We Could Be Rats

by Emily R. Austin

I remember reading that “To be, or not to be” speech, and thinking, What the fuck does this mean?

I wanted to try on being a different person.

I also thought it was unlikely for someone to like me if I were just myself. She typed my name as “Astrid” in her phone, and we started texting.

Pigs are adorable. If anything, it’s a compliment. If I walked around town and everyone called me a pig, I’d think, This is amazing.

I found it easier to relate to people when we could be dinosaurs. I found it harder to click with others as I got older.

When I’m not myself and people reject me, or I don’t fit in, I don’t have to take it personally. They weren’t really rejecting me.

Being my real self makes me more vulnerable. When I operate in life as if I’m playing a game, losing feels less significant. I can just start over. Play again.

It’s hard for me to understand when a lie is better than the truth.

I would prefer to be told to never lie, rather than be told I should lie sometimes. I think when rules are gray, we think about them too much.

It’s because she developed an opioid addiction.

I find it difficult to accept that my life isn’t a game, and everything is real and permanent.

Can I just be honest with you now? I’m tired of pretending. I don’t want to play games.

She was annoyed by and disappointed in me, and I felt abandoned by her.

I always wanted to be something I couldn’t be.

I also thought it might be less upsetting to accept I died of a physical ailment than it would be to stomach that something was wrong with me mentally.

She didn’t grasp that someone could genuinely experience the world differently than her.

I don’t relate to big, inspirational songs about overcoming obstacles, or being a hero. Bright songs that reflect some happy party life sound totally alien to me. I won’t ever relate to songs about feeling huge, crushing love. I’m a lesbian in a small town. I can’t meet anyone new. I don’t have enough life in me to resonate with tragic ballads about revenge or breakups. I can’t listen to songs about places I’ll never go to. I don’t connect with any of them.

I comprehended, finally, that life doesn’t work the way I thought it would, and that I had no control over that.

Inaction is an action. I realized that when I didn’t submit my Hamlet paper. When I didn’t stop Greta from making bad choices. Not doing something is doing something.

Do you think the reason most people with bad lives don’t kill themselves is just because they’re afraid of dying? Is that really it? I think dying is less scary than growing up. I’d rather die than grow up to be a shitty person.

I can’t imagine anything that would devastate me more than Sigrid dying. This is the worst thing that could ever happen to me. It’s like someone ran me over. Did someone run me over? I feel crushed.

I feel eviscerated.

I wouldn’t be shocked to learn there is a reality where I died to spare a portly little forest creature.

One thing I really wrestled with was feeling like there was less love in the world for me. When she died, I felt a shift in the universe. It was more than her absence. I felt the cosmic void where her love for me used to be, like an empty stomach after puking. On top of feeling shattered by her absence, I felt less important with her gone, and also guilty for feeling that way. I wasn’t just mourning her life. I was mourning her love for me.

“Infelicitous”

Defn

Sometimes it’s kinder to let people believe they are helping you even when they aren’t.

“I’m just saying there is a working class and there’s a ruling class. The only way to overcome today’s problems is to confront the divide between those classes, and it’ll have to be violent.”

“It sounds like a lot of people want to help you.”

Even when she and I were fighting, or hadn’t spoken in months, there has never been a time when I would hesitate to bury a body for her.

“I wish we were rats”

we would all be rats at a fair. We would all live well, sampling every possible ounce of happiness. We would roll around in garbage and suck on sour keys.

She would say my political correctness was toxic; I was selfish, and virtue signaling. I would end up getting heated and shouting that I would rather signal virtue than signal hate,

When it was my turn, some misguided demon possessed me to say I was thankful for the resilience of Indigenous people. Everyone made faces at me as if I had said something batshit. Billy cracked some joke about me being a social justice warrior,

The foundations of all my beliefs were built on something false. If I accepted that people could be bad, that would mean I could be.

I think being a teenager is about hiding all your quirks and contorting yourself to fit in and impress people, and being an adult is about re-finding who you were when you were eight years old.

I wrote this while listening to the songs “Devil Town” by Daniel Johnston, “Afraid of Heights” by boygenius, Noah Kahan’s Stick Season album, and “Another Sun” by Tracy Chapman.