jo mars. three.

Convulsing on the living room floor and my mother is tired of this. There is something bad coming - and then it is here, in my chest, this is the bad thing. This is the thing I was frightened of. It is me, inside of me, and I cannot get it out.

I'm afraid I'll be like this forever -
choking on the smoke that killed our father.

It passes, like it always does. This too shall pass - I keep telling myself that. But when you're in the middle of disaster, unable to shake it off, it feels like forever. Mom suggests we take me back to the clinic and I'd rather die. Truly, madly, I'd rather die than go back. It wasn't terribly wrong or awful or bad. Being there just made me feel even more insane than I usually do.

I'm tired of this. My mother is tired of this. My siblings are tired of this. My name is a sigh, Joplin. Synonym of exhaustion, of not again, of for Christ's sake. Cancelled plans or plans cut short. Days ruined, lives put on hold. They give me valium until I can manage to fall asleep without gasping for air and thirteen hours later I wake up, feeling human once more. 

Temporary. But I take what I can get. It will come back once more, when I'm sleeping or far too busy to twig what's going on. I get dizzy, so dizzy I pass out in the halls at school and the doctor said I had been hyperventilating for three weeks without realising it. I stare up at my ceiling (they tell me rest, rest will cure all) and curl up into a memory: the tower, Ursa Major, my father said he'd find a star and name it for me - an entire constellation of Mars and his children. 

He is dead and there are no more stars to discover. We stay grounded, smothered - when Dad told me stars were distant things burning out of the night sky I didn't think he meant literally. They're dying, my father told me. How beautiful is that?

My father is dead, and I am constantly sure I am dying - there is nothing beautiful in this. Ash, a dark circle burned into the grass in the back yard. Mother tells me they wanted one more and got two instead. So I would hide up in that tower with a book or a sketchpad, making myself so small I was near invisible. If I pretended that I wasn't taking up space, that I was as far away from this house as the stars in the sky, maybe I'd just fade away altogether. Hold my breath and shut my eyes and tremble back to the corners of my shared bedroom.

Joplin, I shorten my name to Jo aged seven. Less space, less energy, less of a mouthful for everyone else. My fingers are raw and bleeding, barely any nail left, anxious picking turned biting turned pulling out hair in the back of my head. When I do speak it is a whisper, the same two or three words:

"Sorry. I'm sorry."
-"Stop saying sorry."
"Oh- okay... sorry."

It is easy to fade into the background with beautiful Sybil, fierce Ebony, daredevil Van. Even Bowie - who is so essential to this fractured family - deserves more space than I. I am extra. Unnecessary. Waste. And what do I do with it?

Panic panic panic panic panic panic panic panic.