the future is a recent concept to me.

i spend my entire life looking backwards, to worlds and people that left me behind long before i was born.
reaching into water i can't see the bottom of, down on my knees in the mud, just close enough to the edge to sweat.
i thought of futures sometimes, occasionally, sleek and chrome with wires peeking through each rusted corner.
but they were never futures i was a part of. always for a generation whose parents were yet to exist, a century i couldn't even count to.

i didn't imagine my own adulthood at all until a week before my 18th birthday.

when i was a child it never crossed my mind. i didn't realize yet that youth was a state that all except the tragic move beyond.

i pried a disposable razor apart with nail clippers when i was twelve, and pulled it through my skin.
once the anger drained itself dry i stared at the scratches, the edges, the angles between them,
as if i was investigating a cave painting, making guess after empty guess at meaning and motivation and reason.
until i remembered that skin would scar.

and suddenly every year of an average life hit at once, and i panicked.
it was long, unbearably long. minutes stretched into days and a decade sounded unending.
so i resigned myself to simply
                                  
                       ­                                         not make it.


and i told myself that, often, for years.
i would set a date, tidy my room, make sure i had all my arguments settled.
then i would cry, and fail, and come up with an excuse to postpone it a few months.

i tried twice, on the same day, four years apart.
i even tried to go to school the morning after each overdose, but i never made it past midday.
i ran off the morning bus the first time, puked and cried and stared at strangers who walked past thirteen year old me, unflinching, until i was done.
i was half dragged, half carried, half conscious to my classes, until i got sent home. but i said i was tired, and nobody asked questions.

when i was seventeen i made it to the alleyway by the school gate before vomiting, eyes watering from the force and the fear.
a man in a van bought me water and offered to drive me to hospital. i wondered what he was doing four years ago.
but the hospital told my parents, and gave me a counsellor, and a month into therapy she asked me why i had nearly thrown away an entire future.

i couldn't answer her. i cried, and we were silent, and she changed the topic.
what could i tell her? that the future always cut off a few vague months ahead whenever i tried to look at it? that i had never even expected myself to get this far? that my entire life has felt like borrowed time? no, then she would only ask more. and i just wanted to leave.

so i left, and somewhere along the way i stopped going back, stopped answering her calls, her letters, her voice asking my mother if i was still alive.
it was a week before my 18th birthday when i realised i would actually live to see it.

but i've made it through a whole year of university so far, despite never thinking i would leave school. it's been one year and four months of winging it now.
time still passes when you aren't looking,
and somehow i made it this far.

i've accepted the rest of my life, however long it is. i hope as much as i fear. i'm tired, mostly. i'm angry at myself for wasting so much time. but there's nothing i can do about that now, i just have to move forward.

i wonder sometimes, often, if i will ever get to a point where i will be okay forever. where i can take the sad little piece of myself that i carry each day out of my pocket, put her down, and walk away.
i don't think i will, but i'm trying to make my peace with that.