—I CAN EAT MY DINNER IN A FANCY RESTAURANT

 

 

How to Survive Age Nine

 

1.   Sleep opposite-fetal, with two daggers tucked up under your young boy wrists, sharpest blade out first.

2.   Make your breath softer than a whisper, even less than the hiss of a snake, or the wind rippling through a sail.

3.   Pray hard, and try not to choke, or laugh, at the outcome.

4.   Control your imagination—It’s your most potent defense. Create a monster that’s bigger, stronger, and hairier, even more brutal than the one that’s coming for you.

5.   Wear spurs to bed, detachable spikes that can be used to gouge eyes out, if you’re quick enough with your slender, shaky fingers.

6.   Be still as the ice cubes that are stuck in the tray, in the otherwise empty freezer, where nothing else goes, other than skulls, or your step-dad’s after-booze.

7.   Make a bedsheet ladder, tie it to a hinge, or a flange, and fall where you may, remembering the refrain, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

8.   Break a drinking glass and swallow each shard until your throat and belly say, “Enough. God, enough. I’m done.”

9.   Make a homemade garrote out of your underwear, and stand ready, alert, both arms up in the air like a victor who’s about to win his first big thing.

10.  Scream like the owls you see, but never hear.

11.  Become an owl, and swivel your head in all directions, noticing everything and nothing all at once.

12. Don’t become a Boy Scout, whatever you do.

13. Remember DNA is now traceable.

14. Forget about those thumbprints on your neck, how they stay there for days, like stoplights, or bruised daisies that never die.

15. Pretend what happened never happened, that the moon didn’t see it, that no one did, not even Jesus, because He was busy napping.

16. Lastly, tell someone. And not just a therapist. Tell someone you trust, someone who’ll believe you at least this once, even if it makes you feel less than, even if it makes you feel nothing at all.  Tell someone. Someone.