Fuck 2015

For myself and many people I love, so far 2015 has just been one long fall down a set of concrete stairs.

We were thrown down them by the abusive stepfather our mother nicknamed “Life”. “Life would never hurt you,” Mom told us when we were very little, the first time we noticed she had a black eye. We believed her.

As we grew up, we realized Life is a brutal asshole with a menagerie of addictions and a truly fucked up sense of humor. Life lost his job and whatever sense of self-purpose that wasn’t sadistic in the stock market crash, so he sought gainful employment in the field of human misery. Life has come for us often since then, but we’ve managed to hold our own. He got fed up with us fighting back around the end of December of last year, so this happened. We’re not entirely sure why Life threw us down the stairs, but it was probably because we refused to go pick him up a pack of menthols. “We can’t,” we said, “we’re not even adults yet”. But Life didn’t care. Life was in a drunken rage, the kind of blind, chemical hatred that burns through your face like acid.

The nice thing about falling down stairs is that eventually the stairs end. Eventually you hit the ground. We’ve got busted teeth and cracked ribs, bleeding brains and broken hearts. Life might walk down and kick us one more time before he lets Mom call an ambulance, just to let us know who’s boss. We’ll be out of commission for a little while, trapped in the purgatory of healing, and our recovery will be absolutely fraught because we can’t be there to protect our family from Life’s violence. But we’ll be ok again. We’ll scrub our own blood out of the concrete so you’ll never even know how we got hurt. Then we’ll walk back up the stairs and kick Life’s ass.