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You, boy, are a fucking disaster, and you’ve known it your whole damn life.
You, are an unsolvable problem (and god knows they tried) in a pretty outfit with a prettier, threatening smile; you are an enigma wrapped so tight in hyperbole and metaphor you can’t see where you begin or end and half the time you think you’ll choke on the irony of it all; a walking inconvenience on legs as weak as a new-born calf’s and at the same time a wolf in an imperfect rendition of sheep’s clothing, playing the fool or the coward long enough to get them on side; you are a star waiting for precisely the right moment to go supernova and do the most damage you possibly can, consequences be damned. Destructive, sardonic, manipulated, flawed, maybe made into the monster you are by conditioning and circumstance but at the end of the day you, boy, are what you always have been and that is disgustingly, brokenly human. You are all of these things, and you always have been, always will be. You are so much these things that you’re not sure if there’s room for anything else; maybe there was once.
Ever since you took your first breath in this mess of a world, torn from your place of safe isolation prematurely; until you gasp your last painfully sometime in the future, probably shot in a field on a mission for a company you don’t know if you trust but you know doesn’t care about you (did they ever? Does it matter? You don’t deserve a peaceful death; if anyone you knew that deserved it got one the world would be a just place, but you know from too much experience and spilled blood that it doesn’t work like that; the world is freezing and firm and unforgiving and being good doesn’t get you anywhere.) Has it been longer than that? You were raise to believe in souls, if not god, and you were never quite sure about fate – have you been this since the first grain of sand dropped in the hourglass of time itself, to continue ‘til the death of a universe no one you knew, let alone yourself, never saw the start nor finish of; though you don’t hold yourself in that high regard, do you boy, to think that your souls worth more than what you could sell it to the devil for, and that sure as hell ain’t much. So maybe you’ve been you beginning and ending with your time on a planet that’s so insignificant it’ll burn up with the sun, taking any trace of you and yours with it and leaving nothing behind but the burned remains of a race that destroyed itself and a mess of what could have been that no one is left, or gives a fuck, to see. And if this place is insignificant, well, what does that make you? A cell within a cosmic body? You never thought you were as important as that – you are a speck on the scale of a cosmos, so infinitesimal a microscope couldn’t pick you up, not that it’d want to.
They say all good things come to an end, and not being born was the first best thing you ever had and fuck if sometimes you don't wish you'd never lost it, never been born, that you could have stayed in that quiet, solitude forever, or that you could get it back somehow. Well. You could, but you won't - you made a promise to your not-quite sister however many years ago and you'll be damned if you break it now or ever. So; you stay gasping polluted air, like you have since you were born, because as much as you want to pretend not to be human, you are – painfully so – and you need it to survive as much now as you did when you were a little kid in a torn skirt pretending to be someone you weren't; only now you cope at least by half by downing shots of cheap, burning vodka on the floor in the kitchen you share with Maxwell like you need it to live; maybe you do.
You were born in a shitty room in your shitty home in Milwaukee, the place you'd live for most of your childhood, and your dad walked out of the room, walked out of the house when the nurse said you were a baby girl - she was wrong, of course, but you wouldn't realise that for a few years yet, after years of your mother joking about wishing you had been a boy (and naming you as such; Drew being a fitting name for the girl they thought you were and the boy they had wanted you to be) and your father not joking about the same thing. You may not remember much about your youth except the salt slick skin (sweat or tears? You don’t know.) and things that definitely caused underlying trauma, but it a picture tells a thousand words your family photo albums are epics of story and lie to rival that of Homer or Virgil.
Coming out should have helped. It didn’t. He may have wanted a son, but he didn't want one like that – like you. So, at fourteen you pretended. Pretended to be the perfect prissy model military daughter they wanted you to be. It lasted about three weeks before you cut your hair off over the bathroom sink with kitchen scissors and threw your dresses and skirts on a campfire you started in your back garden (Huh – you’ve always been this fucking destructive, haven’t you? You set an oil slick fire the day you joined this earth and you never put it out). Your mother cried like you’d broken her heart and your father screamed like he hadn’t since he’d been a drill sergeant and you could not have given less of a shit about either because every time you caught your reflection you delighted in looking a little bit more like yourself. You refused, point blank, to wear any goddamn skirts or dresses after that – your parents got you more masculine clothes; not acceptance but necessity because setting shit on fire in your yard just got the fire brigade called and nosy neighbours getting far too interested in your business for your fathers’ tastes. If your friend bought you a binder for your fifteenth birthday, your parents didn’t need to know that, nor did they need to know how you, theoretically, would wash it in the kitchen sink when they were away on business trips.
Getting the hell out of there at sixteen would have been the best idea you’d ever had. Two bags packed with all your stuff, any money you’d squirreled away or stolen shoved in the front pockets with your phone, $35.49 spent on a bus ticket to Chicago (and oh how different your life could have been if you’d managed to get out then; people always say the world is small. How much smaller would it have felt, had you met the man you’d meet in San Francisco thirteen years later then, if you’d been able to get that bus to Chicago?)
Money was a concern – of course it fucking was, how could it not be – but the only thing keeping you going for those last few years at home was the idea that one day, finally you’d be able to be yourself; you clung to it like the misguided attempt at religion when you were a child, or like the blanket you’ve had since birth, or like a notebook full of secrets you couldn’t tell to anyone but the open air as you half screamed your lungs out on a cliffs edge. No – you clung to it like oxygen, like you needed it to breath or to burn and you weren’t sure which way it would swing but it was either maybe die with it or throw yourself into the dark cold abyss without it, and you’ve never really been one for the lonely unknowable void, have you boy? (Ironic, isn’t it, how you end up?)