letter to a psych somewhere

after my mother told me i would be getting a shrink, i daydreamed of all the things i would tell you about myself, how i am sometimes irreparably lonely and how on long car trips i sometimes stay awake for periods of time training my eyes to be unfocused over the white lines on interstate highways, or i sleep with my feet tucked underneath the floorboard carpets, or i read kurt vonnegut novels.  after my mother told me she wanted me to talk to someone, i panicked.
here are some things you should know about me: i memorise poetry for fun. i would have an entire vonnegut novel engraved on my tombstone if it would fit. i am good at lying to other people and i am exceptional at lying to myself. i can talk myself out of love.
i have.
i want everyone to know that i am fine.  fine is my favourite lie.
my hands are freezing. i always have to wear jackets.
i unbuckled my seatbelt and climbed into the back of the car to rescue my laptop when i knew i had to write this down and my parents said nothing when they heard me click the buckle back into place or open up the computer and begin tapping on the keys.  
i wish they would stop looking at me.
it is impossible to train your eyes to stop scanning trees when they speed by and your car stands still, did you know that
i tried.
i decided that i would tell you about how i’m disappointed that i eat normally these days and how i don’t want my parents to find this because mostly i want to suffer without them knowing.  mostly i want to suffer and be cute and creative and artsy in my suffering but my mother is sometimes tricky and strangely perceptive.  mostly i just want her to stop noticing me so much and it doesn’t help that my older brother has gone away to college.
i decided that i would tell you some things and not everything and i decided that you would probably hear that and say okay because i am not required by law to tell you anything
i decided
that’s the beauty of it, really.  i can tell you almost nothing, i can give you fifty puzzle pieces out of five hundred, i can say that i was born at howard county general, and ask you to tell me why i am here, what is wrong with me, how to fix myself.
and the tragedy
my parents are willing to do anything to fix me. they sat with me in waiting rooms before surgeries that cost thousands of dollars, drove me to all sorts of doctor’s appointments, made me smoothies when my jaws were wired shut.
but i don’t want to be fixed this time.
i don’t know many liars but i am the best of them all.  i go to church and i have faith or fake it.  i believe in the mercy of people and the power of knowledge.  i am the president of school clubs and youth organizations.  i am applying to colleges in new york city and boston.  i ride horses, i play soccer, i smile at children.  
i never want to have kids because i’m scared they will end up like me and i’m scared that they won’t.  i want to adopt older kids because they know things that i know and they know things that i don’t, because no one wants them but i do.  i do.  i want those children the way i want to be a writer in malaga or new york, the way i want to be an organ donor, the way i want to be famous because i write what i think and not necessarily what i know.  i want those children the way i want to be dysfunctional in spain, diseased in my hometown, and in love underwater.  i want to be sick a little, i want to die slow, i want famous last words or the chance to make someone’s life different, if not better.  
i want to help the invisible children, or the people in appalachia, and i want to spend more than five seconds signing my name on a petition, and i want to spend my life smiling at those children and giving them what they need.  
i want to spend my life writing
i want to hand out sandwiches to the hungry on the corners of streets with numbers for names.  i want to listen to the radio and not have any clue what i will hear.  my left hand is always colder than my right.  when i am cold my handwriting shrinks.
i decided to tell you that it’s raining and i am not bothered.  i decided to tell you that i still haven’t saved this document and i am a sea of headlights in port cities across the universe.  i am a study in ethics along the west coasts of twenty nine different countries, i am amazed at being afloat and dry underwater, i am the top forty static in the jungles of south america.  
this is a character study and i am behind a three-way mirror and impossibilities abound.  
i am a study in ethics, i am a woolen bird kissing leaves from opaque july’s knees, i am a lie and its liar, i am an infinity of happy goats awash in light from jesus’ painted halo. if i am moved, if i am moved and you do not know.
i am the last insurgent with high-impact dreams and a gun for fulfilling them.  i am a seventeen year old theocracy faced with my choice of college mascots and worries which i have convinced myself are not entirely irrational.  
see, i have doubts.  i saved the document.  how terribly mainstream of me.
i have this unquenchable desire to fall in love with every undiscovered artist while going eighty on the highway and not getting pulled over by police.  i tend to be unaware of clichés but i know enough to be skeptical of “i love you” and most everything that i see on television.  i know enough to be so skeptical that i don’t like to be touched.  
i decided to tell you that the first short story i can remember spending time on was about a girl who dismantled her psychiatrist’s desk with a screwdriver from her pocket while he was out of the room.  but i don’t own a screwdriver and i doubt most desks these days can be dismantled in such a manner.  if you have a desk at all.  
my fingers don’t hurt anymore when i play the guitar.  my left thumb is double jointed.  
i decided to tell you that i don’t think i am in love anymore