Bumped on the shoulder.

A note that this piece has three distinct narrators.

Yes, I remember that day. I remember it because it was the night before my seventh birthday, and we were in the kitchen squeezing frosting flowers from makeshift Saran wrap tubes. I cried because you were better at it, then. Your ten-year-old fingers had acquired dexterity, and mine were still pudgy with the remnants of baby fat.

Your flowers were flawless budding wonders, almost lifelike in waxy splendor. When I looked at the confused splotches of icing that seemed to ooze out of my frosting tip with drunken abandon, I felt an emotion I could not name for another decade. It was a pressure in my chest between tightness and paralysis, a flush that rose to my sunburned cheeks without my consent or recognition. I was not a part of my body, but something operating it with strings from a distant corner—tugging at tenuous strands with questionable results, unable to predict the next jerk of my limbs.

I cried with the foggy frustration of a toddler. Later, I swore that I saw you sneer: a grimace frightful for its too-large front teeth and their jagged and plaque-covered edges. Or maybe you bumped my shoulder so that in a moment of distracted envy I dropped my tube of icing and left a path of pink on the tiled floor. Or sometimes I remembered your face as it screwed into a grimace (of what? of anger? of scorn?) and your hand coming toward me, fierce and huge-seeming, and I wasn’t ready but I knew it was coming anyway (why?) and I hated you as even as my shoulder smarted and I knew that I’d crossed a line from somewhere to somewhere else.

“You were picking on me!” I’d insist years later, but you would always deny me my defense. And even to myself, I sounded a little like an excuse worn thin with doubt, but then why the sobbing I remember so well that I can still sometimes taste the salt trails on my cheek? “You were being mean, I know it!”

But the moment would have already passed. They always did that, when I was around you. How often had I turned around to say something, only to find myself talking to your shadow? How many times had I yelled at your back as you exited a room, oblivious to my objection raised a moment too late?

Yes, I remember that day. Maddie and Lea were having their birthday party, but Maddie was scared, poor girl—she didn’t have many friends in her class, and only a few RSVPs had come back for her, though we’d sent out invitations two months before the scheduled date. Lea, we never had to worry about—she was already the princess of her first grade class, the sunny kid who doled out cute smiles as though she’d invented the concept herself.

But Maddie, back then she was always an unfriendly remark away from tears—nudge her the wrong way and she’d whimper and go off somewhere to lick her wounds. We said it was because of that one morning the baby monitor broke and we didn’t hear her crying until well into the afternoon, when we were already about sink gratefully into a session of well-deserved and all-too-rare—and we realized, suddenly, that Maddie was so unnaturally quiet, that she’d never been that quiet before.

When we’d finally hurried to the crib, she was a trembling bundle of snotty sheets, and though we picked her up and soothed her shhhh mommy’s here daddy’s here, don’t you worry now, sweetie, there was nothing sweet about her look of betrayal, about the way she distrusted us, and therefore everyone, and therefore the entire universe. Lea was still blissfully sleeping at the other end of the small mattress, even as Maddie in her infantile tantrum managed to kick her no less than a dozen times, but we were used to that, with Lea.

And you could already see the worry working its claws into Maddie, the way that crease implied itself between her eyebrows even in infancy, before any true worries of the world could have tainted her soft baby-smell aura. It was as though she knew, with a child’s preternatural instinct, what was to come, as though perhaps things just went wrong around her the way the dazed curiosity of innocence clung to other more fortunate babies.

Most years, the reminder of her birth was answered by a reminder of something inevitably gone awry: the economic collapse around her eighth birthday, Greg’s alcoholism that developed around her tenth, the fire that destroyed three-quarters of the house only weeks after her eleventh birthday. She was drawn to disaster, a child of catastrophe.

But it was all started, I suppose, with the accident that happened on the day of her seventh.

That day? That day was the day I started lying. I was only ten, but I knew what it meant to know something that someone else shouldn’t. I knew how to keep a secret. When Maddie saw Lea’s frosting flowers her eyes lit up while the rest of her seemed to darken and become tenser. I knew why she was so interested in Lea’s flowers (my flowers weren’t nearly so plump either), and for a second or two I felt sorry for Maddie, always the withered version of Lea lurking in the background, not quite as brilliant or as friendly or as anything, really, as Lea was.

Which is probably why I didn’t get it at first when Maddie pounced—it was such an action, a dynamism she’d never before achieved and never really did after, either. But that’s the word I would use for it now: pouncing, one feline stroke of motion across my field of vision, savage in its animalistic immediacy. Then Lea was on the ground, her icing tube landing in pink streaks on the kitchen floor, Maddie with her hands pinning Lea’s shoulders and pushing her deeper into the tile, if that could at all be possible.

Lea’s head had grazed the edge of the kitchen counter during her fall, and now where the jagged stone edge had collided with her skull there blossomed a redness that grew steadily and symmetrically into the yellow strands of her hair. In Maddie’s eyes, now, a ferocity that had not been there before—something more alive than the dread with which she’d been whining minutes earlier, it’s no fair that my flowers are squishy and ugly.

I only know that I yanked Maddie off Lea because that’s what they told me I did. Afterwards my hand hurt, and Maddie was too stunned and too young to understand the cause-and-effect of me and her and Lea, still lying motionless on the floor with the redness sloppy-spreading around her.

Silence.

—And then Maddie crying, the always-distant sound of sirens, a party canceled and birthday cake left uneaten on a countertop, how old are you and how old did you become just now?, Maddie staring up at me with a wide-eyed contempt.

