chapter one. you don't remember warm hands and warm blankets and what the sun looks like rising over the peak of a mountain, because that was never there - it was unfamiliar wood and unfamiliar hands and your best friend's skull splitting into orchids and chrysanthemums every time he looked at you and smiled. you take it upon yourself to help two other people as well as yourself, ensuring there's food and there's company. you don't like it when people touch you. you'll talk and then go quiet and you can't bring yourself to speak. they're calling it early childhood trauma. you learn how to cook and you learn how to keep a good posture. anything to make sure you'll wake up the next day.
chapter two, and everything you were burns, everything that gave you nothing is gone overnight and she goes with it - they say you grow overnight, but you've been too mature all this time, keeping your head up so you can match the eyes of adults, restricting yourself so someone else can have more. you see and hear things you're reminded aren't there. your teeth hurt when you talk and you're too young to want to die. the halfway house between ash and steel is where you start thinking about not waking up.
footnotes start to appear. school, opportunity, a family you don't love but they feed and shelter you. his head still bleeds petals, and the new girl does too. the ones who stay bleed like this. those who don't have red spilling over their lips.
chapter three and she's dead and you're dead and they won't look at you the same way ever again, every rotting thing inside your skull took on the wrong name and the wrong title and killed someone something a thing a living thing a woman and you can't ever go back, you can't find the house you were never welcomed in and you can't walk to school with them ever again, running your nails down your arms as you rot in a park. you remember too much. you'd rather forget. forget and die. forget and die. forget and die and let her flesh and blood take you from the world, split your lungs and stretch them out, forget and die.
chapter four, and you're under a familiar roof, planning your funeral. that kid looks you in the eye and smiles. you remember how to walk, you remember how to breathe, you're listening to two different doomsday cults, you remember how to take your pills. you count to remember you're you, because he can't count - all he can do is kill.
ten times four is forty, and then you count down. thirty nine, thirty eight.