seventeen reasons why i need to count to ten

Reasons why I am so angry that I could rip the head off a teddy bear. Actually no, I could never do that.

1) Due to a quirk of fate, for the first three months of next year I will be spending upwards of 8 hours a week in the company of one of the few people in the world who I find it extremely difficult to love. What would Jesus do? If I pretend to honestly believe that Jesus' reaction to this guy would be to smack him upside the head with a ring binder, does it justify me doing it?

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4) The play we're studying makes Christians look like pathetic, clingy and downright stupid losers. Calloo, callay, oh frabjous day.

5) I have a mosquito bite on my arm. It's December. Why?

6) She's not doing it intentionally, I know. But, oh Lord, she's making this whole thing so much more difficult. Wanna make me cry and simultaneously run the fuck away? Talk to me like I'm 7 and get all sentimental, as if you're the only one who's lost someone, as if you're the only one brave enough to express it in that awful, quavery voice. I know I'm hurting. Do I look like I want to discuss it with you?

7) That I can't discuss how I feel with anyone. I feel like I'm screaming into a room that's full of people and I'm sure they'd all love to chat, but they all speak a foreign language so I'm holding pillows over their ears so they can't hear at all. I'd rather not talk to anyone, my words come out wrong and I can never get out what I'm trying to say.

8) That I am still the same stupid girl I was two years ago. I haven't grown up. Not even a little bit, not even at all.

9) That people have funerals. Why? Let's dress up in black and go together in black cars in awkward silence to the place where they will burn my grandmother and all sit on hard wooden seats and cry out loud, with her body in a wooden box, freezing cold, just feet away. Let's hate every single fucking second of it, listening to some man who NEVER EVEN MET MY GRANDMOTHER talking about what a blessing she was and then lets all have the cheek to lie about it, and say how beautiful it was. Funerals are not beautiful. If I die tomorrow, have a party. Play my favourite songs and get completely wasted and don't let anyone wear black.
If I die tomorrow, please don't turn my funeral into an occasion that is harder to deal with than my own death.

10) That I can't stop whinging. My dad has lost his mother. My cousins have been landed with the task of going back to gran's flat and clearing it out. There are orphans and starving people. Some people feel like this all the time. I hate that I feel so sorry for myself.

11) That life is not fair.

12) That, at 17, I still get surprised when I'm reminded that life is not fair.

13) That I don't understand why God has done this, or is doing this. Some light at the end of the tunnel would be great.

14) That I'm still getting mad at God, when he's the only light I actually have in the tunnel at all.

15) That now, when my family actually need me to be strong and supportive, I can't stand to be around them. I deal in my own way. I deal on my own, or with the help of a person who's right at the time. All of a sudden now Granny has died, I'm expected to be an open, communicative pillar of strength. I am not. I am angry and weepy and frightened and I feel about 5 years old.

16) That I am no longer 5 years old and so no longer allowed to act like a child, but am not mature enough, in any sense, to act like anything else.

17) Most of all, I hate that I'm letting all these things affect me. I hate that I'm angry, all the time.