We Could Be Rats

by Emily R. Austin

I just think you should try to collect days like that. Do whatever will turn you into a rat ball, so to speak.

When you’re a kid, you assume you’re just getting a taste for all the memorable experiences life has in store for you, but the truth is, most people don’t spend countless nights running through the streets with their friends. They spend a handful of nights doing that if they’re lucky.

Maybe I’m supposed to come up with some palatable lie as to why I’m waiting to pull the trigger.

I was never fully in tune with how the things I said and did would be received by others.

I wasn’t the type of kid who wanted to be a teenager. I wanted to be a kid.

I wanted to migrate, like animals do, to an environment better suited to my nature.

I didn’t like playing with her. I didn’t want to hold my breath, feel scared, or pretend Margit was grown enough to be a mother.

I’m not sure why we tell kids everyone’s so unique. We aren’t really. I get wanting to make kids feel special, but most people are more of the same. It might be easier to grow up if kids weren’t sold this tall tale that we’re all exceptional. It might make it less jarring to become an adult if we knew the truth the whole time. We’re mostly ordinary.

I wasn’t a difficult person around other people. In fact, I don’t think anyone outside of our family would describe me as exhausting or dramatic. I think you might have a warped perception of me. People saw me differently than you saw me. I saw myself differently than you saw me.

I think you thought of me as someone who didn’t have it together. I think I was our family’s scapegoat, or something. I was a distraction from the real underlying issues in our dynamic.

I googled the cost of caskets, and it’s criminal. Please bury me in a garbage bag.

I threw pie at Mom because I lost control of myself. When I was in that house, it was like I reverted back to being a kid. I felt immature, under attack, and crazy.

That’s why I didn’t go there often. Every slight, everything that offended me, hit like a major blow. I was carrying a bag of grievances. I knew that even the slightest addition could break me.

The problem is, I think one of the benefits of growing up with a sibling is having a witness. It’s nice to have someone to cross-reference your childhood with.

You always said you were introverted, but I don’t know. You might just get tired carrying the mental load required to monitor everyone around you.

My approach to our parents’ tempers was to disengage, while yours was to dial in excessively.

If our parents were a TV show, I was in the next room, chasing a butterfly, tuning out. You were pressed up against the screen, your hair static, your eyes wide and glued to the glass.

I have a bunch of messages on my voicemail that he accidentally left by not hanging up fast enough. In one of them, I can hear him muttering to himself, unaware he’s recording. “I hope she’s okay.”

Everyone helped me put my little world back together.

She and I used to talk about how a lot of life felt like that, like we were never the target audience for any of it, like we were always on the outside of something.

Sometimes, I think if I hadn’t met Greta, my whole life would have felt like going to prom—like I was in a costume I hated, but on the outside, secretly pretending to feel what everyone else does.

Who am I writing this for? Am I just writing this for myself?

The whole system of penance left me thinking, If I’m going to sin, I might as well really sin.

We were socio-economically comparable; we watched the same TV shows, spoke the same language, ate the same Pop-Tarts. They were just more uninhibited, unapologetically trashy, and seemingly happier.

I figured it was bad enough for me to fail high school, it would be worse to burden everyone with me being miserable about it. I thought the least I could do was pretend I didn’t care.

I wasn’t used to being calmly assured of anything, let alone that I would find my way. I’d grown up in a house full of tightly wound people who lost their cool easily.

I didn’t know it was possible to face stresses the way Rabbit did. It hadn’t occurred to me that not panicking was an option.

I just wanted to be happy, but sometimes your own happiness comes at the expense of other people’s, doesn’t it? It’s hard to balance being both happy and considerate. I often tried to be both by lying, but that usually made it worse.

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.

It’s easier to pretend to be someone else than it is to be my real, authentic self. There are fewer stakes. 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.

When I went swinging with the girl I was seeing, the chains pressed into my grown hips, and it hurt. I couldn’t do it for very long anymore.

I was getting older and losing my capacity to imagine. My dress rehearsal was ending, and I was just going to have to be who I was.

I couldn’t go to a diner with my aunt and sister and just shoot the shit. Almost every conversation I had devolved to discussing my big life plans.

I guess that’s part of the plight of being young. Everyone around you is fixated on what you’re going to do next.

I always had a big imagination, but you can’t have a big imagination when you grow up—unless you’re using it to design video games, or write fantasy novels, or something.

I think people often judge others by their own standards.

I think my mom didn’t understand how I could be gay because she wasn’t.

She viewed me being gay the way she would view herself being gay. The only reason she could come up with for why she would be is to get attention and bother people. She didn’t grasp that someone could genuinely experience the world differently than her.

Despite experiencing no recent injuries, I felt like I had been physically beaten.

It’s not that I hated myself. It’s just that when you get older, you are suddenly required to be the person you are.

I would live to be about two years old, which is as long as most rats live. I would get my money’s worth out of my little rat lifespan, and I would leave the earth happy to have been there.

She said Greta needed help. I already knew she needed help, but hearing it from her mom felt like hearing it from God’s voice booming in the sky.

I’m not sure there is a way to be alive without upsetting people. We’re all in this web together, aren’t we? Everything we do tangles everybody else together.

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.

Every word means more when there are fewer of them.

Geographically and ecologically, the habitat that the road is in is a forest. When raccoons or deer turn into roadkill, it’s not because they went somewhere they shouldn’t have. It’s because there was an unnatural street in their woods.

Am I eight years old, dreaming that I’m in college? Does the library feel empty because I’m small and ignorant and I don’t know what to dream up?

I spent over an hour crying, hugging my crew necks and T-shirts on the floor of my bedroom. I had makeup on. I got foundation and mascara marks all over my things. I was rubbing my face in the fabric.

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.

way. I wasn’t just mourning her life. I was mourning her love for me.