I wish I loved her more than I do

I know a girl, Spencer. She complains that her name sounds like a boys name, but I think it's kind of pretty as a girl's name. She sometimes tells me stories far too personal for someone I know far too little. Stories about how her father would beat her slightly too hard and too often. And typically her more than her other siblings. She had two older sisters, two older brothers, and a younger sister. And of all of them, she got it the worst, she said. Of how her mother would berate her senselessly in public. Stories of her siblings living to become such great people with successful lives and beautiful children and a nice car while she has nothing to show for her own life, in her own opinion anyway.

She even told me about how her one older sister once tried to kill herself. Her sister had been found with her one wrist slit open across the wrist. In hindsight, she says, it was probably more a cry for attention, because she had only done the one wrist, and it wasn't a very long or deep cut. And she said that when her mother had called her father on the phone saying their daughter had tried to kill herself, he had responded "Oh, was it Spencer?" She asked me how fucked up that was. That he would guess her. That, in her mind, he himself knew that he was harder on her than on anyone else. And that there was no reason for it.

She sometimes alludes to how she wanted to kill herself once. How sometimes she still wants to kill herself. Sometimes its how we'd all be better off with her gone. Other times its "you'll see how much you miss me when I'm gone".

At times like that I sometimes think, that since the dawn of man, maybe 8 million years ago, there have been people who have thought the same thoughts. That have found so much value and so little value in themselves all at the same time. And that for all the advancement and technology and wonder we now have and take for granted, that we can fly through the air for god's sakes like fucking kings of the universe, that a girl like Spencer could have learned so little, and think thoughts so primitive they were likely thought the exact same way 8 million years ago.