Dear Shauna,
I think I have some sort of social anxiety problem. I'm terrified of parties. I have to force myself to go to them. When I walk in I say over and over in my head, it'll be okay, it's only a few hours, I'll survive. They're hard for me. Usually I end up relaxing and enjoying myself. Sometimes I stay apart from everything, a pane between me and the world.
So when I walked up to your house today I felt like that. But the way that you took care of me... came and got me every time I was alone, tried to direct me to the few people I knew... the way you so efficiently and tenderly took care of me, the way you always have, and not just at parties but in life... it made me love you so much it hurt. Not that lesbian kind of love we were terrified of in eigth grade when I slept over at your house, because we didn't understand friendship and human nature. No, the kind of love that ties you forever to someone, that makes you smile just to think of them.
It also occurred to me that because you are the only person that understands me in this huge world, that makes you inconceivably valuable in that way too. If I lose you, I am completely alone. I worry about college because of that... because when I am gone, and you are still here, no one will understand me, and I'll be alone like I was before I met you.
My gosh we were young. I was old in many ways, and I didn't understand what I was doing, but we were both so young essentially. Even talking about destiny and time as sequential and simultaneous and philosophizing, we were so innocent and naive in middle school. I think that we both believed that we weren't innocent, but we were. Me too. Maybe it doesn't seem like I was, but I was so very young then, and I didn't understand it or appreciate it. Maybe we can't ever really understand how important things are until we have lost them.
When I am with you, I feel safe. You see right through me. You always have. I think that you are very insightful, yes, but I also think that we are amazingly alike in many ways. The way we think is so similar. I miss you so much when I don't talk to you. Part of that is because I don't understand myself when I don't talk to you. You tell me the things about myself that I can't grasp on my own, and you're always right. You tell me things about you, and I see them in myself.
So today, at that party, I began to understand everything that you are to me. And I can't quite describe it, it's so priceless as to have no obvious, realistic thing I can compare it to. On my own, I would have stayed tense, but you pulled me into reality. I had a lot of fun.
You said I'm an anomale because I live so much in my head but I care so much about my body. I suppose that's true. But when I am with you, I am in me. It's because when I am behind all my fortresses etc. where I think no one can touch me, you always walk right in and drag me out.

I don't know how to say thank you for what you've done, or to tell you how terrified I am of losing you, and horrible those months were as we both recovered from what happened before. I might worry about sending a letter like this to somebody else, for fear they will not understand it, but I know you will. You always do.

-Lindsay

My parents asked me why I was depressed, and I said I wasn't, and believed myself right before saying it. It's odd how some lies can be believed until they leave that bitter taste in the mouth... is a lie a lie because it is not 'true,' or because someone does not believe it is true and says it anyway? There is a difference. One leaves a lie as an entity that can exist without propulsion. One makes a lie only the product of conscious intent.
The English language is so ambiguous. Life is anyway.
I started crying today at my therapy session, which I have not done in a very long time. I'm so good at being an armadillo, but sometimes I'll leave some corner of me open, and all the pain diffuses in and I can't breathe. I'm not sure if my therapist does it to me or if I do it to myself. Anyway, I told her I am not so sure it is possible to recover from an eating disorder, I told her I keep trying, but only in cyclic motions, only sine waves, no inverted exponential decay intact to make one amplitude higher than the last. I don't understand why I can't see from the top of those crests that the waves are all the same length, repeating forever into oblivion.

I told her I don't want it to be a part of me... I want it to be personified, something I don't have to be ashamed of, something I don't have to believe in because there's never a way to be positive that it's not all in my head when I am the one creating it.
Years ago, when it first started, I didn't understand. I wanted it for attention, at the very first, and then control. And then I lost control and everything was... gone. Now I am left here, empty, facing this dualism in my life, the huge gap between the world as I want it to be, and the world as it is; the truth in my head, and the lies in my mouth.

She said there has to be a way.

discouraged

I almost dare not post and destroy my palindromic summation of postings, but then you'd never hear from me ever again, and I'm sure that would make you sad.

I've been really depressed today for some reason. Not in a depression way like I'm used to. Just that empty, hollow feeling, when you realize that something you want is really good, and should be atainable, but you may not have the strength to get it.

The eating thing was really great, but I've hit a wall again. I think I don't want bulimia to be part of me. I think that I will personify it as a great monster, unwilling to leave me alone, unwilling destroy me enough that I don't care. I thought to myself today after buying some amount of destructive substances whether I was giving up. And no. Some part of me cares. Some part of me is struggling to let go of this eating disorder. But how? Nobody knows how! Nobody can tell me how, or show me how! The one person that could ravaged me and left me totally bereft of any comfort. She took care of me and promised she'd continue, and then left, abruptly, and hasn't spoken to me since that day two and half years ago. I write her endless letters that I never send, because I know that she has all the keys to everything, but she's selfish, she's guarding them, she won't help me. Or maybe she is afraid.

If I could have known this years ago, I think I would have never stopped eating, never thrown up, never bought diuretics or laxatives, because it's not worth it, in the end. It is for a while, that wonderful way to control yourself, to make you feel like you're doing something to fix that awful mess that is you, but in the end if you starve your body your mind consumes you. Everything is broken. I think that the eating disorder is far more frustrating and far more difficult to quit than cutting. Cutting is something I believe firmly that I can let go of if I make the choice. I make the choice to quit the eating disorder every day, and then I hit the wall and fall back. It happens again and again.

How can I have so many people that love me and still feel unloved and alone? Why do I need to be kissed to believed I am worth it? Why am I not strong enough to beat this eating disorder? Back when I was young I was so convinced that I could do anything... is this what age brings? An accute, unshakable sense of one's limitations?

Do people really get over eating disorders, or is it a myth?

All the love in the world can't make me feel loved if I still can't love myself consistently. In the end, there is only me and always me, damaged, bruised, and broken.

BUT I WILL NOT GIVE UP!!!!!!!!

I've been watching every day for it, determined, like every year, not to be surprised by it, like I am every year. But I failed yet again. I was shocked today to see so many green leaves on all the trees. Hope... oh my gosh I love spring. I think that ignoring bipolar etc., I have seasonal depression. It is always the worst in the winter. So those leaves... I feel like every bit of me is blooming when I see them growing.
Let's see here- AP bio review- abssisic acid (sp no clue) makes the nodes etc. stop growing, auxin (I think) makes them actually fall off.
I'm so glad to have hope again... I'm so happy for no reason. Everything is beautiful except me. I still can't see any beauty in my body. I'm okay with my mind now, my soul, I can love that, but I can't love this stupid body.
Today I ate... sorta normally. Way more than usual. I'm convinced I can do this. I know I'm gaining weight and it drives me crazy, like this drip drip drip of Chinese water torture so constant in the back of my mind, but I can. I don't want to be bulimic forever. I don't want to always binge and purge. I want to eat, eat the way my friends do. I want to not hate food, and all the physical acts of eating.
I feel like giving up every day. Especially when I gain weight, like now, because my body's not used to food. But like last year when I started eating again, it will stabilize, slowly. Maddeningly slowly. But it will happen.
It's spring. It's spring and everything is possible.
I love anticipation. More than Christmas I like Christmas Eve. More than my birthday I like the day before. I like the openness of possibility, the joy of knowing I'm about to get something exciting, physical or mental. So although I love summer, I love spring more. Everything is ahead of me in spring. The whole summer is this shining jewel.

