Today while sitting and considering the brighter aspects of life, wondering where I sat on the cosmic bench we are all seated at, something caught my eye. A lone moth, perched on the wall, waiting for night to come. It had fluttered in during the night, attracted by the lights I had on, and now was waiting for that time to come again.

"Hello, little one!" I exclaimed brightly, and I outstretched a finger as if waving at the little thing.

All of a sudden it flew straight at me, launching itself with surprising force from its place on the wall, fluttering its wings in a frenzied, murderous rage as it drove straight at me, intent on injectings its dusty, evil moth venom into my cheeks or perhaps my eyes.

I screamed and fled down the stairs, batting at the air as I did so. I almost tripped, still unused, after so many months, to wearing trousers rather than the skirts I was made to wear. As I entered the living room, stumbling and panting as I went, my father glanced up with an irritated sneer from his newspaper - he was reading reprints of Snoopy, by the look of it.

"What are you screaming like a woman about?" he demanded.

"A moth!" I cried over my panting.

He rolled his eyes and glanced back at his newspaper. "You're a complete fool, and a twatish son. Ever since you were born, killing your mother as your gargantuan shitty head almost split her once beautiful hips in two, I have known that you would be an unslightly abomination, unfit for the skin and bone used to create your pitifully weak and weedy body. Everything you do in life, everything that seems like success, will actually be just more shit and failure, piled up so high that it will wear you down. Whatever success you have will just be failure of a lesser proportion, not as bad as some of the others but still fucking terrible. Every job in your life, you will lose, and every woman to come your way will leave you when she opens her deluded eyes and sees you as the human atrocity you are. One day, you will die, and for a brief moment in death you will feel at peace, before you are condemned to wander as a ghost. Then everything will continue in death as it once did in life, but this time with no end in sight and you will cry a trillion ethereal tears each day as you sob your sad and sorry existence."

My lip curled. I was on the brink of crying uncontrollably. My happiness ... My hope ... Ruined.

"Anything else?" I murmured.

My father adjusted the newspaper with a crisp crinkling. "You're ugly too," he said.

I'm so sad.

-Misunderstood
(MNA August 4th 2008)