Sean Leslie

You’re lying in bed, under the covers, with your knees tucked to your chest and your arms folded under your pillow. “It’s the same.” You whisper to yourself. “It’s the same. It’s the same. It’s the same.”

The girl that always gets another chance. So here I am, begging you to count your blessings. Your dad takes too many selfies and your mom’s taken too many Xanax, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still hope for you. You’re Lindsay Lohan, goddammit.

Nothing will be the first one. It’s all so sudden, and then so still. Nothing happens. You hit some kind of mental crossroad, where there’s a disconnect somewhere between your brain and those words.

I want you to know, your mind will wander. Let it. You’re about to move into a hospital with four stark white walls, a bed, a TV set straight out of the ‘90s, and a slew of machines and monitors that will hum and beep endlessly through the night. You’re going to wonder “why you?” and then you’ll see the 7-year-old boy in the room next to you, with a brazenly bald head and a smile you can’t even fathom and you’ll wonder, “why him?”