I got my glasses today, for wearing at night and stuff. It's been a long while since I've had glasses, since the summer before ninth grade when they fell in the Snake River. I remember the first time I got glasses when I was in first grade, I was so excited. And the funny thing is, even though this is my fourth or fifth pair, I was still excited to get them. There's something exciting in having something made especially for you. Kinda like I used to be excited about my retainer before I started losing it all the time and neglecting to wear it. Even though retainers are painful, even though I've broken three from playing with them too much in my mouth and stuff, there was something amazing about that yellow plastic that fit exactly in my mouth (now I have the stupid clear kind because I've broken so many wires).

The eyeware fitter person said I have really long eyelashes, so amid my tyrade about how much I hate my body I will admit that I like my circular palms and small hands (although I don't like the hangnails from chewing my fingernails- nervous habit) and I like my long eyelashes. It sounds like something in a poem- long eyelashes. Something I might believe in.

There's still so much about me to hate, like everything physical, like this stupid body I'm stuck in except when I dissociate, this body that doesn't even feel like a part of me (my therapist says that's a bad thing), it's just something I use to try to gain control, but I always lose. But, in the midst of all that I hate, I am beginning to love- myself, my mind, my heart, life, leaves on the trees in spring.

Ever since I started loving myself last summer I've been able to love and appreciate the world a lot better. SPRING IS SO AMAZING. Every day I don't even mind school now, because there is spring, and summer coming. It's enough to get me through all the stress that's being poured on.

Thank gosh for Buspar.

food

I have been eating. A lot, by my standards, about average for most people, about what my body needs to be healthy. It feels weird to me, all this food. It feels out of control, yes. But I don't need control right now. More than control I need to feel full. I'm so sick of feeling empty.
I don't want to go the opposite end and start emotionally overeating, basically the binge without the purge, but I think that food and emotions are inextricably tangled in my life, so I can only try to minimize the damage. Right now I'm doing about my best. It may not last, but for a little while, I am eating, I am healthy, I am full.

The stress is building, but I don't need to throw up etc., I don't need to cut. I just need to feel.

It was so warm, seventy degrees again, on Saturday at noon. I sat outside and did all my homework. I thought that if I did it all Friday and Saturday I could spend Sunday relaxing. I guess I forgot that the work never ends... there's always more to do, pushing in the back of my mind. I can never relax these days. I can only keep remembering what I should be doing.

Summer is coming, though. Six real weeks of school left and three days of semesters. My grade point is intact for another year (I think I'll be okay for this semester). My Spanish course, although difficult for me, is going alright and I have an A in that too. This summer I am taking an imaginative writing course at the college, and I'm sure I'll be fine.

I am worried about math next year. I've never really taken math at a college. We had all of the same assignments and tests and everything this year, but it was with high school students still.

Anyway, I digress. It was really warm here, and then it snowed all night last night. Today there is snow on the ground. It's sad, really. Just when I think summer is finally coming winter has to swirl in with a last vengeance (although I'm sure it'll snow a few times in May and probably once in June, as it usually does).

It's not a sign. I swear it's not.

Amanda isn't leaving. All of that emotional hell I put myself through, all of that distancing and anger and crying when no one was looking, all of that was really for nothing, because she's staying another year. When she finally does leave, I will be leaving too, and it will not be the same sense of abandonment that I have been struggling with this year.

I am very happy, no matter how confused I am about our relationship right now. And I feel a bit stupid for all of that pain I went through to try to adjust to her absence. Unnecessary, all of it. Oh well, I learned something about myself.

I am still happy, still distrustful. I believe in my words that happiness is an action, and the only way to trust it is to constantly live it, to take control of it rather than letting it control you. But I'm having difficulties living those words at the moment. I'll get it right someday. I know I will.

Fridays, spring, hope, and war

Fridays must be the best invention ever. Especially fridays in the spring, when it is almost May and all the trees have little extensions flowering off of the tips of their naked twigs, and the grass is turning green, and not just where the dogs peed. How grateful I am for spring, for seventy-three degrees and short-sleeve shirts and sunshine that lasts until 8:00. This year has been the worst. It has been the apex of something. What, I don't understand yet. More than high school. My life perhaps?
My English teacher told us that for most people their twenties are the worst and the best times of their lives. I'm fine if I have the best times of my life, but if the times I have been three in middle and high school aren't my worst, I'm not sure I'll survive.
I am grateful for now, though. For the hope in this spring, and for being over the hill so that my futre unfurls before me in dazzling shades. I have been happy all week, amazingly happy, sleep-deprived but hyper and social and ready for life. Is that a record for me? This happy for a week? It might be, if we ignore the mania. It is, at least, a record for 2006.

How wonderful it is, to be alive, now, just now in this moment as my fingers are darting over keys at 78 wpm and the tv is talking about policemen and suicide and drugs. How wonderful for all of those frightening things to be encaged in that screen, that the photons being admitted are maybe at frequences and energies other than x-rays, benignly smashing in insubstantle haphazardness into our eyes. My eyes, with the weighted contacts because my prescreption is -8 or so, my eyes that when I wear glasses might be magnified five times, like inexpensive microscopes. I don't think I've ever been grateful enough for that, for sight, even as it degenerates. For the ability to perceive color. For the intensity of... of this world, this world I have struggled for years to escape from. I tried to live in that monochromatic place inside my head, and was safe. There was the greatest danger of all there, a danger I never could have understood: the danger of ceasing. Of losing connection with my fingers on the keys or the photons hitting my eyes or the nightmares that prove I've known better days. Still, I am different. My friends wear flip-flops and shorts and I don't because I don't feel safe that way. I feel safest layered and sweating, giving off fumes of pear deodorant. Nothing can touch me through thick cotton, can it?
Oh, it is funny the way we try to protect ourselves with meaningless symbolism. But it means something to us, doesn't it?

I have been thinking a lot about war. It is an odd thing to think about on a day like today, but we are talking a lot about Vietnam in history. If I was alive then I would have protested it. However, now we are on the threshold of a new war, and I am not sure what to believe. I hate the idea of war, the concept that we have to kill eachother to solve something that could be solved with words. I would promote passive aggression except that it's a bit heartless to say the United States should just take the terrorism, the 9/11's, passively and wait for the world to react. And how would the world react anyway, to terrorism? Violently, I suppose, with bombs and guns. No pain is avoided.
I think that maybe we should have never gone in. Saddam was a horrible dictator, yes, who did not value individual life in the way that our pseudodemocracy does. But he had control, and now there is none, only the chaos of guerilla Iraqis. My father says they are evil, and the only way to beat them is with their own fire- with violence. How can they be evil? They are fighting for a cause they believe in. Maybe it is a generation-old schism between those nationalities over there we are struggling to unite, but they believe that God is promoting their antics. They have been taught since they were young to hate. Does that make them evil? Is killing American soldiers and little civilian children with car bombs evil if they believe they are doing what is right? How can we define evil that way? We can't call them evil. Their actions are. Murder, in my opinion, of innocents is evil. But that's not how they see it. That's not what they've been taught. So are they evil, for hating, for killing? I don't think so but I am not sure.

