MC 18

I've been moving up and down today, not really in my mood so much as my level of intensity, which consistently fluctuates between this enormous passion for living and then this quiet reserve where all I want to do is people-watch. At the moment I'm at a standstill between the two, anticipating the switch perhaps not eagerly but certainly with an almost shy level of expectancy.

I feel everything right now. I feel everything on this elevated plane, at an altitude where I no longer see people and instead I see walking frames of distinct emotions. Yesterday I was frustrated and I looked at my friends and all I could picture through my narrowed eyes was heat, this red energy that they had no control over because I was creating it, because I was so embittered that their smiles seemed like jeering pokes, because I felt pricked by their ability to laugh and joke and jest while simultaneously I stood trapped in my inability.

Yesterday I watched a girl and a boy walk down the hallway together. Their fingers tapped, flirting with the idea of partnership, and yet these appendages seemed more to me like incongruous cogwheels. The pegs fit mostly due to pressure, to force so heavy that manipulation sets in and everything is faked, like when you tell yourself that the two puzzle pieces you just joined actually do fit together and that the minuscule slivered crescent moon of blank space lying in between is intentional. Their fingers were incongruous, not with each other but with the standards set for them by the bodies they inhabited. Yesterday I watched this girl and this boy, this immaculate pair, travel down the hallway, their backs to me, faces toward things they don't know or don't understand or can't possibly anticipate merely because a combination of youthful naïveté and inherent uncertainty blocked the window ahead. Yesterday I watched them and I felt love in the purest form, in a way that is unlike any love that has consumed me before. I looked at them and I felt their need to be near another person, their desire to have something, someone to walk alongside toward an unsettled future. I felt the comfort and security of an extra set of eyes and of an extra body and of an extra voice. The French have one-hundred and fourteen variations of the word "love." Yesterday I felt all of them.

Everyone is absolutely beautiful lately.