We're All Damaged

by Matthew Norman

Black eye, messy hair, dressed like an eighth-grade alcoholic. You’re doing us proud, Andy.”

It’s like someone has painstakingly built a museum dedicated to the study and analysis of teenage virginity.

It’s probably not fair to feel like this—to insist that our moms and dads somehow exist in suspended animation.

“Don’t listen to him,” she says. “He’s currently under construction.”

Maybe this is how Catholics do it. We accept a certain level of unhappiness—like we have an unhappiness equilibrium built into our brains—and then, one day, we drop dead.

essentially rolling around in her unhappiness like puppies in the snow.

Are all our parents, collectively, fucked up? Have they always been fucked up, and it just takes us until our own adulthood to figure that out?

For a year, I’ve been so sad, so trapped in this murky, sludgy cesspool of misery, that I’ve barely been breathing. But I’m alive now.