Be My Friend

by Mique Watson

cold. I’ve tried telling her things, but she never … listens. And maybe it’s unfair to say that. She certainly hears me, but I don’t feel like she seeks to understand where I am coming from.

Whenever I tell her about something I struggle with, she takes my words and twists them into a narrative of her own making, one she uses to justify making it all my fault.

I wondered for a bit why such a dark book would appeal to someone who is so sad like you. And it dawned on me: modern medicine’s apprehensions at understanding mental illness have fallen short.

Tell me, do you think you have walls built up around yourself, guarding your inner world from everything around you?

leave. Do you ever feel like the only reason people are ever nice to you is because they’re trying to be polite? Like, in society, we’ve mostly been raised with this set of ground rules of personal behavior that people feel obligated to follow to prove to society and themselves that they’re decent human beings? Take for example, if I was–god forbid—in a car accident and colleagues came to visit me in the hospital … What are the chances that they actually care, you know? I feel like they don’t. I feel like they’ve just shown up because they’re trying to be polite.

When I was in the relationship with this girl—let’s call her [REDACTED]—it was like I was being performative. Like I was playing a part: the boyfriend I was under the impression she wanted. I play this same part in life.

In reality, I feel like an alien living amongst men, trying to copy their emotions … trying to study the proper ways of reacting to things while maintaining the correct inflection of my voice … the lilting baritone that conveys the proper emotion in any given situation. Do you know what I mean?

Allow me to rephrase my question: do you feel different? Like you’re adopted or something similar? Like they’re a puzzle and you’re that one piece that just can’t manage to fit no matter how hard you try?

damaged person who took a lot of his frustrations out on me. I hate to say that because we’re trained to love our parents and see them as superheroes from a young age, but I just can’t reconcile what and who he was.

I don’t relate to the people who state platitudes like “Forgiveness is about you.” I’m more interested in healing whatever damage was done to me. I hope that resonates with you.

What do you make about your father’s abuse? I ask this because the father is a very significant figure in one’s life, as an archetype. If we’re abused and he’s not creating safety, then damage is inevitable.

don’t know. I can’t really remember most of my childhood. There are just giant black voids when I try to think back to all that.

I’m not going to deny it. I think that I, like everyone, am capable of good and evil. I think it’s in all of us. But I don’t know what makes a person choose to either heal it or spread it.

There’s a sick satisfaction you get when you make everyone else feel as hurt as you do and justify it with some gaslighting and moral superiority. Everyone’s a narcissist these days. Everyone wants to be seen as the good guy even at the expense of other people.

Everyone says they’re the good guys even though they adhere to the Machiavellian concept that the ends justify the means.

Red knew that, even if he was just a thing to them, they would never leave him alone. Red would never be a picture on the wall, he would never be a chair that no one took a second glance at, he would simply be. And to be was to be used by them at their behest.

You know what I think? I think you’re so used to being abandoned that when someone comes into your life, you try to over-compensate so they don’t leave you behind because you’re anticipating they will inevitably leave you. You try on all these different personalities to see what works for a specific person, only to be unable to be who you really are, because revealing who you are will inevitably render you an outcast. Does this sound accurate?

You know how people are noisy even when they’re being quiet? My brain just refuses to switch off! It’s like music keeps playing and playing and I don’t know how to fucking shut it down. All the time, my thoughts just run 24/7 and I can’t escape them.

I’ve been so lonely for so long, and it just hurts walking out of the door during the day and seeing all these happy-looking people who I cannot relate to. I just want to scream. I want to douse myself in gasoline and light myself on fire just to ruin their day, just to traumatize them, just to make all the normal people see what I have seen. It hurts so much. I try to make friends with people, but they just treat me like I am a last resort.

Other than that, I’ve got a pretty loveless existence. My mom doesn’t pay any attention to me, my dad is dead, and my brother hates me for having to depend on him when I was younger and stealing his youth from him.

It was open and welcoming, lit with the amber hues of golden hour. Then the sun set and lit up the sky with stars that looked like spilt rice. I will admit that, at that moment, I felt a happy presence. Like nothing else mattered. I lay down and looked up the stars. I couldn’t explain it, but it was like pure bliss. And then an ad started playing.

The YouTube video was done, and some dumb fucking ad ruined it all and brought me back to real life. Obviously, it had to come to an end.

I lay down once again, hating myself for my inability to just shut down . Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down.

Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. Shut down. FUCK, WHY CAN’T I JUST FUCKING SLEEP!!!!!!!!!

Fuck this day. Scratch that: fuck this entire existence. My life is sad, desolate, and pointless. There’s no point in trying to salvage any of this shit. I. Am. Done. So fucking done! Why can’t anything be fair for once? Why does it seem like some people are entitled to more happiness than others? I know I need to try focusing on gratitude, but what the fucking hell do I have to be grateful for? Yes, I have things keeping me alive, but it’s like I’m on life support and being forced to endure an existence that is nothing but suffering.

What I do wish I could get is a gun. I wanna use it on this poor son of a BITCH I know named Jacob. If only I wasn’t too much of a pussy.

Day 45 I did it. Last night, after that long-ass rambling I wrote, I broke into my mom’s booze stash. I know this is the one thing I swore I’d never do, but I couldn’t help myself. I just had to numb myself to all the shit going on in my head. Imagining the happy place doesn’t work for me anymore because thinking happy thoughts just pisses me off. I can’t relate to that shit!

I feel like I’m driving on an endless road, my GPS has died, and I’m lost and don’t know where to go. Whenever I think I’m making progress, whenever I start seeing something familiar, I make a wrong turn and the road just repeats itself over and over again.

be a lot nicer. I’ll be gentle. I can’t help but get angry whenever I see that a couple at school has broken up. Is there anything worth ruining love for? I get so depressed when I see people take that love for granted and throw it all away. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to treasure it forever.

was thinking about why we go to school. I think it’s so society has a way to turn people into little cogs in a factory. That’s why we sit on a desk in organized rows and wait for bells in a ploy to get us ready for the real world. But what do they actually teach us? All they do is teach us to come up with the square root of a triangle.

Am I even human? Am I part of the same species as these aliens? Or maybe I am the alien? I want this place; I want to kill whoever I deem unfit for anything at

Sometimes I think about how ending my life would make my mom’s life easier.

have very sad thoughts all day and all night. What is happening to me? I can’t control these thoughts. I can’t quiet my mind, even for just a few moments. I’m so tired. I’m so desperate for rest.

He then taught me I had to work my way through my greatest fears. I couldn’t identify what that was. As I reflect now, I think about the typical things people fear. They say they fear the death of a loved one or the passage of time. I don’t really get much fear from any of those things because I feel like I’ve just given up on life.

That my emotions were nothing more than brain chemistry. Love, happiness, anxiety, disgust, fear … all of it was brain chemistry.

My nerves were meant to protect me from myself.

I guess a part of me regrets it because he was my dad and shit, but he had to die for me to live.