Only ten people will cry at your funeral.

I decipher what that means to me, sitting on a curb in coastal New Jersey, staring at the empty, unlit sky.

How cataclysmic. How abysmal, how abhorrent, how calamitous.

Ten people. My tribulations and hardships don't mean a damn thing,

Yet dissipate at the thought of looking stupid.

Ten people. The love I've given, the love I've lost, the energy I've blasted through like a soaring wildfire, was only a brink in time.

Ten people. I'm sure I know more than fifty, and forty of them will discard me like the rotten core of a once glimmering Apple, I'd say I'm kind of offended

Ten people. Ten fucking people. I'd cry for a thousand, no scratch that, a billion, and I only get ten.

So when I can't speak around the boy I like when I fail my biology exam when / laugh at the wrong time when I get too drunk and say something Ill regret, it never truly mattered.

Because only ten, if that, will shed a tear at my funeral. And I only know three who will attend the burial.

Those eight billion sixty-one million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety people don't give a rat's ass about you while you're alive, and definitely won't once you've abated.

Take the risk, make the mistake, do the dare, say something dumb, sing that song off-key, and jump in the deep end where you know you shouldn't be any fucking ways because nobody cares. And as melancholic as that may sound, I find it to be incredibly relieving