Let me tell you some of the things I know about the month of May. It is the fifth month of our Gregorian calendar and the month that first kick starts our summer. These things I know, but they are of little to no importance. I'll tell you some more. In May, the sun comes up too early and doesn't set 'til almost too late in the evening. I've worked harder this month than I have all year, and things are about to get tougher. I finished college almost a month ago, for those five months of summer that most relish. But there is something in this month that bruises my skin, not so much memories anymore but just goddamn feelings. Of what use are they now? It's almost four years to the day since they put me in hospital because I took too many pills and drank a little too much and then claimed that I didn't really want to die, that I was just experimenting with my body. Truth is, even at that fucked up, I couldn't deal with telling other people that I am not okay. I lay on that bed counting the tiles in the ceiling. They tried to make me use a bedpan but I was stubborn. They pushed me in a wheelchair. I smiled. My brother never came to visit but I bought him a birthday present, anyhow. Four years later. Those are just words without meaning and I am an inconsequential little fuck. I am stuck in a job that I am starting to hate because I am here every hour of every day. I work here and sleep here and shower here and watch TV here and pretend to exist here. My boss leaves with bad news but comes back exchanging it with something worse. I would leave if I had a place to go, and if May didn't somehow make me feel so guilty. I am sitting here with a pain in my gut that's followed me around for weeks now and I am too afraid to be seen by my doctor because it's always the same. Stop being so anxious, they tell me. My hands are tied. So I do the next best thing. I take a razor and I cut all of my hair off until you can see the colour of my scalp. It's supposed to relieve me somehow, and in ways it does, but in others, it can't. Saturday night, I allowed myself a night out with my boyfriend and I found myself smoking cigars out the back of the local with a crowd of people that I have no intention of ever having anything to do with ever again. A drunk man with curly hair waited all that time until just as I was about to leave and asked me in the most snide of manners where it was that I got my hair cut. The words got caught in my throat and I left but I should have mentioned that nurse Margaret in that hospital just to make him feel bad, the way people like him have done to Maria and to Anastasia and to Shirley and to all those other people that had no choice but to lose their hair (and shhh, eventually, their lives). I was so angry with him and my pulse tried so hard to shoot out my mouth but I sat and I pretended and I reminded myself that some things are temporary. After all that, I wished the worst sort of death on him too. May he die bawling and puking and may nobody come to his side.
I am not sorry. I'm blaming the month of May.