“Maybe I’m more well-rounded than you.”
I let the sting of that ravish my nerves and deep in my head, I heard someone say, “Ignorance is bliss.” I thought about the lies people tell themselves to drive away the smoke in their hearts; about how people shrink the world to the radius around their own feet so they do not feel so small; about how they call themselves kings and queens when they are just flotsam orbiting existential masses of conformity and oblivion; about how horrifying their android speculations are when they are simply regurgitation machines nothingness; about how it could be so much easier if the greatest thing I worried about would be what my lie to my parents would be to sneak out of the house and not whether or not my soul will be eternally damned for all the scars I carved in my lungs out of an effort to fix myself. The blood in my temples probed past my tongue and I could taste the bitterness in my mouth; I could taste all the reasons for why I hated people and why I hated myself too.
I swallowed the tornado that was wracking my rib cage and I forced a smile.
“Maybe. Maybe you are.”