Choices, Scenery, Guilt

The window is open, before me. Outside, the rain is falling steadily down, and straight down, which is good, because otherwise I’d have to shut the glass, and I like the breeze. I’m just about eye-level with the bottom of the screen if I sit up, but from my slouched position, I can’t see the top of the shed—just that maple, I think it’s a sugar maple, and behind its fairly skimpy branches, a shorter, but thicker, red maple. There’s a tree larger than both of them, with four main trunks, to the left, and to the right, I can just see the tops of the trees on the other side of the block. There are maple keys sticking to the screen, wet and limp. They’ll probably be stuck there all summer, or until it rains again, possibly tomorrow. On the white part below the sill, there’s a picture of my sister with some girl I don’t know, and another shot of the park in Hartford, the ink washed strangely by rains long past. My desk is littered with objects: a red pen, a purple pen that writes black, two empty plastic bottles, a paycheck, a watch, several coins, broken headphones, a bead, half-filled coffee mugs from a week ago or so, a sketchpad… On an index card stuck to the wall, it says “And if you’re looking for the answer, and if you’re looking for the Light that leads the Way, take my hand and I will lead you where the torture and the pain will drift away.” At the end it gets all small and scrunched up, because I have problems with margining. There’s a vaguely demonic-looking picture on the jelly-cabinet-turned-bookcase, to my left, and above that, a sketch of a broken chain with six links. Actually, ‘sketch’ is being generous. My cat is sleeping underneath it, on a nest of plastic bags that I don’t have the heart to throw away. My sneakers are wet, as are the cuffs of my jeans; my t-shirt is dry, because I wore a sweatshirt when I went out to get some cash from the convenience store ATM at the bottom of the street. I remarked, amusedly, when I left, that I was turning into a human, doing crazy things like wearing layers in the rain. On the wall to my right, just before the corner, there’s an oil painting that my mother did: a red-haired woman walks a grey pony which pulls two warmly dressed children (this is unrealistic; I usually ran out into the snow in a T-shirt or somesuch; also we definitely never had a pony, and there were five of us) on a sled, through the snow. In the background is a hedge of holly bushes that turns into a stone wall and cuts away, back towards the right. There is a swing, hanging from one of the trees in the background. The snow is very realistic. In blue, it says smudgedly “Lo…” in the bottom right hand corner, where it would say “Love Mommy,” but the paint smudged in the rain when she gave it to me. Under that, on my dresser, is a plastic black hat which has a bunch of pennies in it.

The house is quiet. Everyone’s off, to one place or another. I don’t really mind, not today, and I’m getting used to it. I need to be here because I have to work tomorrow, and I suspect rather strongly that I won’t be on time if I go with my family, Friday nights.

I’m lonely, and angry, and I wanted to write a story about two crows who were given the choice of safety or freedom, and they made two different choices. And then I decided “Fuck the metaphor, why don’t I just write what I feel?” But I don’t know if I can. Besides, this is not a choice I made. All the important choices in my life have been made for me. Oh God, I’m sorry.

Life and Love

Life, measured in summers, in moments of laughter, in breezes that fill the lungs and skin and hair, and leave you with memories of something beyond sight, touch, hearing, life fills your eyes and seeps into your bones and the days are full. Life, measured in scraps of poetry found in old, long-forgotten corners, in magazine pictures, glossy and over-edited and full of a longing for something that doesn’t quite exist, in the many smells of paper, of the powdery, reincarnated souls of numerous trees, life gets into your blood and lends your skin a glow that’s more than natural. Life steals, it takes of your heart like a poison, and before you can grasp it, you are addicted, and you need it, and you cannot ever be without it, and you will fight and struggle and kill to keep just a tiny drop, too little to taste or even see, just to know you have it still. It doesn’t register that you don’t have it anymore, if ever you did; life cannot be had; it has you.