War always leads to quagmires. Apparently the United States has been falling in its rank in the world. That does not matter as much, but we need to be able to take care of our own citizens. Losing power, losing rank, it means something if the terrorists gain absolute control of Iraq. Excluding the citizens there that they would be opressing with their hatred, they would pose an incredible threat to the United States. The terrorism would not stop being a threat once it won the war. It would turn against America, especially this new America in a new, vulnerable state.

So we can't pull out. It was stupid, I think, to get involved, because there were no weapons, and Saddam's horrible regime was not as much a threat to the United States as the terrorist one was. I know that we have to look at what he was doing to the Iraqis, but did we honestly think we could come in and work magic and produce democracy in a society that is split into nationalities, and groups of people so infused with hate that they'll bomb anyone? No. There can be no end to what we are doing now. The terrorists will not give up. They live in secret and fight with power, because they are not inhibited with the kind of moral conscience that the US soldiers have. This war could go on and on. But we cannot leave and let the terrorists win, or everyone in the world besides the terrorists is in far worse shape than they are now. Especially as we have made them hate us, meddling in their civil war they intended to win. No, that would be a ridiculous gamble, to assume that the Iraqis could somehow mobilize themselves through their differences and defeat the terrorists. It wouldn't matter, anyway, even if they did by some miracle. Terrorism never dies. It exists in people's souls until it can leak through the organization and tear it apart from within with violence and hatred.

So what do we do? I guess we stay there. I guess that's all we can do. We're in this mess now. We can't let the terrorists win, which is what I think would obviously happen if we suddenly pulled out, or even gradually pulled out. The Iraqis are in no condition to fight their own war. In Vietnam, the consequences were not so great. The communists, the Ho Chi Minh's, the Mao Zedongs, prevailed in the region. But it was not the end of the world, and domino theory did not hold as much water as was expected. But I think that though communists can be a threat to the nation they control, terrorists are a threat to the world. There are no rules with them, no order. No one is safe when a government formed around unrestrained violence exists. So we can't just let them win like we could with Vietnam.

There is no draft. There are too many people, even, enrolled in the army, ready to fight for what they believe in. Do I believe in it? No, I don't see the end. I don't see the end to the war we are fighting. I don't believe in going to the war. I stand by my ideas in eigth grade that it was stupid to blunder in there. But it's too late now. If the soldiers are willing to fight, if they really believe in it, if they believe that the annihilation of terrorism and hatred is possible in the region, then I support them. I have to. There's no longer an alterternative. But the second a draft is passed, the second Americans who do not wish to fight are pushed into this mess of a civil war, then I will oppose it.

Anyway, sorry, that was a long political rant. But I needed to sort through my feelings. I also need to ask some of the people I know that are pushing strongly for leaving Iraq what they intend on the nation doing when terrorists that hate the United States control the country.

drowning

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yay for good days

I had a great day today. I don't really understand why. I was tired from lack of sleep. I got an 87% on my math test (my first B in forever). I'm falling behind in all my classes and the AP tests are in three weeks. I'm not ready at all. There was a National Honors Society meeting that took up half my lunch and during the other half Siobhan made fun of me for not knowing how to knit (I've been trying to act like I do) at knitting club. I'm burned out and just want to sleep and read all day for a year.
Everything's against me. I know those are all little things, but they stack up. I could be depressed, but for some reason I'm not. I went to my tennis coach today and for the first time in my life I really quit something, truly with no excuses. I felt better. I sat in my car doing my loads of math homework (I didn't know matrices got this complicated) and I realized I don't like play tennis as a competition. I want to play it totally for fun, which I can do without the school.

Also, in chemistry today we did flame tests. I was in heaven. The bunsen burners were so beautiful, the flames turning crazy rainbow colors. Lithium is still my favorite... that stunning, deep magenta. I think I'm a bit of a pyromaniac. Fire always calms me down. I light things on fire in my sink a lot. But I'm not going to become an arsenist or anything. I just like the way flames look, and how quietly they burn.

I did binge and purge today, but hey, things go one thing at a time. I'm happy today, I'll fix the eating disorder tomorrow.

I was sitting in my car thinking about quitting and wondering whether I was pathetic because of it, and whether I'm going to fall apart and quit everything, when this Jimmy Eat World song came on on my ipod and told me everything I needed to hear:

Hey, don't write yourself off yet, it's only in your head you feel left out or
looked down on
just try your best, try everything you can.
And don't worry what they tell themselves when you're away.

[chorus] it just takes some time, little girl you're in the middle of the ride
everything (everything) will be just fine, everything (everything) will be alright (alright)

Hey, you know they're all the same
you know you're doing better on your own, so don't buy in.
Live right now, yeah just be yourself.
It doesn't matter if it's good enough for someone else.

(IT DOESN'T LINDSAY!) sorry, I still talk to myself.

discarding responsibility

I think I am continuing my mid-life crisis.
See, my mom taught me to finish the things that I start. That's an important lesson that I agree with. She also taught me by example and help to be extremely busy. I have continued that tradition. I'm not really a dilettante... I don't think that's the right description. I guess I do try to do a lot of things, but I'm not mediocre at all of them. I'm actually good at some. And some I guess I am bad at but I enjoy them still (like tennis).
Today I randomly quit tennis though. As the school year goes on I become more human. I procrastinate now. I fail to do homework. I complain when I have to stay up past midnight. And I decided today that having some time to read (or study for AP tests if I get motivated) is more important than tennis. Tennis is something I love. When I start dreading having to do it every day, there's a problem.
What I finally began to learn last year when I quit symphony is that sometimes it's good to quit things. I need to take care of myself, and that takes precedence sometimes. If I've committed to someone else to do something then, yeah, I need to do it. But if I'm just doing it to make myself be busy, and it's hurting me, then no, it's not okay.
So I am officially being irrepsonsible today. I went to the funeral (which was hard, and I cried a lot, but not as hard as the viewing last night) and I played my violin for a huge chapel full of people. No, I played my violin for a little girl up in heaven and her parents in the front row. I gave her everything that I have to give.
I should have gone back to English class, but the period was almost over. I missed our quiz on The Dispossessed, which is sad as I actually read it and was ready for the quiz, so I decided I didn't want to go listen to Mr. Cooper drone on about American literature in the 1900's for fourty minutes. I should have gotten my history book so I could finish the chapter but I didn't. I should have gone to the mandatory tennis practice today to tell them I'm quitting. But no, I did none of those things. I drove home, I hate half a cup of sugarfree ice cream, I checked my email, and I decided to write this entry.

So here's to being irresponsible. Here's to quitting something because it's making me unhappy and stressed. Here's to putting myself first. Today is the only today I get. If I don't get at least an hour to waste reading Scientific American book club magazines and writing whiny blog posts, then I'm pushing myself too hard.

