my father eats dates like they are pieces of candy. there is an ikea jar on the windowsill and a plastic container in the freezer and a pocketful whenever he leaves the house. dates, dates, dates — the man is crazy for them. he tells me they're blessed and i tell him he's wrong. i hate dates but it is 3pm in a foreign country and there is a date in my hand — a fresh date, he tells me, straight from a tree. i did not know dates could crunch like grapes. did you? fresh dates are a nice kind of sweet and they peel from the seed very neatly, but i think i would've eaten this date even if it had been one from the ikea jar on the windowsill. my father splits it in two and hands me a half and says 'try this, you'll like it', and i think about how sometimes the world falls to pieces around him and i think about how he's tired all the time and then i think about dates. i share a date with my father and i hate dates but this date crunches nicely, like a grape, and i ask him for another but he gets up and washes it first. if i was stubborn, i would be mad. don't you know i hate dates? but my father knows me better than anyone and he hands me a fresh date and says try this and i do and i am so glad to be my father's daughter. i don't like all the types of dates in the world but i do like this one. it is not his favourite but it is enough.

my mother tells me I am her greatest gift and i tell her that i am my own worst curse. but I don't actually. i keep quiet because the truth is this: she is my greatest gift too, and i sit in my room and think thank you thank you thank you to the divine forces that i don't believe in. i don't believe in god and i don't believe in fate but i do believe in my mother's fingers in my hair when i lay with my head in her lap. it seems familial and sweet but the truth is i wanted to play mario party and she was in my favourite seat, but she was warm even so and her fingertips were calloused where she touched around my temples and i only wish i hadn't let my hair get so thin, or else the braid she tied might've still been where she left it.

when i write, i turn my phone's camera access off because i'm afraid the super secret spy on the other side will see me. it's like my misunderstanding of schrödinger's cat, where someone could be watching me, right? but there could also be no one there? but that means that they're both there and not there and if you put them in a box with something that could kill them but also if they meow- oh i'm so sorry i mean if they speak, does that mean they are alive? is that it? the truth is i don't know and i'm not much of a physicist so i don't really care to know either but they're watching me right now, i think. the human, i mean. not the cat. how scary to feel unsafe in your own skin, to stick painter's tape over your laptop's webcam because heaven forbid someone perceives you. i've got nothing to hide except for myself, maybe, but it's rude to stare. it's rude to stare but i can feel them do it anyway, like spiders in undusted bedroom corners. it's okay though, because they are only looking.

my brain has never known the feeling of not wanting to die. does that make sense? life treats me okay, but i treat myself mean. all the things in the world bother me, and i say i'll be okay if i approach everything in a laissez-faire sort of way, which is to say i should not approach anything at all. but i can't help it. the world is all claws and teeth and it stings in my fingertips and under my eyelids and i hate the people i once loved. isn't that so cruel? my brothers and my friends and everyone i held dear are the subjects of my 3 am half dreamt arguments and i scream and i scream until my mind screams back and my fists are clenched from all the pain i would never inflict. i hate them all with a hatred that's detached from the 'but i do love them, really' that should follow. it should. i know it should. but i hate and hate until it eats me alive and that's okay but it's not. i want to love the people i've spent a lifetime loving but i can't. it's 5:31 am and my father has just come home from work and i love him and i can say that i love him. my hatred is reserved for certain people, i think, and maybe that's okay. maybe it means they're special to me, in a way. or maybe i'm just searching for humanity in my evil, but maybe that's okay, too.