𝐆𝐑𝐈𝐌 & 𝐃𝐀𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐆! | harry styles

𝐗𝐈

DEAR Self,

Your mother's favorite story to tell about your birth was the one where she asked the nurses to give you away, or lose you on purpose. To switch you at the very least.

She wanted a prettier baby, a quieter baby. One not so skinny. Or loud.

Or real.

You were an oops. That kind of oops you don't even realize happened until it's too late, and suddenly there's a human inside of you. The kind of slip that's really just a split second, and suddenly you're growing hair and teeth and brain cells and in ten months or so, you'll be responsible for keeping it alive. Sadie was another oops, but by the time she came along, the deal had already been broken. There was more fighting than friendly family dinners. Your mother had started sleeping down the hallway in the impending nursery long before the new baby arrived. Your dad spent more time hunting than home, more time fishing than being a father. You spent most of your time under the back porch with the dirt and the worms building castles out of the soft dark dirt.

That was your first really bad idea because you got some sort of weird rash on your knees that spread down your legs, and by the time you worked up the courage to tell anyone about it, you looked like you'd stood in a bonfire for a few seconds too long. It took almost six months of antibiotics and some green smelly salve to clear it all up.

A few months later, you tried to become a mermaid and ended up flooding the upstairs bathroom, which in turn flooded the downstairs living room and short circuited the fancy flat screen television your dad had just bought himself to watch baseball on. The house got new carpet, new drywall, new curtains, your dad got another new tv. You got grounded for almost a month.

The next year, you played dress-up with the cat and accidentally strangled it when it tore out of the house wearing a tiny pink doll dress printed with yellow flowers and trimmed with a lacy collar that got caught up in a barbed wire fence. You set your tree house on fire a week later trying to hold a funeral for the cat, toppling one of the candles you stole from the pantry, the ones that were supposed to be saved for the nights when the northwest storms blew through and knocked out the power. It took three days for anyone to actually notice the charred remains in the old sycamore out back, but when they did, your parents grounded you. Again. This time for two months.

In seventh grade, you decided to drive to Port Angeles at midnight because you'd eaten the last of your dad's special ice cream, and he'd be so mad when he got home from the double he was pulling down at the station that fear got you behind the wheel of the old station wagon. You sat on a pillow to see over the dash and drove halfway there with the parking brake on before you figured out how to disengage it. You spent every last dime of your allowance and even needed to scrounge the car for a few quarters to make up the difference. You got pulled over for speeding on the way back. By him. Grounded. Three months.

You wore black lipstick to school and never lived it down. You tried out for the cheerleading team and never lived it down. You won an art contest with a drawing of a sad girl in a puddle of blood and never lived it down. Most of your high school career was one big long first-hand account of the acute kind of humiliation that only teenagers can inflict on other teenagers. Gitmo doesn't have shit on high school. Waterboarding, isolation, all that shit was small potatoes compared to the bathroom interrogations, and the locker room beatings, and the hallway gauntlets. Problem was, most of it was your own fault. You could have flown under the radar, could have just slunk through the building and not made eye contact and sat in the back with your head in your books and then gotten the fuck out of there with a little bit of your integrity intact but, for some reason, you couldn't seem to do that. It's like you invited it, the lipstick and the tryouts and the bloody artwork.