I’ve had a matter on my mind of late,
A little worry niggling at the corner of my brain.
Another school shooting,
Another group of people dead,
Another flag at half mast, and why?
A weathered cloth a few feet lower on a dirty steel pole
That won’t bring those people back.
They should send a senator to comfort the families,
Tell them that their kids died for people’s rights to enlarge their egos with death machines.
The kid’s name was Elliot Rodger.
Read a few pages of his manifesto.
Sounded a bit like me.
Depressed, quiet, awkward around peers,
Disappeared into a cyber-universe for a few years,
The same one I crawled out of after eighth grade.
Now, this makes my blood boil. I’m not like some neurotic little turd who refused help and shattered people’s lives because he didn’t have the stones to take a few beige pills.
But this tiny voice, this part of my brain that has it out for me, keeps murmuring in my head.
Oh, but what if? What if he was broken, and you’re breaking?
No.
We’re fundamentally different, he and I. He thought he was perfect, entitled, the paragon of human existence.
I know I’m flawed.
Deeply flawed.
Perhaps even fatally flawed.
I imagine a dead boy lying like a doll thrown down by some careless toddler, gun in hand
Yea, gun in hand, its throat hot, death peering out of its hollow eye socket, and I think--
No.
That’s broken.
I look at my hands, sweaty, pink, a burn healing on my left index finger.
I got that burn baking cookies for my friends. White chocolate, macadamia nuts, and vanilla extract--
Eyes radiation blue, cheeks a flushed, arms skeletal and restless--the boy--
That’s broken.
I am not.