I don’t have special happy anything. For a few years I took a lot of acid, that was pretty special-happy, but I got burned out on it eventually. I remember sitting on the floor of some girl’s apartment, rubbing my face on the carpet, watching the leaves fall off of her lamp, and I just thought: “What the fuck is this? This is just pointless.” I forgot about it, but then every time I dropped acid I would remember again and obsess on it, you know how that goes. Or maybe you don’t- Are you a drug virgin, Mercy? Somehow I don’t think you are. Anyway, a year or so later I just quit. It wasn’t fun anymore. I guess I grew out of it.
I don’t know why I’m doing this. Every letter I send feels more like signing a confession. Today I was went downtown to meet with some friends, and I saw a girl standing all by herself at a bus stop, and I thought of you. I just don’t think I should be like that with you. It’s not safe for either of us. Eventually someone is going to find out about the letters, like the post office is going to x-ray the packages or something. And it’s going to look like I’m partly responsible for all the killing somehow, I know it will. I’ll end up in jail with a bunch of Toothless Donnas. You know, women who act like they’re fourteen even though they’re like forty and have saggy tits. Me and my friends call them Toothless Donnas after this anorexic looking bitch we went to junior high with. When we started high school, everyone grew up a little but her, she never changed. We call her toothless because she started a fight with some girl and got her face thrown into a brick wall and lost all of her front teeth. She was such a bitch. She totally deserved it.
It’s like a dirty secret, you know? I shouldn’t be contacting you. I should be so ashamed of myself for what I did that I should want to call the police myself. I don’t even feel a little bad. I don’t even feel the tiniest bit sorry about the kid. And the fact that you know about it, you were there, it makes it seem like you’re the only one who can understand the part of me that did it. I used to think that part of me was really small and just noisy, but now I know better. It’s big. It’s so big that it takes all of my energy every day just to hold it back. If I give in just a little bit, all of the sudden I can’t think about anything else. And my stomach starts to tumble around, like I’m sick. But it’s not a bad sick, it’s the kind of sick that you get when you want something so bad that even going without it feels good. You almost want it to hurt because you’re desperate to feel any part of it. It’s like a wound you got from touching the fire; you almost don’t care how much it hurts because it means you got to get close to something so incredibly beyond your own limits, something so beautiful that you’re afraid to even dream of having it.
But it’s wrong, I know it. The part of me that has a family and friends knows that it would be really fucked up if one of them was murdered. Whether they deserved it or not, I’m not the person who can just kill someone and walk away from it. Well, I guess I am. But just once. Never again. Never.
-Ingrid
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