what an unproductive week i’ve had. might as well have been a month, a year. i thought about my year a couple nights ago, tried to recall any moments of significance. what a joke. i wasted all my moments on you. wishing hoping praying, thinking scolding saying, “you deserve this, you deserve this, you deserve this,”

almost everything that happened this year happened in my head. happened in songs i can’t listen to anymore, pictures i can’t bear to look at. words and words and useless words you’ll never see, trying to reach you anyways, all buried at the bottom of a bin on my bookshelf, buried under rocks by the river i haven’t been to since july. it’s all been in my head, all of it. but i’m pulling it all out now. i’m pulling it out and burning it to the ground.

you’re crammed in every corner of my headspace. my brain is an attic and you’re the tattered cardboard boxes that fill it, each one spilling over with faint memories of your sideways glances and fantasies of your touch. you’re the dust that billows effortlessly through the crowded space, prancing around to the sounds of your own laughter and shimmering in your radiant gaze. some of it is settled delicately across my most cherished thoughts of you, unwilling to disturb them in all their splendour. and there’s no room left to walk around in here. there’s no room in my head for anything but you.

nonsense. i thought i was in love. i don't know what i was. but the cardboard is stale and mouldy, and the dust is making me sneeze. i forgot how spacious it was in here before i used it to store you. i guess it’s nice that i’m finally moving everything out. sweeping the floors into piles of regular dirt. giving the boxes little shakes, realizing how empty they are. cubes of air with your name scrawled across, space-fillers, some illusion of deep sentimental meaning. but i barely knew you. you barely cared. how disappointing it is to find such magnitudes of nothing.

i’m unfocused this week. almost let myself get convinced to switch programs. you’ll like it so much better. school is killing your creativity. as if you know what i like, as if anyone does. they don’t know i hate everything i do. they don’t know i don’t plan on having a future anyways, that i’m clinging to success till it kills me. i can’t give up now. i can’t let him see how weak i am, i can’t let him win. i need him to see that i’m fine without everything i used to have.

i’m not fine. i don’t want to do this anymore. it’s breaking my brain, it’s splitting my heart. i’m sick of everyone telling me what i need, what the right thing to do is. i’m sick of career paths and people with dreams. what’s my dream? to take pictures forever? to dance, to build lego, to run in a stream and catch fish with my hands? i’m just a kid. i’m sick of everyone treating me like one. but i am.

get an internship. like it’s easy. like they don’t mean fail 50 interviews, lie about skills you don’t have, work for a company you don’t even like. they say it’s easy to convince people you’re better than you are. how? i don’t believe in myself. they’ll see right through me. i’m too underqualified to have dreams, too underqualified to hate this path as much as i do. i need to be smarter. work harder. stop bitching about being jobless, being skill-less. i need to grow up. why have i still not grown up.