For so many years I have done everything because I thought I should do it. Now I want to begin doing the things I actually want to do.

Easter

I love Easter. Usually I at least notice it coming, but not this year. This year I just remembered yesterday.
What is the rule for when Easter is again? The second Sunday at some point?
Anyway, sadly now there are no egg-dying frenzies, no cute decorations put up at school, no waking up at 6 a.m. to see if I got the Easter bunny's signature. My parents still got me a small Easter basket though full of sugar-free candy. It made me happy. I realized today that I only have one more Easter at home, one more Christmas, one more Halloween... and then I'll be gone. I think they realized that too.
All of the important Easter things were still here though. Like thinking about Christ, and going to church, and feeling that. This holiday really matters more than any other. In my opinion, Christ's birth and death aren't nearly as important as the attonement and resurrection. If it wasn't for today I would be nothing. I would have no hope.

The past few days have been rather difficult. I've been thinking a lot about death. This six-year-old girl from my church died. Did I write that in here? Anyway, I remember her so well, remember babysitting her and her sister. I remember one time she put these things up her nose (beans maybe?) and it took my friend Kara forever to get them out. She was worried she'd have to call the hospital.
And she liked to pretend she was a pony. She liked to prance around.
How to comprehend that she is gone now? I don't know. I can't. I can't imagine the kind of pain her parents must be in either. Losing a dog left me senseless for a week. Losing a child... does that kind of ache ever go away? It seems to me a horrible kind of pain, because for a while it is so constant, and even if you do finally forget for an instant, having to remember all over again hurts just as badly as the first time. My stomach feels sick when I think about it.

We are all so temporary. I guess I've always known this, but it was shocking for me to remember. A few nights ago my mother and I got into a big argument, and she yelled at me that she wished she could tie a string around my throat and strangle me to death. For an instant, the thought of that haunted me. A few years ago, I would have been afraid she'd do it. Now I know she wouldn't; she loses control, gets angry, needs to hurt someone. But it just reenforced my fears of being extinguishable. So a few hours later I went upstairs and I laid down with her on the bed where she was doing crossword puzzles alone and I didn't say anything, I just hugged her.
I guess you'd have to know me to understand that... I never hug my parents. They try to hug me a lot, but I don't really like touching them or being touched by them. So this was a big deal. To me, it was an admission that I am leaving soon, I am going to college soon, and I will lose everything good about them. It was also an admission that the possibility of death was there every moment of every day. I never knew when my time, or hers, or anyone would come. It could easily come five minutes after she threatened to strangle me. Then that threat might haunt either of us forever.
My brother's wife's grandparents rarely fought. One night they got angry at each other, and for the first time in years her grandma slept downstairs on the couch. She died that night. He'll always have to remember that last fight.

I was... not depressed. I think depressed is the wrong word. I felt a bit lost, a bit foggy. I felt confused about how fragile human beings are. It really doesn't take much to kill us. Nobody is safe from death. So I did cut. I don't know if I feel guilty. Not yet. Maybe I should. It's the first time ever, in all my years of cutting (and I've been cutting one and off since seventh grade, maybe before, I'm not sure) that I've ever felt physically sickened by the wound. I thought I was going to throw up, just because of how it looked. That's weird for me. I'm not usually squeamish. Maybe because I kept thinking about our dissected cat, and how easy it was to slide the razor through skin, fat, and muscle.

I felt better last night though. I settled down on the couch picking out all the stitches around the edge of a quilt I'm sewing for the kids at the psych hospital. I watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. They looked so young... they're voices hadn't changed yet. I realized that when I watched the movie, I was only a year older than they were. That felt weird, that I could have gotten that much older without realizing it.

Today I think I have the flu. I really don't feel good (well?).

Rapunzel

((((This is to all of you))))
The same old stories can be told infinite times, and most people will assume that the morals have been leached from them, sucked out like the toxicity of lime when the rain turns it to limestone. It’s chaos theory, though. Even your breath changes the universe, somehow.

She grew so used to stone that the nerve endings in her fingers could not remember any other sensation. Perhaps stone was all they had known. She could not remember. The past, in its gaping negativity, was a door she dared not open. As barren and lonely as that room on the top of the castle was, it was all she knew. There is a curious thing about people and familiarity: people would rather embrace the horror they know than face the possibilities of an optimism they don’t.

And so she felt the stone.

The room was swept of all sentimentality. The floor had dust marks of decaying emotion. She stepped over the grimy streaks with light feet and a heavy chest. With every heartbeat, every tidal-wave of blood seeping into her lungs and purging her body, she felt guilt. She did not deserve the blood. She did not deserve the body. She deserved emptiness, apathy. She deserved a cleaning solvent breaking up the bonds of old emotion. She didn’t deserve to step over it every day.

Despite her knowledge that she was apart from it, or perhaps because of that knowledge, she was obsessed with life. She was obsessed with the red blood streaking her pale skin, dripping out with every contraction of cardiac muscle like the haze of tears she couldn’t cry. There was something liberating and exhilarating about knowing she possessed something she didn’t deserve. She tried to purge herself of it and failed; every connection with stone screamed life even while that disconnected part of her painted death in nervous brushstrokes.

In a corner, far from the rotting remains of feeling, a mirror stood, constantly on edge and prepared to shatter. It was a precipice she understood, that thin blade between wholeness and slivered existence. She felt a pull to the mirror, but she rarely looked in it. There was a crack in the upper corner that she knew her rawness had caused; it pulled apart into two separate, reflective tectonic plates. When she was younger she had sought out some sort of beauty, some sort of nourishment in piles of sticky flowers and dripping glass. Then, when she still cared about something other than herself, her face would appear in the mirror- delicate, stormy, but undeniable. Now, now that she has denied the world, denied all life, denied hope, there is nothing in the mirror. Even when she stands in front of it, it only reflects the stone of the room at the top of the castle.

She knows that when she was younger the door was locked. The heavy wood was lodged firmly into place by other inhabitants of the castle, the inhabitants that sustained her life with watery soup and dying flowers but never came in to touch her. Occasionally one would slam through the rotted beams of the door before she could stop them and plunge some icy weapon into her, and for days she would sit numbly in a corner, aware of nothing. They were always so eager to hurt her, so eager to prey upon her distraction if she did not watch the door one day.

Yes, when she was younger the door had been locked from the outside. She had had no real control over it. They had controlled everything; they had kept her alive only to hurt her, but it had been a sort of life she could value. Because she had to fight for life, she found a reason for it.

Now, years later, it has been ages since the inhabitants had a reason to keep her locked in the tower. She took up their mantle. The door is locked still, but now from the inside. Now it is her trying desperately to keep them out. Now that she has nobody to fight for her life she hordes it within her inexorable heartbeat.

There is a window. The window is another thing she never noticed when she was young. All of her focus, then, was on the door and speculation of escape. She noticed the window a few years ago. She had been so frightened of it’s openness after the first nightmare that she had fashioned bars to cover it. The ground was far below. Surely such a fall, taken without assistance, would kill even the immaterial parts of her. She barred the window for the same reason she locked the door. Now, the threat wasn’t the possibility of never escaping. Now, the threat was the possibility of somebody forcing her out of her safe isolation.

