The art of not making the list

Not mediocre. Worse. Forgettable.

They don’t tell you about the particular mathematics of not mattering. Not last place, not even that dignified. Last place is still a place, a number, a small, stubborn proof of existence. I am what slips the list entirely. Not mediocre. Worse. Forgettable. A name forgotten before it is written. I have practiced coming in nowhere so often I have become expert at it, the way other people become experts at coding or languages or being loved. I wait anyway. I stretch it thin across days.

My brain won’t shut up. It never shuts up. One thought splitting into five, into ten, into something uncountable. I am here, writing this sentence, and also the bills, and also two days ago saying something that sounded wrong, and also tomorrow’s unfinished tasks, and also the dishes, and also the next sentence that will not land. Nothing lands. My thoughts race like rats in the walls of a house no one visits anymore. Scatter and multiply and I cannot catch a single one long enough to finish it, to make it into something whole. My brain is a train station where all the trains arrive at once and none of them stop, and I am standing on the platform with my hands full of tickets to places that I cannot go to.

I have become so replaceable I might as well be air. Transparent. Necessary in theory but noticed by no one. They breathe me in and exhale me without a thought. I could disappear and the shape of the world would not change. The chair would still be warm. Someone else would already be sitting in it.

There’s a mathematics to burden I have learned by heart. How much sadness is too much sadness to speak aloud. How many minutes of crying before someone’s eyes glaze over with the particular film of wishing to be elsewhere. Before they press their hands to their temples because I am the reason their head hurts. Four minutes. That’s how long my sadness was interesting. Half think I am too heavy to hold. The others have already set me down and walked away. So the judges render their verdict: I must learn the art of being light. To produce and produce and produce like a machine that never requires maintenance. No blood to interrupt the work. No pulse to betray it. No soft and inconvenient need to be gathered up and held.

My throat still remembers the last time I cried. The raw scrape of it. It hurts to swallow. It hurts to talk. It hurts to cry again but I want to cry again. I need to. There’s this howl stuck in my chest and I cannot let it out because my throat cannot take it and also there’s no one to hear it and also what’s the point. The point is I’m alone with this scream and it’s going to choke me.

At night I stare at the ceiling and the darkness stares back. Not the gentle dark of sleep but the wide-eyed dark of absolute wakefulness. My mind replays every moment I was not chosen, every time I fell through the gaps, every ranking list that ended before my name. I count them like sheep but they do not bring sleep. They bring only more counting. I think about it often too. The ending. The cars. The height of the building. The pills in my mom’s drawer, and how long it takes. But not yet. Not today. I think about the different doors out of this room and how easy it would be to walk through one. The stop. The relief of it. The silence. I pray for God to decide for me, to make it an accident, an act of mercy I do not have to orchestrate myself. Please, I say into the dark. Before I have to do it myself.

I make space for everyone. I am so good at making space. I can fold myself smaller and smaller until I am nearly invisible, until there’s room for everyone’s needs but mine. I wait for my turn and my turn never comes. It’s always someone else’s turn. The world is full of people whose turns have come and I am the one still waiting.

I try to be better. Better at everything. I will master this, I think, and then this, and then this. But I am a diluted version of competence, spread so thin I am invisible at all of it. Forgettable at work. Unremarkable as a daughter. Easily replaced as a friend. Overlooked in love. Never worth keeping. I am the participation trophy of humans. I showed up. That is all.

My brain is ugly and no one can handle it. The thoughts that loop and crash and contradict. The heaviness of my feelings, the way I make everything harder just by being how I am. Difficult, they say. Too much, they say. And I know they are right because I feel it too … the weight of me, the burden of my own existence.

I am tired in my bones. I am tired in my blood. I am tired in the parts of me that used to hope. I want to be excused from the room, to be released from the obligation of continuing. I am so tired of continuing.

And still, I know I am not deserving. Not worthy of the rest I crave, not worthy of the love I need, not worthy even of my own grief. I am just a name that doesn’t make the list.

And I am so very, very tired of not making the list.