excerpt from "C + Me"

Allow me to pick a sharpened pencil and ram it into my neck. Allow me to materialize a pistol from the rage I can pit into the palm of my clenched fist. Allow me to thread the years of my life, my halo of a childhood, through the pupil, past the iris, the pistil of a flower, to see what I have never seen, the silencing of my life, the blackness, time through gusting tunnels of thick howling clouds hurling me from my body, out of myself, suffocating on the gulps of frigid air, like on the tops of mountains, becoming tepid, teetering to asphyxiation. Let me have this. Let me die.

I cannot say this mission is a recent acquisition. I have begged my mother for my death on the 12-pack of children's stickers that had a furry, upright monster, smiling, with a lion's mane of purple fur - the sticker primarily being three inches of white space, its boundaries outlined by a large speech bubble pointing out of the monster's open smile. I had saved them in my drawer, cherishing them for what they were : relics of the second grade where I was the recipient of these stickers for being well-behaved, and good. These were special. I had no idea what I'd make them utter with such glee, I had no idea until I stopped caring. I took them, knowing the act of writing on them would be my own murder, a pen to the empty space, ink on the vapid, all saying the same thing, the only thing I wonder if I've ever wanted: "Kill me," in Spanish. Kill me, I wrote on all of the stickers, without peeling their backings, reducing myself to a machine that would fling the desecrated rectangles of paper. Kill me, I wrote in Spanish, because I wanted her to understand the severity of this plea, and two weeks later I was still eleven years old, and she was still my mother, and nothing felt right because nothing had changed.







Nancy Romero, November 2007