She remembers when she discovered the window, before she understood its danger, before she’d barred it with supports from her splintered bed. She had been humming one day, not a happy tune but some jagged creation of her own that tore her throat as it fled her larynx. At first she had heard only the comfortable, constant sounds of water dripping off of stone, a sort of harmony with her shattered hymn.

Then, slowly, she began to hear beyond her horrid humming the sound of a person singing. It drifted in through the window. It was beautiful, and new, and back then she had not been afraid. She dashed over to the cavity in the wall she had until that point not been aware of. She looked down and she saw a knight in shining armor. The steel of the carefully forged suit was the opposite of her abrasive stone; it was smooth, with healing powers. She forgot all of the broken places inside of her and worshiped the beauty of that kind of freedom.

The knight tilted his (or her, it doesn’t matter) helmet up towards the window in the high castle tower. The girl who knelt by it smiled. She felt a sort of wariness inside of her, but it wasn’t extreme enough to stop her from that small twitch of her lips.

“I will come up to you,” the knight said, his features distorted by the helmet, “I will come up to you and save you, and we will ride out of that castle and into a place where there are no castles, and no doors are locked.”

It had been such a wonderful promise, a promise full of all of the hope she had denied herself until that very moment.

“How?” she cried out. It was the first word she had spoken in years, besides the whimpers she had used to fight off the inhabitants of the castle.

“Just let your hair down,” the knight said, and the sun glinted in musical pools off his chest. The girl in the tower looked at her hair. She had not noticed it before. She had seen no need for it. But she had never cut it. It was long, and black, and strong, like the filaments in a spider’s web.

There was a moment when she hesitated. But this knight seemed so different from those that had hurt her. She fastened to this thought, gathered up her hair, and threw it down to the knight. The knight held to it with gauntleted fingers as she pulled him up to the stony room with the locked door.

She was so innocent then. She thought that if she locked the inhabitants of the castle out she could keep pain at bay, or at least pain caused by others. She had not thought to worry about the window.

The knight, in his armor, was very impressive, and for a while she was sure that he had come to save her from all of the horror in the world. She thought that he would never leave her, never hurt her. But one day she woke up and saw him slumped in a corner. He stood before the mirror. The reflection was not of a strong knight but of a blot of fading darkness, a blur much like her own reflection. Her knight tore off his armor then and there was a wraith underneath. That mass of hurting darkness had only the strength to pierce her heart before it tumbled out the window and fled to somewhere she could never reach it.

She had trusted the knight, and thus his betrayal felt maybe even worse than all of the betrayals of the inhabitants of the castle. She had thought that she could be saved.

After that she put the bars in the window. A few knights still passed by, but they saw the bars and shook their heads and left. She wasn’t worth the effort. Even more broken than before, the girl went back to the processes of withering away, of disappearing from the tangible world and into her own world of darkness. She hung a black sheet of cloth in front of the window, behind the bars. No one could see her. No one could break in. She was perfectly safe, all alone in her castle stronghold.

At night, though, she could not fool herself. She felt her burning isolation, so cold as to light her on fire, and she could not dismiss it like before, because now there was something to compare it to. Now, in memories that would not join those rotting streaks on the floor, she remembered feeling safe, remembered feeling like someone cared about her, someone was looking for her. The knight had hurt her, of course, more profoundly than she could ever explain. But he had left her with something legitimate; he had left her with an aching need she could never fill.

However, just when she was ready to shatter the mirror with the jagged rock of her anger- that balled up manifestation of all of her atonal hymns- a small crowd of knights gathered at the base of the castle and refused to leave. She tried ignoring them, and painting more parts of herself black to frighten them away. She tried dressing up like a being of light, to trick them into believing she had no need for their companionship. She tried frightening again them by dragging her black fingernails through her pale skin and drawing that fading life-force from her.

Through the days and months of their small congregation outside her window, no matter how much she tried to stop it, she felt herself loving them. She had always loved them all- the inhabitants of the castle, that first knight. Love wasn’t something she could lock and defend like her room in the castle. Love was something that her soul gave freely when she felt she had nothing left to give. Even when she had wanted nothing more than to disappear into the gap beyond the mirror, love had sent its tiny roots from her toes into the ground, and grew though she never watered it.

One day she woke up in the middle of the night. She heard them out there, sleeping but ready to jump up and save her. She walked quietly to the mirror, the spongy bits of love creating soft sandals to cushion her feet against the stone. For a moment there was that same old emptiness in the mirror, the absence of her existence. But then, in a flickering flash so brief she almost didn’t see it, she saw her reflection for the first time of years. She felt the stirring of the sprouts under her feet and she knew she was beginning to love that faded, imperfect duplication of herself.

There is no ending yet, no definable moral. There is the toxicity of lime as rain or tears turn it to stone. The poison is fading. Perhaps the story is arbitrary, random. Perhaps you do not know this girl. Perhaps she does not exist.

But every night she looks down at you just outside her castle window, and every night though you may not notice she cuts one wooden bar in two.

She sits on the bed and wonders what you think of why she won’t let you in. She worries that you think it is because she’s convinced you’ll hurt her, like that first knight long ago. That is not it, really. That may be part of it, but it is more than that.

She could tell right away that you were wearing a good kind of armor. You are not wearing it to keep just yourself safe; you wear it also to protect others. It is not something you are confined to, though. You can take it off any time you want to bathe in the sun.

So what is she afraid of? I’ll tell you what I believe, though it may not end the story. I believe she is afraid that you will show her to the mirror, and that when she looks into it she will see a suit of armor like that of the first knight, fake with a wraith within. Yes, you know, that would destroy her world.

But it’s more than that, isn’t it? More than that fear (which we can’t deny is within her), there is a greater fear, harder to pin down, as fleeting as her reflection in the night. What she is most afraid of isn’t something you can help her fight; it is something she would be left alone to handle.

What she is most afraid of is that you will show her to the mirror, and when she looks into it she will see something beautiful, something worth loving.

Yes, you know, that might save her life.

I have so much homework I still have to do. I've been ignoring it. And I really need to go buy my math book. I was hoping that I could either A. buy the linear algebra book, copy all the assignments and return it with the receipt or B. go there every day and hide in the bookstore while copying assignments. It is not worth it to pay $80 for something we're using for two weeks. But I deemed both those things unethical...
College books are so overpriced! I know I'm constantly complaining about that, but it doesn't stop being true in-between my complaints!

The school is conveniently eliminating early period next year. Have I ranted about that yet? It means I either can't take chem 2 or I can't take science seminar (which is one of the classes I really want to take). It seems that in this last crunch of high school I can't take anything I really want to (thanks to the stupid math class which requires three periods... another thing about college- it should conform to high school schedules!). The one class I have always looked forward to is creative writing. Now I can't take it. And I can't take studies in science fiction either. I can only take government and English and chemistry and math and all of the usual. Nothing I really want to take (although it would be a lie to say I'm not excited about multi-variable calculus).

Today I am being lazy again. But I'm going to the humane society at 2. Hopefully I will not be severely wounded by another psycho dog this time. I love those dogs though. They are all so innocent really.

