My Secret Family

Sue Decides

Sue

40 kg and falling

I had to wear gloves to school because I was so cold all the time, even the lightest autumn breeze blew straight through the trees of my bones. My nerves had become overly sensitive, even when people touched me it hurt. I didn't like to go out because I didn't like the sun, or the rain, or being touched by people, or dogs, or cats, didn't like the way the wind kept blowing my hair in my mouth or the way the sun blinded me at sunset. I didn't understand people's fascination with the outdoors, it was just a big, dirty, uncomfortable space filled with bugs and morons.

My room was the best place, it was just right, not too warm and not too cold. I could watch TV and read and text this one guy I knew. Just some random guy, not someone important.

At least, that was the perfect life I had imagined for myself, I had this strange ideal of it lasting forever, just living in my room with my mom looking after me until I got old and died.

But this guy, this big, manly guy, broke up with me. He didn't even tell me or even message me, he just unfriended me. He changed his relationship status from 'it's complicated' to 'single' and left the status public, talking shit about me when people commented. I knew because my other profile, the one he thought was a random college chick with big ol' tits, was still there, lurking, lost among the long list of his female friends.

That lying, cheating asshole didn't even have the decency to break it off properly. I found out only when I searched for his name to chat and it simply didn't come up. When I messaged him there was no reply. Two days later he finally replied after hours of me trying to get hold of him.

YOUR NT MYTYP ITS OVR SORRY, he texted.

You can tell what someone thinks of you by the amount of vowels and commas they use in a text. I wanted to reply, 'your tarded', but irony would be completely lost on his tarded brain.

I didn't feel well, and I thought, if I die today the world will not be affected one iota. There would just be one fewer allergy-ridden loner to clog up the drains.

If I was alive or dead the world would continue worlding, people would continue peopling, sounds would continue sounding. Did it really matter if I waited years, long enough for my skin to get wrinkled and battered like a catcher's mitt, used too many times for the same thing by the same people? Was it so amazing to wait and see if life gave me her final 'fuck you' of cancer or a heart-attack or diabetes or some other vicious trick that nature used to kill us all? Nature, that murderous, dirty bitch.

I used to sit on the floor outside my dorm room at college, just listening to the people talking inside their rooms, feeling the vibration of their laughter against my back, feeling them have fun without me. If I was inside the room it always brought people down and so they ignored me, left me to a corner where I could be out of their way and I was glad to be out of it, but some people always felt they had to include me somehow, making half-smiled comments asking my opinion and then turning their head as soon as I started to answer, covering it with a sip from a beer or a puff of a joint. I didn't really want to get drunk and joke around with them, but I liked to watch them, they were interesting. I wished they could just leave me alone to watch.

I had a ten o'clock therapy session with Doctor Ray. Doctor Ray was old and gray, he wore a brown suit and a tie with little fishes woven in blue, he wore thin framed glasses from the 80s, and old brown leather shoes, made back when leather was made from leather and not fake cardboard leather. He asked me about the relationships I had with people I didn't know, how, they ended, and I was surprised to think of those two-second interactions as relationships.