Everything feels so personal now. The shitty connection of this call, the warping mole on my shoulder, the dinner plate shattered on the floor. It’s dangerous, that kind of belief, but I believe it so much like how some people believe in their own God: Everything in my life is, if not my fault,then instead some symptom, or sign of my unworthiness.
But I feel so silly now saying it. It has suddenly come to me that worth is an idea rather than something definable and tactile. Am I worth more than a homeless person? Would I not move more graciously in a room full of crack addicts? Maybe guiltily, I do think so. Am I better than a greedy politician or an online racist? How about people who text and drive? Or slow walkers? Does my life have more worth on a ship than on land? Worth seems more fantastical by the second. If there’s a worthiness spectrum, I don’t know where I am on it.
The truth is I’ve been depressed lately. Can you tell? I wish I could see what everybody else sees. How they think sitcoms are funny and babies are cute. Most importantly, I would like to know the person they’re looking at in front of their perplexed gazes. Is it the way I move, speak? You can tell me honestly, I won’t be offended.
The plate on the floor in fragments could be, I suppose, my fault, but is it my fault that I’m clumsy? I didn’t purchase my clumsiness, foster it with bad habits and wrong decisions, I just simply became so one day. I am set on a path of wrongness not by choice but through some natural order, some inherent caste system of the universe, like a rollercoaster set on its tracks, my life must be intense and constantly startling. So, the mole, I guess, is a birthmark of my cellular inadequacy. This shitty connection is just another desolate sharp turn of my day, which makes up a week, a month, my life.
I realise you haven’t been talking. Can you hear me? Hello, hello?
Emily Linehan has shown a great interest in all things literature from a young age. She has been published in the anthology Cork Words 2, Icarus, What Now, and is a 2021 runner-up in UCC’s Eoin Murray Scholarship. After completing her M.Phil. in Creative Writing with Trinity, she is currently teaching, and working on her novel.
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