I've been attempting to think (something that never goes well over spring break). I'm trying to understand why I'm so paranoid of letting people in. I guess I'm afraid that if people really know me, they won't like me. There are too many horrible qualities about me. And also, I know that I always have hurt the people I care about. I'm so sick of hurting people. But if there are always walls, no one will ever know me.

I'm reading another good book about Latin American history, In the Name of Salome. And I must confess I find Latin American history far more interesting than American history. The only politically out of the ordinary things that have happened in our history is that periodically some crazy, racist third party attempts to seize Congress and fails. Nothing that I'm encouraging constant revolution and guerilla warfare, but it is quite a bit more interesting than having ten chapters in a row about America was sliding gradually into consumerism and affluence.

Losing them

I know that humans naturally deify things that they need desperately to believe in... but I thought that if I were to ever do it it would be more obvious to me.

What do you do when you realize that the people you worship are just... people? People who can't be the strong monoliths you need them to be, people who can't possibly expand into the fuzzy, heroic images your mind projects to disguise their weaknesses? Maybe they can love you, but there is a point at which you can only appreciate them, you can't admire them anymore.

I feel lost. The people that saved my life are just as afraid and weak as me. The difference is that they were strong enough to help me. I am indebted, but I was deceived. Not by them, but by myself. I was disillusioned. I thought I could reach something on the path that I'm on, but it ends abruptly in the dark, like all the others.

What now?

Things are beginning to smooth out again. I feel alive again today. This past week has been a hazy, nightmarish dream, chock full of anxiety and devoid of sleep. Last night I slept soundly for eleven hours, the most I've slept in months. I've needed to sleep that long for months, but all the vibrating tension inside of me always wakes me up when I'm still exhausted, still needy for more sleep but unable to grasp it.
Josh's house was a tornado yesterday I guess. I'm hearing everything from Ariel. His family had a pretty much day-long discussion. Josh is going to see a counselor once a week (and I'm assuming his little brother is too), and he doesn't get any unsupervised internet time. We are just friends until he starts to make some changes.

I've decided that philosophy may start inside of us, not outside. When I was trying to weigh those two great pains- Josh's pain if I told his family, and Josh's pain if i didn't- and what was right or wrong, I didn't need to think about philosophy. I just felt it, somewhere inside.

I am so grateful for the support I had from you and everyone. It helped me to do something incredibly difficult.

I guess things aren't the same now. And they may not be the same for a very long time. And they may never be the same again. But things can be... different. Different doesn't necessarily mean worse.

All of this has made me think about the things I'm still struggling with as well... the cutting and bulimia and everything. Maybe I can change now. Maybe I need to change now. Maybe I need to let go of all of this and get the help I need, the way Josh is.

I don't know. As hard as it is to force someone into a situation of change, it's harder to force yourself.

how to explain...

How do I describe the twenty four hours between yesterday and today? It seems as if time crawled, it seems as if it's been a millennium and not just a day.
Last night I got ahold of Ariel finally, a girl who is 18 and a sophomore in college (she is really smart) who is the older sister of someone in Josh's grade. She has been helping him. I talked to her for a long time about a lot of stuff. We could really relate on abuse issues, as she'd been through it too. Whenver I discover another victim I am always both relieved and happy while being depressed and angry- relieved/happy that I am not alone, depressed/angry that I am not alone. It is a battle between the need for companionship and the desire to just ameleorate the situation.
She didn't know about Josh's problems with ...abusing... (I guess is the technical word although not my preferred choice of word) his brother/cousins. I've been so alone with the issue since December, and I've been threatening to tell someone if he doesn't, but I trusted him when he said he would. Now I understand he's not capable of going through with that, and also he's sunk so low that his word means nothing to him (or to me) now.
He did tell Ariel though. So I wasn't alone. And Ariel, being stronger than me in some way, knew we had to do something right away. We all three talked until 3 in the morning. Josh finally refused to tell his parents and wouldn't promise not to kill himself over night. I agreed to call Ariel at 7 in the morning and we'd call Josh's parents.
I fell into bed, exhuasted, but I couldn't sleep. Everything was over between us, and I knew that. I knew also that his life and healing were more important than us. But it hurts... it hurts to love someone and then for there to suddenly be no possibility of a real future relationship. Everything in me still loved him, and I felt like there was no way I could leave him. But I knew I had to, for both of us, and he knew it too and told Ariel he would break up with me.
I fell asleep at 4 and woke up at 7. I dragged out the calling card and woke up Ariel. I tried to do three-way calling but it wouldn't work with the card. I tried without the card and it still wouldn't work. So Ariel agreed to call.
I hope that I have courage like that someday... courage to do something incredibly hard with the strength with which she did it. I would have called if I had to, but she was so much more brave about it than I could be.

(WRITTEN 04-09) Now his parents know. They're going to make him get help. They talked about putting him in a center. I hope they don't. I'm not allowed to see him for a while, and I'm encouraged to just be his friend from now on. He can't use the internet. He was so focused on his future, always, that he didn't understand that it could never come if he didn't fix the present... for him, it will appear as if I am tearing his life apart. I wish he was mad at me, but Ariel says he is not. I want him to scream at me. I don't want this helpless defeat. Ariel went see him yesterday and she said he could barely talk, he was just curled up in a little ball. I wish I could be there... I wish I could hold him... not in any way remotely sexual, but in the way that you hold a tiny dog that has been alone all night... I need him now more than ever, I will never stop needing him in some way, but he matters now, and what we are or were is something of the past, maybe something that was simply necessary to get him to this point, to get him to the help he needs.

Yesterday I played my cello solo on three hours of sleep. I was too agitated to sleep on the way to Bozeman but too tired to read. I came home and sat in my house drumming my fingers. I felt like I was going crazy. To have lost what I loved more than anything, all in one day, and so definitely... I could feel the sorrow inside me but it was buried, and I couldn't feel it yet, and I still can't, and that scares me.
I called Erin. She knew I needed her so we went to Starbucks and then I slept over at her house. I was so tired, from all these days blurring into each other, that I just talked and talked about everything. She listened, and talked when it made sense for her too. She knew I just needed to talk. I just needed to be with someone, even if inside of me I was still so far away.

I don't know how I will ever forgive myself for doing this to Josh, although I don't regret it for an instant. I don't know how I will ever forgive myself for doing this to myself. I trusted love this time, and it was a mistake because I am left broken. I have a best friend whose life is falling apart... I have memories... and past that nothing... He meant more to me than any boy ever has before and maybe ever will romantically, but to save his life I had to shatter any romantic connection.

That is what hurts... that is what makes me still feel dizzy and blurred, even though I got nine hours of sleep last night, dead to the world on Erin's bedroom floor. I want to cry. I want to cut but I told Ariel I wouldn't. I want to feel it. I know inside me that it hurts more than anything, to lose him, and I want whatever is trying to protect me from that pain to just let go and let me feel it. I need to hurt. I need to scream and get angry and cry so long that when I'm done I feel new again.

I won't believe love is like this, but it always has been for me... I love someone so much, I take a chance, and in the end the love for them is what kills me. It never works out. I am left with the tatters. There is the rational, logical part of me that knows that it could never work now, not between me and him.

