach aches because they never went away, even when I stopped eating to see if what I’d been feeding myself was the source of this and if abstaining from it would help. I thought the same when I left him. I lost 20 pounds in two weeks and I was happy about it because it was defeaning glee, the way people finally looked at me. And when I was counting the ways I was alone, the noise grew louder. It flowered.
I broke in May. I kissed three different boys in the same day and I remember going home and promising myself it’d be okay if I decided to stop living because if one plant that grew beside me could do so, beautifully and quickly, and I took longer, while it leaned on me without ever touching my roots underground, than there was not reason I had to be here. It didn't need me. There wouldn’t be anyone around to see me flower. Humans only live to what, seventy? I didn’t want to see twenty. I stopped growing. I chased ***** with whiskey to see which one was the first to hit me. Which one gave me a worse hangover so I finally had an excuse to spend beautiful July days rotting in bed? I remember the first time I took a shot of whiskey and it was ******* gross but I'd already adjusted to that fuzzy, churning pain in my stomach so I kept drinking. I drank a whole bottle. I was 19. The first time I tried ***** was at a party after you told me I'd turned into a "real ****." I remember that perfectly but the rest of the night is blurry and now I drink to get the fuzzy feeling back the way I had it for a day in May and thought I'd fallen in love again. I never understood why I knew what it felt like to feel alive but chose to sit and brew inside a room that smelled too much like the Walmart perfume I wore every day the first year I fell in love. I still get choked up. It’s a weird feeling, to not love someone anymore and to forget, day to day that you ever did. But to remember how it felt to hear your heart beating inside your chest before your very first kiss, and how it felt like papercuts when you had your last. I disassociate when I get scared so I start putting “you” when “I” should be there. That’s something to note. I know how to let go but not how to take responsibility for my actions, ones crafted by loneliness, or bitterness. I counted this year in let-downs. How quickly it went by, too. Would you believe that? In just three months I will be able to say that I spent every day of my life, 365, thinking about you. I almost don’t want to publish this, because I forget that there is more to me than the way I felt in 2016. If anyone cares, there’s more to me than what I just stained the page with, right up there. I laughed this year too, with new faces. I drank in new places and got new bruises on body parts I hadn’t seen in years for fear of ridicule. They’re black and blue but they’re beautiful. I spit words out sometimes and they don’t always make sense nor do they make a perfect sequence but that’s another thing I’ve learned this year. It’s hard to measure in numbers, what do I count when I’ve been out of order for the whole thing? Which parts do I mention when I start remembering the year that cut me open, and the year I bled for all the world to see because I needed validation, of any kind, I needed attention, from all eyes, for once because I could. How do I measure the year that I lost 170 pounds of freckles and lies and gained 40 in beer and candy? Or the year I finally made it to 32 months self harm free but that I talked about killing myself every day in between? How do I measure a year when I never feel like I’m flowering?