Self-Deception

Maybe if I just keep repeating it, I will believe what I am saying.

Nothing Sticks

These keys submit under the gentle pressure of my padded fingers.
I need time to think and react.

------

Today's song is "Stay" by Katie Thompson.

I could give you my heart, I could hand you my soul
and you could do what you want with my dreams.
And I'll take you so far,
just as long as you know it's only change for what I need.

Thoughts

As long as I'm engaged with others and living outside of myself, I'm absolutely fine. It's only when I am left alone that I crawl back inside and let every little thing wear away at my exterior.

Child of the Universe

And with invisible fingers he reached toward me and lifted my face. Buried truths swarmed his invisible body, uprooting themselves, cracking the pavement which moved underneath us but upon which we stood, static. I watched as he dodged the torment of his own realities. My own hands furled into concrete fists of anger, and every atom in this space, each tiny unjust particle, I felt. They pricked my skin, startled my eyelids to shutter open and remain, transfixed, on the horrors I could not affect.

And somewhere, a few feet away, I caught in the sere shadows a glimpse of his pride. It lay in his footprint, crushed.

ABCB

A line popped into my head today as I was clacking away on these plasticky keys, typing up a critique that I lost all inspiration for long before I even started. A line popped into my head and then another...and for once, they rhymed, and being a free-verse nut, this both scares me and excites me. They're still flitting around in my head, these two lines, except I think they've undergone cell division because now I'm up to four. I'm itching to write but I think I'm going to let this one develop on its own. My heart hasn't pumped quite so energetically in a very long time.

Ten Prints

Hands are the most beautiful extensions of our inner selves that I have ever known or seen.

Four Hours Ago

The stars faded.
At least--
they did
for me.

Atlas

I am at home today, taking a mental break from the feverish intensity of school. I don't like to admit when stress, versus me, has won the battle. Does anyone like to admit their weaknesses? Surely we do, but do we want to? Sometimes I feel like we all experience the tiniest twinge of hesitation before we plummet to our own personal depths in very public ways.

We are only people and this world around us did not evolve to be a burden on our shoulders.

Even Atlas had to shift positions now and then to bring his aching back relief.
Today I shift.
Tomorrow I'll resume position.

Roadblock

How can I ask for
help when I push my problems
behind closed gray doors?

10:15 AM -- 12/15/09

365 Days

It's strange to think back to where I was exactly one year ago. The fourteenth of December: my parents had already sent out the moving vans (which, unfortunately, arrived in Holden the evening of the ice storm) and now, it being 6:00PM on a Sunday evening with the apparent possibility of school the following day (in retrospect.....yah no), I was scooped up from my best friend's house and unwillingly shuttled two hours north to my new "home." Luckily school was cancelled until the new year, and so I passed the vacation time exploring these new, foreign mazes of streets and the labyrinth that was a new highway system, a new town center, a new city. Everything was new, different, unfamiliar.

It's a funny thing about "new"--materialistically we crave untouched, unspoiled perfection. With change, though, we cower in fear. I don't excuse myself from this generalization; I'd be lying if I did. My first day of school at Wachusett was absolutely dreadful. Nothing at all horrible happened. But what made it so incredibly painful was that nothing happened. I came to school, I walked, lost, down the hallways, I entered classrooms, took my seat--once or twice realizing that the cryptic writing on the board was not, indeed, math but was instead (for some inexplicable and cruel reason) Spanish--and come lunchtime I would have completely dissolved into the tiled lineoleum floors had it not been for the wonderfully-cheerful junior in my pre-calc class who let me sit with her and thus performed one of the greatest acts of kindness ever known to man or, at the very least, to me.

My very first friend here is now my best friend. I am lucky in that fact, extraordinarily so. She is clever, beautiful, talented, funny, charming, and sweet beyond words. The few friends I made in the following weeks were all so different, so unbelievably singular in everything they did and said and conveyed, and every day I would marvel at the variety of people I met. I would sit at lunch, in classrooms, at drama rehearsal--I would sit and watch these humans, these beautiful humans who were kind enough to invite me in. They carved a little place for me in their lives. One day I will thank them formally.

I don't think we thank people enough, myself included.

Thank you to my first friend, and my second one as well.
Thank you to the boy who needed me to run lines with him and shyly asked me to help and actually remembered my name so that he could talk to me at lunch, and thank you to him for becoming my best boy friend.
Thanks to Mr. McTigue for pairing me up with one of the most intelligent, gorgeous, and spirited girls I have ever met. He probably has no idea, but he introduced me to my other best friend that day.
Thank you to the oboe player that willingly corresponded with me before I even moved here.
Thank you to the girl with two first names, for giggling with me and always checking in.
Thank you to the boy, the boy who is so completely comfortable with who he is, for accompanying me to prahm, and for forgetting the past and sharing an enlightening present.

There will never be enough thank yous, and surely I've missed people.
One day I'll fill in all the blanks.
I promise.

Reality

"It's called The American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

--George Carlin

I Cannot Break This Habit

It's that word followed by the smile that gets me every time.