Life is a lot like love, in that regard. You meet a person, and the next day you see them and you smile, and later, you are talking, laughing, and then before you know it you look forward to seeing them, and the image of their eyes—so unlike anyone else’s— settles, like dust, in the recesses of your memory, the places the wall of protection, the brush of indifference, cannot touch. And when the day comes when you will not see them again, and when you can never look forward to seeing them again, you reach hungrily, painfully, desperately for that brush of indifference to protect you, to make it so that their laughter, their voice, their way of talking and the things they say does not matter to you. But there are things that cannot be forgotten, and love does not care for your pain. Love does not need your consent to take root in your mind, in your heart, and is a force greater than anything, even than the ever-consuming need that is life.

Life flourishes in the most unlikely of places; in high places of rocky crags, where the winds tear anything loose away and the clouds freeze if they venture too close, there are small things growing, in the cracks and the crevasses. In the desert, where the sand is all and end and start and all, and heat rules the day without mercy, and cold rules the night without give, life survives.

And where there is life, there is love, and both are the most necessary thing, the one thing that makes you human, or more than human, or less, and neither are kind, and what can you do but give in?

Things about the very end of school.

1) I had no idea I could get so attached to so many people so quickly. Where the hell did this come from? There are people I’ve known all four years, five, in some cases, who are so much a part of my life that it’s hard to imagine not seeing them every day… and then there are people who I met this year, or last year, and somehow they became a seriously important part of my life in… what was this, eight months or something?

2) For four years, I have felt imprisoned, like a wild animal in a cage, struggling and pushing and scratching at the bars, and then all the sudden, I’ve been released, and the outside world is actually kind of scary. But you know what? I’m glad for the challenge. I don’t need no steel bars—or white bricks—to keep me in, and I don’t need no boundaries between me and the real world, and I’m glad it’s over.

3) For the better part of four years, like… three and change… there’s been a pack of wolves at my back, ready to rip into me when I showed the slightest weakness. A crowd of girls—well, mostly girls—who were outright nasty to me, every chance they possibly got. To this day, I’m surprised there was no bloodshed; I almost got into a fistfight with one girl, but a teacher stepped in with a yardstick and talked us out of it. (Or me, at least; I don’t think her heart was in it to begin with, their strength seemed to lie in gossip and bitchy insults.) So, what’s the point to this?
Not a single one of them will admit to any of this. And I didn’t confront them, not even a little bit, actually. It’s really not that important. But, but, they’re all asking me to sign their damned yearbooks! Why? Why, why? I asked them. None of them had a real answer, and not a single fucking one of them remembered any bad blood between us. Oh, there was a little nastiness, but nothing really serious, right? I wanted to scream. And the worst part, on my part, is that I smiled and said that it was really both of our faults, I was pretty nasty to them back.
Bullshit.
I didn’t do a fucking thing to them. I’d fight back, every now and then, if I was in a bad mood and they pushed me too far, but at the rate things were going, one of them at least thought I was going to bring a fucking gun to school, three years ago. If I had significant cause to actually do something like that… eh. Whatever. The fact is, it doesn’t really matter, not anymore. It just boggles my mind how much of it was blocked out completely. Do they really not remember, or are they just lying to themselves, or me? Again, I don’t think I care. But, but, anyway, that’s something I needed to get off my chest.

4) I wrote the above three points before leaving for work. On the way to work, I was struck by a sudden burst of realization. I am FREE. I’m free! After graduation, there is no claim on my life whatsoever! I can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone! I can ride my bike to Cotton Hollow every single day if I want to! I can spend hours just playing guitar, I can do ANYTHING. Oh, I am so looking forward to this. Even more once I get out of Connecticut and have my own life—I’m free, and nothing in the world can take that away from me.

I don't want to write this paper. I want this paper to be written, I want to just pour all the shit that I know is IN my brain out onto the paper and have it be done.

But I don't want to write this paper. I want to stare out the window at the pretty, shifting clouds being windswept over the trees, and read Brave New World again, and look through every one of these books about World War One in minute detail, especially the Illustrated History, and wander around the library, and think up new stuff to do with my character, and write on my hands, and basically do ANYTHING but write this paper. Including type up this blog.

It's back to that old thing, where my brain refuses to tie itself down, and finds every possible way to distract itself, including staring at the fucking screen for hours, typing one sentence every five minutes. [it probably doesn't help being off meds though]

What the fuck, brain.