=burn diary=

The Long Walk Home from School

I feel totally exposed & vulnerable. Bullies everywhere, even if I can't see them. In the background: the hanging tree in the schoolyard. I've escaped it somehow but that just means they'll hang me again tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow. That's how bullies operate: they never outright kill you; they always leave just enough life in you to torture you all over again the next time. Look, in the foreground, the bullies have left me a message: my impaled genitals, meaning "We're coming for you." I seem to be walking on water, which represents how perilous my life felt to me—I could go beneath the surface like a stone & drown at any moment. What keeps me from sinking isn't a miracle in any meritorious sense of the term; nonetheless, it is a miracle. How do I do it? The green cat represents an unexpected sign of life on the otherwise scorched plane: symbolic of a talent for quick escapes from near-misses, an instinct for survival in spite of myself. 

At the far right, my father in his skeleton suit, never far from my thoughts.