And there is the part that reads all the emails he ever sent me, including the very first way back in June... the part that listens to the CD of love songs he made for me... the part that thinks about kissing him in the climbing gym, and in the snow, and everything in the world feeling possible in that instant... and that part of me is shredding slowly into confetti.

I have lost all of that to save him... and I am left with him, and he is what I loved, and the only way to have him was to let him go...

I don't know how to explain the pain. It is worse, I think, than anything I can remember feeling before. Even if I cannot feel it yet. The fact that it is totally mentally debilitating is proof that even though it hasn't arrived in full-force, it is already beginning its threat to destroy me.

I need, more than anything, to be held in his arms right now... and that is the one thing that I cannot possibly have.

(I got all superiors on my three solos and my ensamble. District doesn't seem to matter much at the moment though).

mortification

I'm probably too tired to type this. I may read it tomorrow and delete it entirely. But I'm here, now, typing, so I might as well continue.
Today my violin solo went alright. Again, my hands weren't shaking, and I was so incredibly thankful. It felt SO nice.

The more entertaining story of the day though...
Our orchestra played. I forgot several mandatory articles of clothing, including black shoes, nylons, and a black shirt. I wore ugly black socks with my brown clunky sandals and asked my dad to bring me the black shirt with a bow on it in my closet. My father is apparently unsure, at age 56 almost 57, of what a bow actually is. He also doesn't seem to understand the fact that stretchy shirts with holes in the chest are meant to be worn OVER other shirts.

So my father brought me the stretchy, hole-riddled shirt (WITHOUT any sort of bow I might add). I had no shirt to wear under it so I safety pinned all the holes shut (very stylish, you know, having messy lines of safety pins showing through your shirt). That worked all right. But I was wearing a sports bra.

I have managed to wear sports bras for the whole year. The reason for that is much more depressing than the entertaining story I am interrupting to tell you this. But last August I went school shopping and bought all new bras. Nice bras, that fit well (I can't believe I'm going on about this in a blog. Oh well- the truth! All of it!). And then I was wearing one of them on that night with Matt in the car, the night that thing happened that threw me into a depression for all those months, and I haven't worn any of the nice new ones since then.

So the straps showed. That's the gist of my depressing tangent. So I had to pull them off and put them under my shoulder. Which meant that there were now odd lumpy things visible under my tight-fitting safety-pin-decorated shirt, kind of like tumors, and also my bra was on the verge of falling off.

As I walked out there to play, obvious as first chair second violin with my clunky sandles and lumpy chest, I thought that this sounded suspiciously like the beginning of one of the articles on the "Say Anything" page in YM magazine, you know the ones that procede to tell tales of mortal embarrassment? That comforting thought led me into my orchestra performance.

Anyway, thankfully I was spared the horror of my bra falling down and safety pins coming undone all at the same moment (that would have been a spectacle for the weary ajudicators!). Although I did get in my daily embarassing moment when I tripped on my clunky sandals (or perhaps, to be less forgiving, just my feet) and fell up the stairs again, crashing into the steps as people stopped to stare, the image of politeness.

It was an okay day. Cello solo tomorrow, ensamble, and then it's over thank gosh. I don't really care about my scores this year. I remember my freshman year when it mattered and after state I cried for hours and punched my face so my nose bled and fought the monster but lost and cut my arm, and I thought that I would always feel the ache of failure.

My gosh I've changed since then.

Propanolol is my savior. I played my piano piece today for the ajudicator, and for the first time in my life my hands didn't shake; I wasn't nervous. It was so bizarre, not having the huge tremor, no painful stomach contractions. I just felt... like every time I practiced it.

Now it didn't go perfectly by any means, but man I felt a lot better than I ever have before.

Today in chem I woke from my stupor briefly to ask my teacher a quantum physics question about electrons and singularity and the different theories about what electrons are before we look at them and whether they exist in multiple places simultaneously (they do) and everyone stared at me like I was crazy. Most people think quantum mechanics are crazy, because the laws are just so different on a subatomic level than on an atomic level. Things vibrating through dimensions, not even existing, until we look at them, and then maybe not even occupying any space, and not following a path but still moving... it isn't something we can really comprhend on our level of the world.

It was sort of like they were all zombies, and they didn't care. That was what was weirdest to me. They just didn't care about quantum physics. Now THAT, more so than any quantum theory, is something I can't comprehend.

proof of a deity

I do believe in God. I have never doubted it. But if all other confirmations in my life fail, I received one undeniable confirmation of His existence today.

Last night I got really tired at about 12:30 (or rather early this morning), so I gave up on my homework. I have three tests today, and I didn't study for any of them. Math was first off this morning, and I haven't been paying attention for this entire unit. Particular spring oscillations and omegas and Hooke's law have managed to evade me a bit. I did all the homework, but I can do math perfectly without understanding it, sort of like a parrot speaks.

I was praying all this morning for a miracle of sorts. I usually do well on math tests (I've never missed more than a point or two, and always get A's/A+'s), but I knew that that could end easily with a confusing harmonic series or a botched spring dampening coefficient.

When I don't study for things (which is happening more and more often), I usually just assume I'll do well, and I usually do. But today I knew I needed help when we had ten minutes left in the test and I had about a half an hour's worth of work to do.

So I prayed, prayed to the God of second order differential equations, and farther up the hierarchy to the God of calculus, and farthest up of all to the God of the universe, alpha and omega (that's ironic, how He always calls himself alpha and omega, and those Greek letters are in the formula for a dampened spring with imaginary discriminants, which I was doing today on the test). I was running into sheer desperation when the miracle (milagre- Spanish three is underway) occurred.

I was just setting my pencil down to complete the exclamation point on my factorial under my third degree of my Taylor polynomial series when the fire alarm went off. Oh, I know someone pulled it, but I believe it was divinely inspired. Then, in that moment when I was praying most heartily for divine intervention, I received it in the form of one obnoxious kid yaking on a handle.

I was nearly crying with joy. I got to go in today after school and spend a half an hour finishing it. I still didn't get my ratio test on one summation to work, and I still failed my omegas and couldn't figure out my amplitudes, but I finished all the parts I had been unable to get to.

So now there is no doubt about God's existance. Coincidences are lovely, but some are a bit too extreme to believe in.

Unfortunately, nobody pulled the alarm during my history test today on the Cold War. My gosh, I don't know the difference between resolutions at Potsdam and Yasomethingorother. Russia and Mao Zedong and that guy in Viet Nam (Ho Shi Minh???) are bad. There. American communist paranoia understood. Who needs the test?

And yesterday my English teacher gave us a quiz where we had to decide whether questions were factual, interpretive, or evaluative, which was really unfair in my opinion as every interpretation requires a personal opinion, which implies an evaluative response. Oh well. One more C to go in the gradebook. I don't care. It's the beginning of the quarter. And somehow, miraculously, every quarter, I get handed that report card with all those lines of A's. It's like I'm a machine. No matter how many quizzes I flunk the A's still come.

read it, you know you want to

Today was going along with the usual boredom until English. My English teacher usually annoys me because he manipulates philosophy, describes a philospher's philosophy in a very narrow way, and leaves everyone to believe that that is the essence of the philosophy. Having actually read the philosophy of the philosophers he talks about, I know that he is ignoring much of the philosophy and emphasizing things that distort it.