And later she would write sentences in her journal such as “If I am cruel, it is because I learned cruelty from my sister,” and I would know she meant me, that though she would almost instantly forget this incident and warp the memory in her mind to fit with a childish purity she never actually experienced, she would remember this.

She would forget the twin sister she had slept next to for seven years of her life.

She would forget the pictures we took that day, and three other photo albums of identical chubby faces—“lost,” in the fire that destroyed much else of our past lives.

She would forget her own role as actor, as catalyst, as killer.

She would forget this, but she would remember that day, at least in part, and the part that she would remember: she would remember me, my violence, my ten-year-old rage, my permanent role solidified as her personal oppressor.

If you are cruel, little sister, know this—if you are cruel, you did not learn it from me. You already knew it. You knew it all along.

Human weakness.

The other day I decided that human need was often mistaken for human weakness.

I've since changed my mind.

Human weakness is often excused as human need. In reality, humans suck. They're pathetic little things with insecurities and imperfections, and no, this doesn't make them more "human" or more "intricate." It just makes them more sucky.

They have no clue what the fuck they're doing. They have no resolve, no self-knowledge, no understanding of what in the world they want or how they're going to get it. They rationalize all their decisions without any regard for the wisdom they would otherwise pretend to understand.

I'm angry because I'm disappointed. I realized that I only know a handful of sane people, and that I could very well be a victim of the same idiocy that I've witnessed so strongly these past few days. Everyone is so selfishly foolish, hopefully and hopelessly romantic. The cynics were right! We suck. Congrats, everyone.

Gimmicky story idea #1.

What if Mr. Right showed up at your door?
What if he had the right clothes and the right color eyes, showed the right sort of embarrassment at the situation ("Wow, um, I'm kind of here with a weird thing to tell you")?
What if he even had the right sort of hesitating, self-deprecating laugh?
What if he promised everything would be interesting (but not overwhelmingly so) and heavy (but not in an unhealthy way), that he would be insecure in the cute way (and not the pitiful way), that you would grow together (but without stifling each other)?

We say all the time that we want him to be delivered to our doorstep. But think about that--going in, knowing that, understanding that This One Should Be Perfect. It would be something, wouldn't it? --something great and awful and mind-blowingly complicated? Yeah. Maybe.

This could be such a Disney Channel movie. I hate it.

English 155.

Here's what my English professor told us today.

He said, The only way I'd do creative writing is, like, if I could write in a way that I could do whatever I wanted and say whatever I wanted, and no one would ever read it, and even if anyone read it they wouldn't understand what the hell it meant. But I also want it to be precise and clear. You see how that works? And even though no one would be able to understand it at the time, I want people to read it a hundred years from now and really like it. And I want to be able to know that, from wherever I am, somehow.

And then he talked about philosophical grammarians.

Never will I ever--.

--hate anyone ever again.

It's draining. "Enervating," as they say (a word that doesn't seem to mean itself -- as I was reminded this past weekend). I've done it. I'm over it. The truth I want to believe is: if we could dig ourselves out of moral stupidity and somehow bring ourselves to full empathy, we could never hate. It would be impossible, because we're all too human. (Read: // we're all // too human, not we're //all too // human.) But supposing that isn't actually true, I still think I could do it, as a personal project! (Personal projects = awesome. Obviously.)

Things go (wrong).

I'm becoming disillusioned.

(Originally I titled this post "Bad things happen." -- but then I realized. That's not what I mean. It's not only that shit happens spontaneously, that you turn a corner and suddenly someone's throwing a tomato at you. Obviously that happens too, and it sucks. But more than that, aside from that, independent of that, I'm talking about the phenomenon in which great things turn sour, fruit over-ripens and spoils, the best thing warps into the worst. What I mean is: the transition from the illusion to the disillusion. I mean it very specifically: the letdown, the disappointment, the stark contrast between what you expect and what you get.)

(Or perhaps I should say that I'm becoming more disillusioned, because honestly and realistically I was never all that expectant of anything great. The contemporary age loves tragedy and feeds on melodrama. We're taught that shit happens, that it's artistic, that it's painful and great to fall upon the thorns of life, that blood proves we're alive. We're supposed to suffer actively. We're supposed to relish it.)

In any case, even that notion has turned stale. I've experienced no great travesties, nothing even close to martyrdom. But what I have experienced is something closer to malaise. In the past few months every profound concept has crumbled beneath the weight of triviality. You need so much faith to believe in intangibles: trust, love, gratitude, compassion. They exist to validate everyday interactions, to convince us that yes, something does occur beneath our words. (Our words are supposed to mean something. They're supposed to stand in place of deep understanding. They convey subjective truth -- blahblahblahbutreally? is that really how it works?)

Maybe this is just the age at which I now find myself. All my friends are undergoing painful transitions into the mess we call adulthood, especially in terms of romance. I'm just overwhelmed by all the ways that (ha!) things go wrong. It's difficult -- unspeakably so -- to understand another human being well enough to achieve acceptance. It's impossible to realize the full humanity of someone else.

And even after that, it takes effort to maintain a connection. It's just so much, and we're all so tired, and wouldn't it be easier -- wouldn't it? -- just to fall asleep, to tumble casually over edge of the precipice, to stumble into living and to pretend that we couldn't have predicted our mistakes? We could be blameless. We didn't know better.

(But all along, we did know better. We had to have known. At some point we looked around us and we saw, but it was too much to prevent. And in the end the failure won't be something glorious and tragic, but rather something shriveling, something altogether inevitable/inescapable (not a bang but a whimper), and it'll just prove, once again, the full truth of the matter: that things go wrong, that they have and will and always, always will.)