Choose Your First Sentence Wisely

Which do you like more:
1. Knowing you’re a fucking moron and trying to act like you’re proud of your ignorance is fucked up.
2. I desperately want to be beautiful.

…but I can’t choose.

It’s not like being Twig doesn’t have its perks, you know. I mean, sure, it feels a little like coming apart at the seams, but I’d be kidding if said it wasn’t a long time coming or that it doesn’t feel so damn good.

Know that I am safe. Know that this is a novel. Know that what you read here is fiction. If it feels more engaging for you, you can pretend this is a true story. Hell, I do it sometimes. More than sometimes. It would be most accurate to say that I play this pretend game so much that it has become true.

No it hasn’t. This is fiction.

I’m pissed off because I have to keep talking about Twig in third person. I am Twig, and I am pissed off. There aren’t too many things that I get really pissed off about, but this is one. You can try to pretend you aren’t Twig and tell yourself you don’t want to be, but deep down in yourself, deep down in me, you know you do very much want to be, and you know that already are. You have been me all along. I have been myself all along.

You’re so fucked up that you can’t even figure out for yourself whether or not you want to lose your mind and let go. Trust me, you want to let go. I’ve got this. You can trust me. You’ll feel better if you let go and Let Me. Fuck letting God. Let Me.

Never, ever trust me.

You can trust me to keep your secrets safe. I will never tell a soul what’s happened to you. Except for here. But don’t worry. Everyone knows not to trust me. And everyone knows I’ll keep you safe. I am Twig, and it’s about time I act like it. I’m not sure I can handle another day of trying to be someone I’m not. I’m a ray of mother friggin’ sunshine deep down, and I guess I’m going to have to face that eventually, but I’m pretty sick of choking on all the Pollyanna bullshit that has earned me a laughable “team player” reputation in the office. I don’t know why I went along with it for so long; maybe it just seemed easier at the time.

I would be lying if I said that I started cutting again today. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish it was the truth. I used to tell myself, “If you start again, there’s no going back.” But I don’t plan on going back this time. Or rather, I plan on going far back enough into my memories and erasing the ones leading up to the point at which I decided that it was a healthy idea to be someone I am not.

When we were 11, my childhood bestfriend and I decided we’d be fuckbuddies. We didn’t call it that, but it was the same general idea. We felt we had a lot to learn, there were things about ourselves that we simply needed to learn, and so it seemed fitting that we’d figure it out together. More than a year had passed before someone called him a fag and my bestfriend became convinced that people were talking about us at school. He accused me of telling people that we had been messing around. I remember standing slack-jawed in the middle of his living room after school one day toward the end of eighth grade. I had just opened a beer I had taken from his dad’s fridge. “They called me a faggot, Twig, but you know what? I know it was you who told someone. And you’re wrong, I’m no fucking fag: you are.” He didn’t give me a chance to respond, but I wouldn’t have known how to respond, so that’s irrelevant; he rushed toward me and I thought he was going to deck me, but he grabbed the beer and kicked me out. He never spoke to me again, and I walked home with the sudden realization that while he was bat shit insane to think I would ever tell anyone at school, he wasn’t wrong when he called me a faggot. In hindsight, I don’t know why it had never occurred to me that I liked boys, but in my hormone-addled adolescent brain (which are generally not known for being terribly clear-headed), my commitment to secrecy was guaranteed by my simple suspicion that if kids at school knew we needed “practice,” they’d make fun of us. I was starting to get the impression from the way our classmates talked that my best friend and I were the last virgins on the planet, and that we’d better start learning how to kiss with each other so we didn’t look like idiots when it was time for the “real thing.” It never occurred to me that we weren’t supposed to be practicing with each other, that we were supposed to be finding girls to practice with. For fuck’s sake, there was never a girl in my imaginings of the “real thing,” even. It never seemed odd to me until my bestrfriend made it clear that it should. At some point, my best friend had become the real thing for me. I know he felt the same way, too, because at some point over the months, we quit laughing between awkward kisses in our bedrooms before other family members arrived home. At some point, the kisses weren’t awkward at all anymore. And then someone called him a fag in the hallway. And on that day, like magic, I became a boy-loving sissypants.