Sometimes, like now I feel like the earth, the air, everything will leap up and swallow me whole. I will disappear and all that will be left is the stigma, the caricature. The people walking all around me, the college campus, will morph into an angry mob. They will strip away all my weak protection, they will label me, the idiot, the bitch, the whore. I will disappear and die,  I will look into people’s faces, and what I see will be so familiar. No one will help me, no one will stand up, no one will stop. Everyone will watch as I am crucified, and I wont get the pleasure of true death, I will exist as a shell. I will walk around with my scarlet letter dead in every aspect excluding my heartbeat.

I know that this is not rational, to let my negative feelings, to let other’s actions and opinions kill me, but they do. They wrap around my neck and I begin to drown in stagnant air. I cannot break down, so I lay there indefinitely, in agony and unable to say or do anything to change my plight. I have the perpetual fear of being “bad” of not being perfect, because in the past people have used these and my depressed position to burn me as a witch, to highlight my flaws and therefore deflect attention from their own. I perpetually fear making a mistake, because I know that the social circle I am in will set upon it, upon me. I must account for my actions before taking a step, saying a word. I am an easy target. I am all alone, and I am desperate to get things right, to be….not perfect….but above their reproach, although I think that would mean being perfect.

A boy, one who was nice to me, he made me feel like I could escape that world. He liked hanging out with me, he was attracted to me, but he was also attached socially to the clique that is so toxic for me. A few weeks ago I slept over at his house, which was meant to be platonic. He touched me, and we fell asleep together in his bed, no kiss exchanged, adorned in the jeans and t shirts we had worn out that night. The next morning felt slightly hungover, he was still asleep, so I grabbed my bag and went home to grab some water and well needed sleep. Texts to him later that week and the next went unanswered and I figured he had been freaked out by the tiny bit of intimacy we had shared. Sad, but no huge deal. That is my life with guys, they leave, they don’t want to go forward…tried to put it out of my head. Went out this weekend with the clique. Was talking to a few guys at the bar, and the boy, the one who had not answered my texts came up to a glass partition separating us, started yelling, saying what I don’t know. He looked angry, he pointed his finger, it looked like he was telling me off. The guys I was talking to stared in astonishment, and all I could think is, what have I done that was so wrong?

No boy has ever acted that way towards me, I’m usually too meek to elicit any reaction from guys. It made me feel so sad to feel like maybe he hated me, and to not really know why. I had talked to him, early on, I admitted I looked at him as more than just a potential friend. I felt safe saying this, sadly, vainly, because he is, as my friends put it, “ugly as hell”. After he touched my chest, and I left in the morning without saying something, was that so wrong? Was he hurt? Was that what made him angry? And if so why does he seem so angry, so hateful? He knows all these imperfections about my life, and I feel as though he will turn around and hurl them at me, that now they will be all my fault and I will be a despicable person. So many people have hurt me, and will continue to hurt me, and it kills me to think that this person, a person I am not close to yet, will be added to the list. I fear he will crusade against me, look at me in disgust, and I have no idea why, because we have not known each other long enough to talk about anything….anything serious. It makes my heart ache even more than usual. I feel like my roof will soon fall down on top of me. I see him in my mind and I think, why do you want to hurt me? I cannot control if someone no longer likes me, but to be on a mission to hurt me, how will that sate your appetite? How will that make things better? What have I done to deserve this? I want to scream to everyone, “you want to kill me, but I’ve already died!”

People surround me to pronounce a final judgment and I clutch the shattered remnants of my life. They cut my hands and I bleed all over, but the red that coats me only seems to confirm my guilt (for what I have little to no idea). I think a lot, how can  I try so hard, and still feel so guilty, so degraded? Everything hits me, everything always has some kind of downside, and that downside surfaces again and again in the trial that is my life. When other people around me make mistakes, they are forgiven, forgotten, accepted. Mine are cataloged and pinned to the skin of my back. They follow me everywhere and despite all my efforts to be kind, generous and accepting, they mark me as an undesirable. I am the girl that is wrong, that is the “problem”. I have a history of stupid inconsequential mistakes that somehow tear at my heart and are tattooed on my soul. I am that girl, people will try to handle me, but they will never love me, never protect me. and all I think is….i am not so wrong, I am not so awful, I know “realistically” that I am a good decent person, but I feel like and am treated like scum, like a problem or an issue  that has to be dealed with. I want so badly, not to feel so guilty, so wrong all the time, I want to accept my failures and mistakes but slowly they begin to define my impression of myself and I do not want/think I deserve to live.