The New Me

by Halle Butler

You can’t ask someone to help you without letting them know you’re different than advertised,

The tragedies we steel ourselves for never come for years and years, and our negative fantasies wear us down

inch by inch, so that when the blow actually comes, there’s little of us left to care.

the false pretense of nonconformity as a sign of intelligence and authenticity.

get socked in the chest, thinking about how things never change. How they’re on a slow-rolling slope downward, and you can think up a long list of things you’d rather do, but because of some kind of inertia, or hard facts about who you are and what life is, you always end up back where you started, sitting drunk on a hard, sticky chair with someone you hate.

People took comfort, unknowingly, in the anger that filled them, the anger that took them out of themselves and into another dimension—a

The countless hours between now and the end.