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I want this non-job so badly I can feel my throat closing up.
Her face crumples chin-first, as it always does when a big cry is coming.
“Don’t make this about you,” my mother says. “Not everything’s about you.” “I know,” I say, but she’s correct in that this is a basic fact of which I must regularly be reminded.
I feel like I’m trying so hard, and the universe keeps being, like: Why would you ever try anything?”
I always thought I wanted smart friends, but after being around Poppy’s smart friends, I’m reminded of why I don’t have any.
Poppy hates herself and I’ve made her hate herself more.
All those times I wouldn’t laugh at a joke Poppy told, just to make her feel lonely.
My mother again, her voice through my teeth.
“This is going to be good for you, too. Because you’re a wreck with no friends, like me, and you need a soft, cute thing to look at to keep yourself from, like, looking too deeply into your own emptiness.”
They say dogs are like their owners, or owners are like their dogs—Poppy and Amy both want to get crushed to death.
Something in me’s griping: it’s not enough.
Having a sister is looking in a cheap mirror: what’s there is you, but unfamiliar and ugly for it.
I google a writer I hate. Next I google endoscopic brow lift. Next I google some direct-to-consumer shelving. Next I google staph from food. Next I google pet cemetery.
“You have so much patience for all the wrong things,” Poppy says.
Poppy always does this; she assumes that because some idea or memory or piece of knowledge is hers, it’s mine, too.
“You don’t have ADHD, Poppy. You already have enough things wrong with you.”
I try to tell myself over and over that sometimes, in life, there’ll just be a little blood.
We’re told that even if other people—other writers—are talking about the things we’re talking about or thinking about the things we’re thinking about or writing about the things we’re writing about, we shouldn’t be intimidated. No one but us can write our version of the world.
I don’t feel happy with my alone time. I don’t feel like myself. I don’t even feel there’s a self to return to.
I can see her mourning the end of the whole night she’d envisioned: she’d ask me if I wanted to grab a drink or a coffee sometime during the week, to talk about the lecture, because she’s new to the city, because her program sucks, because she’s just been through a breakup, because things were supposed to be one way and they’re another, because she has a shelf of Moleskines waiting to be filled the way she’s seen other, better writers on Instagram and Twitter post pictures of their shelves of Moleskines full up with their brilliance, because she can’t keep going to these kinds of things and
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I just wanted an excuse to feel like the way I looked at the Internet was different than the way everyone else looked at the Internet; like the way I wasted my time was special.
I’ll never blossom into the woman of ideas I like to imagine myself as late at night. It’s not that art is dead. It’s just that I’m not going to be one of the ones who makes it.
She can’t take care of an animal. She can’t take care of herself.
“Sorry. Everything’s really okay,” I say, less sure that it is than I was a few moments ago.
All I ever want for my birthday is for the day to just go by.
“I’m joking,” Poppy says, forgetting it’s upsetting to joke about drinking bleach after trying to kill yourself.
“It’s just, like—any step I take to change or improve myself or my life or give myself things to be responsible for, she’s basically like, You’re never going to be able to be responsible for it because you’re a fuckup and I hate you.”
Nothing gets me going like when a certain kind of person pretends to care about ableism.
I think you just want to come up with something to be scared of.
“I feel like whatever—whatever engine inside me, whatever engine is inside every human that lets us keep going, hoping we’re gonna, you know, maybe experience one nice moment each day, get a raise, eat some candy, it takes so much for me to feel that?
She stares out at the cemetery. It’s like she’s trying to make her face extra wistful. I start laughing. She looks at me, furious.
“You, like, transcribe conversations you overhear in public, and you screenshot every text you get so you can make fun of it later, and you get mad about hypothetical situations that don’t exist, and you find an enemy everywhere you go, and you’re always on your phone, you don’t even fucking recycle, I can’t take it anymore.”
“There are no bad drivers,” says our father, “just bad passengers.” We don’t say anything. “That’s a metaphor,” he continues. “For life.”
“Ruth Ginsburg’s in the hospital again,” she says, as if she and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are close.
I’m very easily Stockholmed by any promises of money and comfort.
“Oh, honey,” my father says, “I thought rotisserie was one of your safe foods.”
Poppy and I sit on her bed, getting ready for company to come over the only way we know how: by hate-stalking each person due through our doors.
Poppy says she will; she’s gonna go try to kill herself again. “Again?” three people say.
Last December I saw a post somewhere about how stretching for just two minutes a day would change your life. But now a whole year’s gone by and I haven’t stretched two minutes a day and I haven’t changed my life.
“Every problem you have is the biggest thing in the fucking world, and then I have one problem, and you tell me to be like: whatever.”
A pigeon is flinging itself over and over against the mesh netting that hangs from the scaffolding, flying higher and higher, desperate for a place to rest.
She often cringes about how she hates to be perceived, borrowing the obnoxious linguistic tic of the masses.
“We can trade responsibility, you know,” Poppy says, “like, over time, who gets the thoughtful gift and who gets the not thoughtful gift. We have our whole lives. We don’t have to always be perfect. God, stop crying.”
“I can’t build my whole life around my sister,” I say finally. As soon as I do, I wonder why I can’t.
