Saying you have no regrets is one of those brazenly bullshitty statements that requires Pretenders-like brass to pull off.  Unless it’s spoken by an elderly person (we’re talking 70 and up), because no one questions them.  Even then, only the worshipping and ignorant believe it.  Everyone else realizes that people who say they have no regrets have a massive case of denial.  Or they have no consciences.

Who wants that?

I don’t.  And from what I know of you, you don’t.

So we’re not going to do that.  Especially not when I’m turning 22 in just a little while.  I suppose a purging session of sins committed would be the most logical response to the above tirade, but no one wants to read that, and I don’t want to write it, and neither one of us wants to remember.  But this is tiresome.  I’ve spent too much time telling myself what I want and you what you want.  That has always been my hangup.

You should know that I’m not relating unless I’m entertaining, or at least offending.  I have a hard time telling you the truth unless I feel superior in some way.  I craft my responses.  I fake my reactions.  I disagree to be different.  I listen for the wrong reasons.  I emulate my favorite novels, films, eras, songs – these are the casts I wear so you can’t see the injuries, only the concept of them.  And when you sign them, I’m sort of happy, but not really, because you’re endorsing the idea, not the injury.  If I took them off, I’d be another battered woman in a Lifetime movie.  Worse yet, I wouldn’t be covered with adoring autographs.

And when I hear I’ve achieved the desired effect – “You remind me of Zooey and the narrator from Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” I scream inside and smile outside.

Create.  Cry.  Repeat.

It sounds like a purging session, doesn’t it?  It really isn’t.  It’s just that I’m 22 (it’s been a little while already, doesn’t time soar?) and nobody knows who I am.  Including me.  Here’s where it gets just horrible: I don’t care.  I can’t, because I don’t know any other way.  The casts are my limbs, the injuries don’t exist.  I refuse it, it cannot be.  It was not there to begin with.  It is nothing but a literary device coerced into life by an upper-middle class midwestern twenty-something with no struggles, aspirations…or regrets.