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I went to three different high schools
I was the weird one I smoked cigarettes in the school basement while talking to my abusive boyfriend on a payphone trying to convince him I was more than a hole while I listened to the cheerleaders chant those same cheerleaders asked me for my diet tricks at impromptu parties at my apartment my mother was never home and my secret diet trick was that I always had some asshole boyfriend that wanted me to look like a porn star I didn't have money to eat and I wasn't hungry from debilitating depression they giggled when I told them that but I saw the fear in their eyes when they realized the darkness they would need to adopt to become willowy and mysterious while they got lied to in my mother's bed by fake sainted high school football stars I cleaned the house and wrote in my journal about sad teenage girls getting abused I scrubbed at my new tattoos with a brillo pad love is always tattooed when you are too young to know you are worth something I poured water into the drunk girls they had neglected in their search for manhood I held greasy heads as they puked because they were not the chosen ones to be pummeled by soon-to-be potbellied, aging football players that sold cars or insurance or something that didn't include the magnificence of youth while I was alone in my own teenage ineptitude my young mother tried to relive this horrible youth-hood with some man that was doing the same when all I could wonder is why no one was welcoming death I longed to chew applesauce on a rickety deathbed with such saggy flesh I wouldn't be in fear of getting raped again and again or leered at by old men I didn't realize that twenty years later I would see all the above as nothing, that there would be worse, that I would long to be seen again even if it only meant being leered at because I had youth and belief how silly it is that we strive to be wanted when everyone wants what they can hurt. what they can take is what we have to lose and it never seems enough for them to want to take more that story the giving tree always made me weep I stopped reading it to my child because I couldn't bear her being yet another one that treated me that way she will gladly sit on my stump in a few years and I will be okay it will still make me weep
1 Comment
6/29/2021 05:05:56 am
Not to be that guy but there is a spelling error that I would want to fix.
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AuthorMichelle Tinklepaugh Archives
April 2023
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