12

12 was a bad age for me. a bad year. it seeped into most of the next year, and took over a good chunk of 14. the week of my 14th birthday i was at my worst. i spent 36 hours in the ER. i had deep conversations with the guy monitoring me when i was on watch, and i read 3 of my now favorite books. for a week or so after i didnt have a phone. i spent all day eating ice cream or at the park with a 21 year old who my mom was fucking, and whos car smelled like weed. he was cool. i still think about him sometimes. that wasnt a good part of my life. and it hasn’t really been that long since then. once, when i was 12 (no good sentence starts with that), i tried to pick a mole out of my skin. it left a scar bigger than the mole itself. another time, i sat on the bathroom floor crying with my mom because i couldn’t get in the shower. im not sure why. i couldnt look at my body without throwing up. i couldnt stand under the water without feeling like i was going to pass out. and it didn’t get better for a long time. my mom was all i had, in the entire world. she was the only person i saw during the pandemic, too. just me and her. and she was my only support system. for a while i hated her. i hated her more than myself, which wasn’t really fair. then i tolerated her. but in the end, she was always there. and nobody else was. i dont know which part was harder to accept