The first rule of survival is this:
If you think too much about it, you won't.
.
You were never much a reader. You liked music, sound. Something to shake your world. And music, unlike poetry and all that shit, drowned out your voice. You could howl with your headphones on.
(He used to bang on the door and tell you to shut up.)
(He. Him. Phillip. Gone.)
.
Survival doesn't come from thinking. It comes from a deep-gnawed need, and it harnesses the peripheral sight of animal instinct and the knowledge that the scent of blood is always exactly the same.
.
The concertos he listened to over and over again. The food he ate and sent back if it was less than perfect.
The jokes he would play with life and death and the ugly spectrum in between.
It's enough that you would claw your own brain out, just to forget—
-only he would like that. He would find it funny, so you stop. You stay live another day, to spite him.
Cut off an ear to spite your face—
Cut them off, Jessica—
.
This is survival: your mother is a monster and needs to die.
Only, you can't think too much about it. If you do, it won't be real anymore and you will hear her voice and see the way she looks at you, and you won't—you don't have what it takes—
This is survival, maybe: loyalty. Pack mentality, but you have been alone for so long that that cannot be true. You have evolved into something different, but no less gnawing.
.
Just like me.
I'm not, you say, and you break free.
You'll choose your prison bars, now and always. You tell yourself that and it feels like breathing—so, like not very much at all.
.
Survival, Trish always said, was no way to live.
Then she killed your mother.