you realized the world was full of
fakes
when someone claiming to care sat
you down
and proceeded to carefully maneuver
around
your abnormal behavior. they then
claimed
you could trust them with anything,
and
you heard the unspoken, even if they
didn’t:
A suicide would NOT reflect well on the
school.
a scream tore from your throat,
I AM FINE
But somewhere in the space between
m
and
f,
somewhere in that dark space,
the not monster muscled in.
the letters around it bent and twisted,
so much so that you waited for the
frauds
to notice. you felt more than saw the
word worms wriggling loose and
drowning the lie with their venom.
remember when you used to be
obsessed with sentimental wall
hangings?
remember the day you woke up and
found
the word worms had gnawed a nest
in the cheap drugstore canvas, how
the
not monster had pasted itself
onto another?
more people realized what was going
on,
and they cocooned you with their
chatter, emails, phone numbers, more
happy words that could easily hold
a nest of word worms and a not
monster.
all deaths should be prevented, they
told you.
the not monster couldn’t fit into that
without
the help of another kind of monster.
meanwhile, the worms couldn’t all fit
in
your head, so they migrated down
to your heart and thrived there too.
the new monster was fetched from its
cave
deep in fog-wreathed forests. its
eyelids
were encrusted with unused
potential,
its mouth a rubber band stretched too
far.
more layers were added to your
cocoon,
more sentimental wall hangings sank
to the floor,
and it was repeated again:
all deaths should be prevented.
the not monster was the first to make
it,
all deaths should NOT be prevented,
and then came the some monster
who took the all angel and threw it
to the worms:
some deaths should
not be prevented.
68