Humanly Displeasing

September

My mother decided that moving closer to her parents might give me a chance to make friends, which has always been a bit of a struggle for me, but I've also never really minded. Her parents live in a small ass town in Wisconsin. Ashwood, population: 1,827. There'll be like sixteen kids at my school, a chance to get nice and close and personal. I don't really do personal. But according to Holly, personal is good. So here we are, tomorrow is the first day of my senior year of high school. A part of me still prefers pretending that my sophomore year didn't exist, kind of like me. Non-existent. I'm skipping right into my senior year, because I had decided early on that I wanted to spend as small an amount of time in high school as possible. I'd like to a least pretend that something about me isn't average. I don't have a thing for make believe or anything, in fact, fairy tales can go run into a dangerous alley. They just find ways to celebrate and encourage mediocre perceptions of beauty, life, happiness. Anything. They are lies. Maybe that's why Danny hated them too.

Danny was my brother. He died at the end of last year. No, he didn't die. He killed himself. There's a difference. He gave up on life, life didn't give up on him. My parents found him on his bed. He had cleaned his room, packed up everything he cared about most and put my name on the box, and he was all dolled up in his Sunday Best. What an occasion, right? My parents wouldn't let me in the room, no matter how much I fought. Up until that point, I had never heard my dad yell so loud. The next time I got to see any remnant of Danny was at his funeral, which took place two weeks before school ended last year. I didn't talk to my parents again until they said we were moving. And that only gave me another reason to be angry at them.

So then they started making me see Holly. She calls herself a therapist, but I think she's full of it, despite her PhD hanging obnoxiously on her shit-brown wall. I see her twice a week, and her first question is always, "What's your favorite color?", then she'll make me take out my phone and find a picture of that exact color on google and show it to her, then she writes in her 3 subject college ruled notebook. Do you want to know what my favorite color is this week? White. Bleak, bland, boring white. But, it's also white every other week. So, I'll turn on my phone, type "color white" into google images, and show her the first image that pops up. The same one, every week. But somehow, magically she always has something to write, as if it's surprising.