I'm not sure why I still lie so much about it. One day someone will know without me telling them. Everybody back home stills calls me crazy, which used to hurt a lot worse until 4 different psychiatrists and therapists told me it was pretty much true. You just can't get as hurt by an insult you know to be true. I'm cold and distant? True. Talking to me gives patient people headaches? True. My writing is such shit it borders on unreadable? True. I'm the biggest liar since my own goddamn father? Yeah. If I never did anything I didn't think I was good at I'd never do anything at all. I've spent my life trying to tell people something without saying it out loud, I can't be more honest with myself than shithouse metaphors and similes allow.

There are holes in my body. Big, gaping chasms in my heart, as wide as a quarter across and as deep as a pocket knife blade; what look like gopher holes in the flesh of my brain. An indescribably large pit in my intestines, and, believe it or not, 5  little valleys the size and shape of fingers on my right bicep. They all beg to be filled in, sewn back together, glued, tied, anything. Some of them came like a crack in a windshield, one of them came like a knife through soft butter. I think that one is bottomless. I like to ignore them but sometimes what isn't there hurts worse than what is.