I can’t even try to cut my ties.

Blood runs through the ropes that attach me to the people that keep me above the water and I don’t know how to struggle anymore.

I make an educated guess that my parents spend at least a few minutes a day as they clutch the ropes wondering what heavier thing could possibly be launched from their respective genitals.

In fact, on the day I was born after 59 minutes of agonizing reluctance, the very first thing I did was deceive my mother into determining I was deceased by laying still, colorless and silent in the nurse’s arms. A liar.

I walked on time, I talked ahead of pace. I used articulate words to outline stupid concepts to teachers who made the mistake of thinking I was smart just because I know the right words to describe the void in my head and yet when my best friend, the elementary school counselor, let me know I had low self-esteem, I didn’t know what it meant.

I think in tiny units, time and direction are foreign even after living 17 years in a dimension dictated by them. I am 17, I don’t know my rights from my lefts. I have to sing the alphabet to remember the letter next. I am outside on my rollerblades with my mother’s arms around my waist to keep me from collapsing onto the concrete and when we go back inside she makes me mac and cheese- this is not a metaphor, this was my weekend.

I cannot drive and I cannot pay you for a ride because I cannot work because I cannot regularly go to a place where there is no escape in case I break down, no accommodations for the screaming tantrums of a 17 year old newborn who will never be able to provide for himself, despite living in a holy ground of support and love and kindness but nothing is enough for me. No angel could keep me guarded.

I am here by mistake, one product more than what was ordered, and just like an extra package I take up space that isn’t mine, I am a waste of cardboard and bubble wrap, I am the subject of a series of frustrating phone calls.

I am doing it now, I am taking air and ruining the silence.