Martyr

Chapter 8

Alice

i wake up to a text from parker. he hasn't texted me since... sunday? it's wednesday.

"are you busy tmrw?" he asks. there's a certain chemistry to the way he types. he always seems to shorten words longer than four letters, and they're always short sentences. all guys text like this, i think. that's what grace tells me, and grace is a whore, but i don't even text anyone of the male species except my dad. even then, never.

"ofc im not, why?" i reply.

"i want to hang out." oh parker, poor parker.

"okay. i'll meet you at your house then."

"kk. see u ltr" sometimes his abbreviations don't even make sense. ltr. el-tee-arr. latrine? latter? later? why does he do this? maybe it's the brain damage.

my life has gotten a lot more eventful in the past week and i am not sure how i feel about it. for once, i should tell parker that i'm the one who hit him, but i shouldn't. knowing parker, he'd freak out. he's that type of guy, to freak out, but keep things on the inside. hell, i've always known that. maybe i shouldn't tell him.

grace drives me to school and we do the same usual, boring things. i hate, hate, hate, hate it. i have better things to do than to realize i'm a good-for-nothing waste of space. "'i'm inadequate, what can you do?'"

my first period is one of the worst: math. actually, math is black and white, hard to understand, and usually there's only one right way to do it. math is kind of like life. no one likes it, but we still get through it just because we have to. other people, like me, fail at it because we know math is a metaphor for life. we solve all these problems, but it's endless. it is never, ever over, until you die. it's an upsetting concept, but we must deal with this, or the consequences will be unbearable.

however, i've been accepting over the consequences of not caring about math - life - and they're not too bad. inadequacy is a horrid place to be, but it's comforting because no one really cares about things you do. you never have to let someone down if you're not enough for anyone. you have no one to let down, but you always let down yourself.

after my psychologically damaging session of math was the even worse session of biology. ap biology because i don't like chemistry. biology is the study of living organisms, but are we really living? are we worth studying? is anything? life is apparently "the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death," but that just proves none of us are living. there is no capacity for growth for a lot of us because there is no desire for change, we stick to what is comfortable. if we stick to what is comfortable, which is mostly ourselves, then we cannot meet people who we will reproduce with. the human race is ultimately fucked. i'm not functional, and no one is. don't get me started on continual change before death. it's an existential crisis all over again whenever i go into biology.

the only class i actually like is third period, and i'm not sure why i took it, but it's photography. that's always psychologically damaging because we're taking moments we will never be able to be in again, and we're trying to capture our feelings in that. artistic classes like that scare me. it's not black and white, and there are a lot of ways to go through it in. it is a spectrum of colors and we never have enough time to see all of them. photography proves that life is not going to last forever. maybe the person who invented cameras just wanted a little more time.

god. the next class is history. now, this is one of the worst. in this, we're not even living our own lives, we're heading back in time before we ever existed. we try analyzing everything and finding the human value in wars, in revolts, in the overthrown dictators. are we ever going to matter? is someone going to change the fate of the country, the world, the universe? am i going to do that? what am i going to do with my life? nothing, right? not even the slightest fraction of me will be mentioned in a giant textbook. i will not matter in a few hundred years, i will just be in my grave, or my ashes will be spread. i've always wanted to be smoked, so my ashes will be put into a joint or cigarette and that will be it. i will be less than thin air in a few decades.