Heather in Paradise

or stick a rifle to your chest and pull the trigger. Because then you might leave behind a 3 year old girl who’ll only live blissfully unaware of you for a few more years, whereupon she’ll come to realize the significance of your absence and she’ll feel the abandonment so keenly she’ll begin subconsciously searching for you in places you’ll never be found. Like where, you ask?

Well, at first she’ll be satisfied with gold foil stars on her homework and achievement awards for attendance or sports. Before you know it, she’ll be on the sidelines with pom-pons cheering others’ strengths. Soon enough, she’s kissing boys she doesn’t even like, just because they pay attention to her and keep her from having to be alone.

And that one boy she’ll meet in H.S., who will love her and tell her she’s funny, smart, and pretty? Well, she’ll love him, too, in the fucked-up and only way she knows how to love, but she won’t believe him or value his opinion until it’s too late, since it is so incongruous with the basic fact of her unwantedness. In fact, she’ll do what she can to run him out of her life because what he’s saying doesn’t sync with her certainty that she is an unloveable, fat, miserable, nothing who deserves nothing sweet or good. She’ll be damned if she’ll stand by and feel happy, not even for a second, not once, it’s not allowed.

She’ll marry and divorce young, to someone she doesn’t even know or love. Next thing you know, she’s kissing ass in a variety of jobs she doesn’t care about, but at least they give her raises and accolades and, well, that’s more than she ever got from you, right? And the men she’ll fall in love with? Only the least giving or accessible need apply. Naturally, those who don’t really love her and leave her are the most appealing of all.

She’ll drink, a lot. She can hardly believe there was ever a time when she lived without the knowledge of you in her head. She’ll experiment with drugs, sex; all the boring cliches you’d expect. She’ll make jokes and if they are at her expense, all the better. She’ll act tough and people will dislike her. She’ll say she doesn’t care, but let’s face it–she does.

Fast forward and suddenly your 3 year old is somehow 36 and doesn’t even recognize herself when she’s writing a self-absorbed diary entry about herself. She’s not who she thought she would be. She moves from place to place, country to country, man to man…thinking that surely one of these times she’ll hatch from that shell into something different. She rips off her skin again and again, but it always grows back just the same. Inevitably, be it days, or months, or years, this new skin starts to itch and she’ll chew her nails until her hands bleed trying to resist the urge to claw it off again.

She’ll get older and understand that although you killed yourself, they drew the chalk outline around her, and that her entire life has been lived within the boundaries of your death. She knows all of these things and more. And still the knowing doesn’t change anything.