Roach.

 I feel like a Roach. Hard shelled, scurrying off to corners where I can’t be seen, and unkillable.

The Hiroshima bomb released enough gamma doses to kill off a human, but not a roach. Then we dropped Nagasaki. It makes my skin crawl knowing I relate to something so ugly. If you find beauty in me—in a roach—you must be one too. It isn’t freeing or badass like being a final girl in a horror movie. People don’t look at me with awe when I tell them what I’ve been through. They just look at me funny. Why you? Just another way of calling me abominable. Anything but brand friendly.  

I am a survivor of gun violence twice over, and I’m a Roach.

And though I can't sit here and say I’ve fully grasped why I bug out the way I do at every loud, sudden noise, or that I've survived something large like Parkland or Orlando or Las Vegas; I can say I've ran for my life. I can say I pushed classmates out of my way–selfishly–and jumped into a classmate's car. I can say I’ve been in too many real lockdowns to count. That I'm a victim of a hate crime where my life was threatened with a firearm, the perpetrator being my childhood best friend. And though I’m just one of many people with PTSD due to passively being in shootings, I don’t fit into the mold of what a survivor actually looks like. I don’t have physical scars, or dead friends, there wasn’t even a death count. Trauma without spectacle is often dismissed.

Two times. Maybe the third time’s a charm? 

By the way things are going, a third time is inevitable.

I’m sorry, are you uncomfortable? 

I yearn to be the Heroine. I want to be Maxine Minx, I want to be Laurie Strode. Sidney Prescott. Nancy Thompson. You’ll go see their movies, would you ever consider seeing mine? The vampire isn’t real, the werewolf isn't real, the zombie isn’t real, but the man with a gun is. The mundane, the everyday, the statistically predestined. Once you’ve seen him, you’ll smile at haunted dolls. Horror has rules, I simply exist outside of them. 

I want to be alone in this. I want the experience to swallow me whole and vanish from everyone’s psyche. I don’t want anyone to relate to. I don’t want to see the headlines. I barely want to acknowledge the existence of something so quick and cruel, that it encompasses us all when a new story drops of an irresponsible parent leaving their gun around an incompetent child. The pain holds the mirror to our undaunted faces when we hear about how easy it is to get something as ruthless as an assault rifle. Are we the barbarians? Are we not the creators of our own ruin? 

All of a sudden, I’m sixteen again. I’m sixteen and my nervous system is too smart for her own good. I’m sixteen and I’m grieving the Friday I could’ve had. I’m sixteen, and the only reason I showed up to school was for gossip and crushes, and I ran out of campus with my soul outside of my body, knowing it’ll take one too many solar returns to have it pulled back to earth. In pieces, but back to me. Vivid, invasive, and inescapable. Looking pretty at the world was my mistake.

Am I making you feel sick?

Who am I, anymore? If not someone who died long before they’ve lived. 

When it happens again, I pray it snatches me painlessly. I’ll be revered and honored. Immortalized. I won't be gawked at. I’ll be perfect. I’ll die loved, even. Not just because I can’t bear going through the motions of existing after the fact again; but because I won’t be a Roach anymore. I’ll just be dirt.