Mr. Erban

Today I had my interview with Brown. It went well, just like everyone (except for me) believed it would. Our conversation was pleasant, and, even better, it was real. Strange, then, that all I can remember now is the magazine he was reading when I walked in the door, and the sweet tingle of Sweets 'N Java white hot chocolate on my tongue.

I'm hoping this is a good sign.
Mostly, I suppose, because I don't know what else it would be.

Mirage

"...No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone."

-Heart of Darkness

Untitled

I’m used to rich brown eyes,
for their sparkle had the ability to make me melt,
and I willingly gave myself up
and drowned into those chocolate pools
of sweet sin.
But blue eyes have engulfed me,
lakes of crystal-clear water
               that capture me as the tide
               comes in
and strand me on the sand
      when the shoreline retreats.
And I am treading water,
unsure whether to hold on until
      brown eyes rescue me,
or give in and become
      one with the sea.

10:55 PM -- 4/15/08 (feelings transcend time)

Target

This is not how it was supposed to turn out.

I can't sleep.

My cheeks hurt from smiling.

P.S. Happy 18th celebration of the day you came out of your mum, Bryan! <3

Two Months

I feel like many adults are more scared of living than I am. They hesitate at taking chances, cringe at risks, deny any thoughts of rebellion or betrayal or, most simply, change. Are they so content in their little boxy cages that the tiny iron bars have melded and forged together to fuse into solid, opaque walls that reject light and keep everything in the dark? This level of comfort has created pseudo-security. They are safe within their own dull confines merely because no one prods at them any longer. There are no threats. Danger has tip-toed onward, irritated with the amount of time it has expended and the meager results that follow in its wake. Haggard in its appearance, it stumbles around, scavenging for scraps of courage. It does not devour out of pleasure; it consumes to heighten. When Risk and Courage meet and combine, beautiful, beautiful things happen. When Risk and Courage combine, Growth bursts everywhere.

I hope we don't all lose our sense of adventure as we age.
Risk and Courage, on their own, reap nothing more than stale footprints.

I don't know what I want.

Does anyone?

Panic

Powerschool has officially ruined my day.
I'm so glad inanimate objects that don't even exist as something tangible that I can touch have the ability to cause me so much stress.
I think I'm growing gray hairs.
On a side note, I wish they were white.

The Kid With the Hat Six Tables Away

I was sitting on one of the plastic seats at the lunch table today, its surface smooth but irritating at the same time (contradictions seem to rule my life lately), and I was picking at my sandwich, because for some reason sandwiches only taste good when I'm at home on the weekends eating one alongside the rest of my family, and I let my eyes wander around the cafeteria. Here were all of these people, hundreds of them, close in age and location but truthfully little else (intelligence, maturity or frank lack thereof, compassion...but who's paying attention anymore anyway).  And here I am, one among them, and we're just sitting in these seats, planted down in this mammoth space like cultures of bacteria in a petri dish, just sitting here, sitting sitting talking and it comes so naturally, it comes without thought or question. Every day when the bell rings, our legs kick into action and simultaneously throughout the school thousands of feet lift and start a mindless walk toward the cafeteria. Because a bell rang. Because somehow, during our years in educational institutions, we have been taught to respond to cattle calls. What if, when that shrill note that always seems longer than it did last block/this morning/yesterday afternoon, what if when that wavelength reached our ears we absorbed it and that was all? No gut physical reaction. We would just stay, remaining as we were. In the distance, teachers would cry foul. "Rebellion."

Imagine.
We come to school to learn to think for ourselves, but every day we are our own paradoxes.
In this I am equally guilty.

Thinking Again

01. Frosted Flakes are good. Just plain good.
02. Yesterday on the radio I heard a Christmas song about a child's immense longing to receive a hippopotamus from Santa Claus. Suddenly my day seemed forty-thousand times brighter.
03. "We don't judge the bull, we only celebrate our good fortune."
04. Stores no longer carry old-fashioned bottle openers. This makes me sad.
05. I got a letter in the mail today. A real letter.
06. The 1-10 smiley-face pain chart at the hospital needs to be reexamined. If a 6 is severe pain, why is the smiley face merely making an "eh" face?
07. I wish more people hung mistletoe.
08. Sweaters and plaid and v-necks make me happy.
09. Currently my head feels like an anvil came and crushed my skeleton.
10. I think I killed ten trees writing the Thanksgiving-break syntax paper for Tarmey.
11. Spray paint + plastic frisbee = unpleasant smell.
12. Good morning? Good night.

(dis)Connected

Today I woke up with body intact, lying on this mattress, all of me here but all of me missing. I got up. My head swooned somewhere far away, maybe it rolled off into the back of my closet(I wouldn't know)or maybe it slipped behind the headboard. Either way its screeches, while far away, were clear so clear clear clear. The clock read 6:11 but all I saw was goback:tobed and so not wanting to argue with time(time always wins)I scooped myself up(my head could wait)and fell back into bed.

My head joined up with me just in time to process the words "sinus infection" before once again sliding away.
At least my fingers still work(they're tired).