Dear Applicant,

We regret to inform you that your Application for a Licence to Remain Terminally Self-Hating has been rejected.

Seeing that you have performed hundreds of thousands of loving and compassionate acts over the years, affecting people around the world with positive moments, no matter how small, we cannot offer you the applied-for License, in spite of the fact that you are fascinatingly human and have made many wonderfooly* cringe-worthy mistakes. In place of the License applied for, we are pleased to offer you a License To Forgive Yourself And Keep Moving Forward, herewith enclosed in pocket-size format. Please keep it near your heart at all times, and refer to it often.

Also included, as an additional consolation prize, is our free Invisible Wrist Tattoo that says “Stop,Think, Act” in our brand new Developer font. We recommend that you apply it immediately and glance at it whenever you’re feeling the urge to do something cringe-worthy from this moment onwards.

We wish you all the very best in your future endeavours. Please write to us again whenever the mood strikes, and we’ll see what we can do for you.

Sincerely,

Your friends and fans at

the Bureau of Universal Development (BUD).

*wonderfooly: /wun’ der foo lee/

Adv. with a wonder-inducing foolishness often regretted after the fact, clearly displaying one’s perfectly imperfect human quality.

#challenge #rejectionletter #self #selflove

After all the appeals, all the claims of innocence, I am still here. People took one look at my sobbing, screaming face and thought yes, she deserves to die.

And for what? To make amends for another death. An eye for an eye and the entire world is blind to the fact that I didn't do it!

I didn't eat my last meal. I, a person who has never been religious in my life, I prayed. I prayed for some divine being to stop the proceedings, to swear this was all some terrible mistake. If life is fated, then somewhere out there someone has decided that I have lost the right to live. What minor deity did I manage to piss off so much that everything I said could be and was used against me? Why was this even happening?

They are coming to take me away. Several people that, though they wore uniforms and not robes, seemed skeletal reapers all the same. 

Last words, they are asking for last words. I try to think up something beautiful, something that could be quoted. Nothing. I try a fact instead.

Did you know that five percent of all those on death row are innocent? They did not. The needle goes in. 

I am the five percent, I tell them. Then I die, I suppose, or cease to exist. 

What was her crime? One guard asks another. 

Don't know, is the reply, must have been right terrible, though, to deserve this.

The mortician takes the body, and all is done.

The exoneration is given to the corpse five months too late. 

Was it really just

the wrong time and place?

If so then I must

believe the disgrace;

justice serves capricious fate.

Or worse, sinister

designs did snare me,

and their minister

still wanders free;

I a scapegoat to pay his fees.

The red mist beckons

but obscures my sight.

The judgment reckons

no longer my plight.

Second murder ends tonight.