2. will i die if i’m not liked
I know people say to keep track of the people who like you, not the ones who don’t... but not me. I always keep track of the people that don’t like me. To be honest, the only people I care about are the ones who don’t like me. It’s not potential lovers that keep me up at night, it’s the haters. The soul murderers and the essence dismantlers. And I know they can’t really kill me but it feels like they bring me closer to my death with each passing day. It’s like they know I lose a year off my life every time they roll their eyes at me and that’s why they do it. It’s like they want to see me perish in hell.
So many people don’t like me, it was getting hard to keep up with how many years I was losing. I can’t count past 10 on my fingers so I had to do something to remember the number of people who have disliked me in my life. I had to get a tattoo of it. Yup, that’s right. I have a tattoo on my inner thigh with 47,395 tally marks so far. One for every person who’s had a negative reaction to me. At this point, it could win an award at a Ripley’s Believe It or Not for longest tattoo ever. It looks like the cash register forgot to press ‘send’ on the bar code and end the receipt.
I have to go in every week to get a new round of lines drawn. It’s painful. Awful. And that’s just when I walk through the door and the receptionist, who also doesn’t like me, whom I already have a line drawn for, has to check me in for my appointment. I sit there staring at her mark as I wait for my tattoo-er to finish his cigarette and deathly reflection in the back alley so he can put more ink to commiserate my losses.
As soon as I get to the chair, my tattoo-er rolls his eyes and thinks “here she is again” then adds another line. He only started disliking me after he asked me what the meaning of my tattoo was. That’s how I know people don’t like me just because they know it takes a year off my life. The tattooist didn’t even ask me what the tattoo meant until my 13th line. That’s how much he didn’t naturally like me. He didn’t even ask what the tattoo was for. He didn’t even care about me.I knew he hated me by session two. That’s when I told him “cheers buddy, can you add one more line just for you <3”
I can’t control who doesn’t like me but I can remember every single one of their names and make a permanent mark on my body so that I never, ever forget who they are and why I’m going to die sooner. And the worst part about all of this is that even if you don’t get the tattoo to keep track, you’re still going to die one year sooner for every person who doesn’t like you during the course of your life.
You know, the government will never admit this but we’re all supposed to live to 111. No one’s ever made it because no one’s ever gone through life without being not liked. We all die too soon. Living to 100 is the goal. But most people are happy to die by 88 because the unlikable nature of yourself starts to wear at you by age 11. It starts to tear apart your insides and twist your guts from within as soon as you start realizing the people you called friends were hidden enemies in plain sight, pretending to like you just so that it means more once they dislike you.
They kill you without a trace. Worse than serial killers, they are the most deadly people you know and they’re all around you, plotting your demise through their expressions of dislike.