i promise to stop talking about the things you don’t want me to talk about. i promise to stop insinuating i’m going to kill myself, and when and if i do i’ll do it silently, without trying to prove a point or making any of the mess that me talking about it makes. i promise i won’t bite my nails anymore. i promise to stop chewing like a cow mom. i promise i will stop staring into the fridge with the same dead eyes that the fish your parents laid to rest in the toilet stared up at its executioners with. i promise i’ll start laughing again. i promise i’ll let you go, and that i have, and that i’ll stop reaching my hands back into the earth to uncover you from the dirt. i promise i will bleach the bones before i bring them back into the house, and that i will only use feathers that have been decontaminated. i promise i will stop invoking your name in the car at night when i am sobbing, and i promise to stop sobbing. i promise to stop wishing things were different, and to instead try to make things different. i promise i will stop making jokes about getting a lobotomy, even if it’s objectively funny to spend twenty-five minutes editing a photo of the claire’s piercing booth to include the lobotomy ice pick. i promise to stop making everyone uncomfortable. i promise to stop taking up space. i promise to stop telling the truth about all the things that have happened to me, and i promise to stop digging up the dead, and i promise to just finally get over it. i promise to listen to my dad and not tell a soul about any of it. i promise i will be complicit in my own rape. i promise i will never confront you about any of the things you did to hurt me, and i promise i will stop saying that you hurt me. i promise i will get the steering wheel fixed, the way we both know i was supposed to, and i promise to stop closing my eyes on the highway when i’m driving and seeing how long i can go without opening them. i promise to never insinuate you were a bad mother. never insinuate you were a bad father. i promise to stop telling people the things you did to me, because don’t i know that’s not polite dinner conversation? i promise to stop eating dinner and to stop eating lunch and to stop eating breakfast, until i am so small that you can just tie me in a shoebox and put me away so you can finally have a break. i promise to no longer be a thing that you can hear. i promise to smile real bright and happy in all the pictures, so you can post them on facebook when i’m dead and create a shrine to your beautiful, dead, finally silent daughter. i promise to stop writing about myself. i promise to stop believing that anyone will ever get what they deserve. i promise to take out my tongue and take out my eyes and take out my teeth and take out my liver and feed them to the crows the way you always meant for me to do. i promise to lay down on the train track when the time comes, to gaze into your eyes and hold your hands and whisper all the things a dying girl is supposed to whisper. i promise to learn the rules and rituals of girlhood. i promise to stop correcting you when you misgender me. i promise to stop starting fights on twitter. i promise to stop telling all my enemies that i am ontologically correct and they are ontologically wrong and that nothing they say to me can harm me because i know i am better than them. i promise to stop being better than anyone because it’s very unfair to the people i’m better than. i promise to stop getting angry when people insinuate others might be jealous of me and instead take it as a compliment. i promise to stop saying that my dad sexually abused me when someone insinuates that of course i am a person to be jealous of. i promise to stop saying it at all, because nobody wants to hear it. i promise to stop making elevator rides awkward and the ride home from the hospital awkward and your morning coffee awkward. i promise to kill myself in the quietest, least inconvenient way possible, so that you don’t even have to take time off work to acknowledge it. i promise to write all the notes the way they’re supposed to be written and to never, ever, ever imply that maybe i deserved better. i promise to stop believing i deserved better. i promise to stop believing i deserved to be taken care of. i promise to stop believing i deserve to be taken care of. i promise to make better small talk and to ask people how their day was and to make appropriate comments about the weather. i promise to take to my grave everything that was done to me that might have kept me above ground if i had said it. i promise to stop ruining dinner parties and family gatherings and christmas vacation. i promise to call more and to be the person you have wanted me to be for nearly twenty-seven years, which i am constitutionally incapable of being, but if i just empty out my skin suit and set myself on the sewing table with a bag of plastic fluff you could probably make me into a daughter you could love. i promise to stop letting people rape me. i promise to stop trying to make meaning out of an ultimately meaningless existence. i promise to stop being loud and angry and visibly disturbed on the internet. i promise to find a real human i can talk to about these things so that i don’t have to keep writing them for everyone to have to read and, barring that, i promise to cut my tongue out instead. i promise to stop ruining the vibe and using my life to process my self and using MY newsletter to talk about my grief. i promise to stop being angry about what happened to me and, more importantly, to stop being mad that no one ever cared enough to make it stop. i promise to stop expecting people to be decent and for anyone to care about anything but themselves. i promise to stop standing up for myself and to stop telling stupid people that they’re being stupid and to stop believing men when they say they love me. i promise to stop asking to be paid for the craft i’ve spent fifteen years learning and i promise to stop being poor and i promise to stop criticizing the culture when it begins sprouting fundamentally untrue and impossible things. i promise to stop responding with rage when i see a tiktok turned into an instagram reel because i still haven’t downloaded tiktok talking about how it’s possible to have bpd without having had childhood trauma and i promise to stop fantasizing about knocking people’s teeth out when they turn up talking about their bpd diagnosis that they figured out they had from another person who figured out they had it from another person who figured out they had it from a “mental health influencer’s” infographic. i promise to stop telling my friends who have ugly boyfriends that their boyfriends are ugly and i promise to stop telling people no when they ask me for unreasonable uses of my time and energy. i promise to stop writing long stupid unreadable letters and i promise to stop making long stupid unreadable art and i promise to stop living a long stupid unreadable life full of long stupid unreadable trauma and with tons of long stupid unreadable heartbreaks. i promise to stop believing that i will find love one day and subjecting the people in my life who get too close to me to the horrifying realization that i need love the way a black hole needs matter. i promise to stop being angry that not enough people are angry and i promise to stop pointing out that the world is ending and i promise to stop telling the big obnoxious asshole truck drivers who drive around lifted ten feet off the ground in their stupid gas-guzzling inherently fascist vanity trucks to go kill themselves and that the world would be better off without them, even if it is true. i promise to stop telling the truth because it’s so uncomfortable for everyone else. i promise to stop letting myself eat sugar. i promise to get a real job and leave the whole arts thing alone. i promise to bury myself with all my secrets still on my tongue, shoved in my mouth like the sock a prisoner uses to suffocate himself with when he realizes it’s time to go.
no, no, i’m getting it all wrong again.
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