#SquadGoals
by Mallory Smart
#SquadGoals:
I will come to you from the woods of the suburb surrounded by highways adolescent. We will start a rave with all our friends, instagram it and get all the likes.
I am bittersweet and poetry tweeting. A sad merrymaker on a cliff. There is a Happy hipster girl beside me leaning off the edge planted in a digital blandness with a cat. A desert of ello and goodbyes, and books made of faces she never knew. She takes a selfie midjump and I wave goodbye, cat in hand.
I wake up mad/ panic attacks every night scratching my head searching for lice that aren’t there, tonguing teeth to make sure I still have them, so that when I throttle my finger deep inside my skull to see if my mind is still inside it thereby killing myself, I can say I followed the standard operating procedure of losing my goddamn mind. You tell me I’m losing my goddamn mind and to come back to bed. I do this. And we go to sleep.
Someone told me that life was better than this. “You should seek life in disparity,” they said. “Break rules that bare no meaning. Pro-tip: there is no meaning. Break them all! Kiss coffee into everyone you know and wake them up so you don’t have to be lonely on the road to living your goddamn life and dying. Madness is only mad when there’s someone around to witness it.” I think that person was a Starbucks barista…
I kiss everyone and everything is ok.
Mallory Smart is a Chicago-based writer and is the Editor-in-Chief of the publishing house, Maudlin House. She also talks about music and literature on the podcast, Textual Healing.
