it’s easy once you start. you’re thirteen and get excited too easily. you want things desperately, try to hold onto them with every force in your body.

and when your plans fall through, when you’re sitting in your room hearing somebody talk at you about how sad they are for you: this is where it begins. it’s a whisper in the dark, and it sounds like a friend. you will trade being excited for ever feeling the letdown ever again. it’s fair. it’s fair. it’s a fair game you’re playing.

at fifteen you lose your best friend. she sends you spiraling in a downwards direction. you trusted her with everything. and while your family says “but what a nice girl she is” you taste battery acid. and you call up the darkness, and you trade again. you will never trust another human, so long as you live. that’s both the good and the bad part about this. nobody can hurt you like she did. nobody can ever get close enough to, ever again.

at sixteen, you are out shopping when you catch sight of yourself in the mirror. the girls next to you are slim, are pretty, are glitter. nobody ever directly calls you a name. they just slide their eyes off your body and leave you standing covered in shame. your phone has a speed dial for sadness. you give up feeling pretty and settle into a trembling madness. food will taste like failure and days without exercise will be a waste. but the good news is that now you control the voice of the plate. you determine the sharpness of the bones on your face.

at seventeen, you are applying to college. you have lost excitement, lost trust, lost positive body image. but you still have hope, still cling to the idea that you might soar higher. still, in this numbness, you have desire. and when all but your fallback schools reject you, you call up the devil, and you sell hope too. it doesn’t do to want things. it just doesn’t do.

that summer you get drunk on your parent’s liquor and your ex-best friend makes jokes that get you even sicker because by the end of the night it’s pretty clear you’re a punchline and they all brought you along to have something to scorn. you smile too, because you feel nothing anymore. you give up shame in exchange for real laughter. you give up horror in exchange for fun.

you’re stuck. you’re stuck. everything is loud here, but nothing really matters. tomorrow you could be hit by a train and made splatter-art and the thought just gives you a strange fit of giggles. you try to feel happy and don’t remember the command prompt. you try to feel anything but horrifically empty and instead just end up with a heaping of nothing. it’s addicting and terrifying and every time you think you made it out, something swings back around and reminds you why you shouldn’t have tried in the first place. at least here you can’t hurt worse than you already do. at least here nobody can really get at you.

it’s at nineteen when he breaks up with you after sleeping with you for two years and six months that you realize you can’t handle the idea of ever hurting like this anymore. you almost felt something for a second, and it scares you to your core. you promise yourself you won’t go there anymore. you finally give up the last bit of your happy, the last bit of love. it’s a fair game. it’s a fair game.

and the darkness has won.