Counting Travel Clocks

I’m tired of being so predictably consistently inconsistent and absent, especially since it’s completely unintentional and I try so hard to be different. I want to be someone anyone thinks of as dependable but I’m exactly the opposite, I’m reliably unreliable. I’m the person who reads your text, hears a noise outside and completely forgets it was ever sent. This morning I thought it was July already, I’m the girl who doesn’t even know what month we’re in. I swear I’d forget my own name if I hadn’t spent the last 21 years hearing you call it out when I wasn’t listening. I’m sorry.

When you’re pacing around your room waiting for me to call and follow through on the plans we’d made the night before, I hope you know it’s not that I’ve forgotten. It’s not on purpose, it’s just that I haven’t slept in days and in my head it’s still Monday and Tuesday hasn’t even started yet. I’m sorry. Yesterday my grandma sent me a text and said, “I hope you’re safe.” It was only after reading her text that I realized it’d been a year since I’d been to visit, she only lives an hour away. I feel so guilty for letting everyone down but I swear it was just yesterday that I was at her house. Only it wasn’t, it was the Christmas before last and I was so high I hardly remember opening presents.

If no one tapes a calendar to my vacuum on October 17th, I’ll turn 22 without ever noticing. Half the time I don’t even know what time of day it is, so if I’m not there at 2pm like I promised then you can just assume in my head, it’s still two in the morning. I’m sorry I keep disappointing you because you don’t deserve it and I don’t know why I can’t be on time when there’s literally 14 clocks in my apartment. (I seriously just walked around and counted them.) It’s five in the morning right now and I was about to call the friend I had plans with two days ago to invite her to coffee— I didn’t realize it was Saturday and Thursday had come and gone already. I’m starting to feel like such an asshole that I’ve given up on making plans with anyone because I’ll only let them down, that seems to be my pattern now.

I keep complaining about not having many friends but I rarely acknowledge the possible reason for that— they never know if I’m going to answer the phone or text them back, I’m sure my response is too late two days later. No one cares that I spent those two days bleaching the blinds in my living room and cleaning the oven I’ve never even used. I spent those two days crying alone in my room, writing poems about how badly I wished to be someone new.

I’m sorry I keep disappointing you, if I were you— I’d hate me too.