I spin. From one memory to the next, my tortured brain yanks me through a place I did not know existed. I don’t know where my body is. It seems my connection to it has been severed. The next memory is dumped on me like a bucket of cold water.

I see my mother’s excited and glowing face as she shows me my new sister. She is beautiful, in hindsight. But all I could see in her was the flaws. Her slightly flattened face and more pronounced eyes. She has down syndrome. I am forced to listen to my bratty, childish, self say angrily, “I did not want a sibling, especially one that doesn’t have a brain.” My mother’s face crumples as I run from the room under a blanket of shame.

This memory bleeds into the next. I want to sob, but I cannot. It is just me and my thoughts.

A new memory. My hands are almost too sweaty to hold the needle that my grandmother gave me. She has been trying to teach me sewing basics for the last hour and I have been an ungrateful idiot. “I can’t do this,” I proclaim in a whiny voice. “I am just too stupid.”

My sweet grandmother tries to encourage me. “You are not stupid, honey. You simply have to practice.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I look at her. I am so mad at my failure that I no longer care. “If I am smart enough, then you must be too dumb to teach me.” I have always had a problem with people that I perceive to be not as smart as I am and that problem shows itself constantly.

I draw into the soft darkness that now seems to be my home. I am a terrible person. I had not thought about these things in years! No one should love me. Did I even apologize?

My thoughts mercilessly drown me in my worst failures for an eternity.

When mother told me to watch the cookies, but I forgot. They burned. Which made grandpa mad. Which put mother in danger trying to protect me.

When I got my high school diploma at fourteen, and I was asked how I did it. My speech was so self-absorbed! I forgot my family, my God, and my friends. Without them, I would be nowhere. But I forgot them.

When I dared my best friend, at seven years old, to climb a fence twenty feet high. He fell and broke his leg. I never saw him again because my shame was too strong to accept my mistake. He moved away two years later.

Every time that I ever failed, from not keeping promises at five, to cheating on that one test at ten years old. Every circumstance was played through my head on a loop. With no sense of time, my tortured mind cried for release.

I did learn one interesting thing in that experience. Eternity really is forever. And forever hurts when you are stuck with yourself.