Today, though, I was fascinated in English class. A somewhat rare occurrance.

We read this short story. Read it. It's amazing. So we read it and he finished and the bell rang, and everyone else seemed to pull themselves out of that steamy English rut and move on, but I couldn't. We didn't talk about it, so I was left only with my own interpretations, my own struggling to dissect the story with the writing of Dostoevsky, William James, and utilitarianism (Mill's, whoever). Which only lead to more questions. I was so rabid for understanding of the story that I considered skipping tennis to go to the library to look it up on the net. I managed to resist, which is good as I don't think my coaches would have quite understood or bought my reason.

So I thought about it all night, all of the crazy possibilities of it rolling around in my head, all the questions it brings up agitating themselves. I have come up with my own conclusions, finally, about the scapegoat, the need for it, the need for LeGuin to separate us from the society in the story, the people that leave, why they leave, and where they go (in the allegorical sense of course).

But if you read this, read it. Please. I wasn't expecting it. It caught me off guard. And I think this is really the first time I've thrown all of my mental faculties into something school-related since September.

Actually, despite my hazy conclusions, I'm still asking myself questions about this story. I'm curious as to whether my English teacher will try to manipulate and limit it into his own perceptions tomorrow. I'm glad he gave us a day to think (or rather me, as no one else really looked affected).

I love stories like that. But the ambiguity could drive me insane.

Then again, is there ever a right way to interpret things?

Finally, are the ideas of utilitarianism/pragmatism (utilitarianism being the greatest good for the greatest number, whatever that is... I'm sure we could dive into Histonic calculus, but let's not be that zealous) and justice (that ever person receive their just due, whatever that is... we'd have to run to another philosopher I suppose) mutually exclusive?

Some part of me is connected with the rain. It makes my father depressed. It makes me happy. I love rain.
Yesterday was going quite well. And it still did I guess. I got the rejection letter from the summer camp at MIT, I'm sure due to my low math scores. It threw me into another matrix of self-doubt and confusion overy my future- English or science, that is the question. I know I'm better at English. But I like quantum physics. I don't want to be rejected from everything because my standardized scores were low.
The old, persistant, inescapable feeling came back... I'm not good enough. Not smart enough. And I never will be.

It wasn't so much the rejection from the camp but the age-old implication that sort of turned my day. I didn't feel horrible though. Just distant. I distance myself from the things that have the potential to hurt me. Much the way I am pushing Amanda out of my life at the moment. No one could hurt me like she could.

The one happiness I had left was that I could take the class at Carroll I wanted to, the writing class. But then my mother told me I couldn't take it, and anything good in me sort of deflated.

So it was pouring out, and I knew that I could escape into something better. I put on shorts and a t-shirt and my lovely, designer Pay-less shoes that leak in water, and I ran. I'm not sure how far, somewhat over two miles. So I guess not horribly far, but far enough to become drenched in freezing sheets of rain.

I'm not sure why I thought of him. It was something about the rain. And the girl in the book I was reading was sexually abused. It was something about being that cold and wet and feeling so vulnerable to it all. Rain does that to me.

So I thought of Craig. And no amount of running, no amount of anger, no amount of desperate desire could make me stop hurting from all of those memories.

sarcasm, wit, or rather the lack of it

Oh what an exciting day, it must go down in the annals of history...
sorry, overreaction due to excess hypomania.
But I did discover Libba Bray's live journal, and considering A Great and Terrible Beauty and Rebel Angels are two of the best books ever (and I have read a LOT of books) I am very excited. I love cynical sarcasm and find it hilarious when I am tired (well I find most things hilarious when I'm tired, but you know what I mean). So you should go read her live journal, it's very funny, and after that you should read her books, as they are funny, suspenseful, etc (continue list of adoring adjectives for lazy blogger).

So I have made a resolution to actually write (write as in begin, commit to, and finish) a book that does not involve all of the depressed, mopy, psychology-addicted sides of me (ie doesn't involve any sort of abuse, rape, or drawn-out addiction) but rather is written by the happy side of me, the hypomanic side of me, the side of me that is addicted to sarcasm and can write very sarcastically when I want to. I am sick of the depression and I want my writing to move on. Well, I want to move on with it. I want those aspects of my writing to combine with new aspects to polish my writing.

I suppose I need some sort of idea for the book, which I will think about today. I'm debating whether I want strictly contemporary realistic, or magical realism. I just need a general idea though, because as soon as I type the first few paragraphs of a book or essay or anything, it starts writing itself (quite convenient if you ask me).

I will now post the essay I turned into my English teacher when he assigned us to write something creative about a realistic or romantic story we've read that exemplifies our knowledge of the difference between the two. It is very long and feel no need to read it (why am I telling you this? I'm sure you won't), but I am very proud of it, and it contains the sort of attitude I want to diffuse into this new, unborn book I swear I will write.

The Gates to Heaven

It was a curious sensation, the darkness, retaining some sort of liquid quality, lapping at his body until the devastating actions of cytolysis slowly dissolved his very skin. There was no pain, no sudden clench of his muscles. It was a bit numbing, a bit calming, all of the darkness and his body fanning out into particles that hovered over the boxcar below where his wife clung to his hand. Some small fringe of him could still feel his wife’s clutch, her fingers locking in a rigid cage around his hand like somehow her touch could revive his pulse. He should be sorry she was gone, sorry he had lost that solid part of him, but he had always felt disillusioned. This detachment was nothing new.

It was only when a small sliver of sunlight pierced the shield of darkness above his head that he realized he must have died. That epiphany didn’t really bother him either. What bothered him was that there had been no warm milk this morning, no agony of his wife’s distracted eyes. He had slept, and in sleeping he had somehow discarded his body like an exoskeleton to grow slowly cold as the day plumped and ripened.

The halo of light surrounded him, and he could see the gates- not pearly like all of the stories, but metallic and so cold your tongue would stick with the faintest drip of saliva. He stood shivering with the snowy photons dotting his hair like peppery dandruff. A man in a tattered, puce bathrobe looked up with bleary eyes from a ledger book. Ink spots dotted his immaterial fingers, and his evanescent pupils were swirling drips of ink themselves, penetrating in their exhaustion.

“Welcome to heaven,” the man said, and his terry-cloth robe swayed from inertia, not wind. “You will enter here and remain forever if you can pass but one test. Answer this one question correctly and you will gain admittance.”

The man stood on a wispy fleck of cloud, thinking dully that he had finally lost those extra few pounds. When the silence, spicy as mouthwash, slowly bloomed inside his dry mouth, he realized he was expected to say something. He looked again at those steely doors. What was beyond them? More darkness? More numbing, confining cold?

“Yes?” he said after the long pause and the mounting sense of obligation. The man in the bathrobe swayed dramatically, clutching the steely gates. His hand stuck, and he ripped it off with the sound that dead skin might make if his hand were still covered in a glove of skin.

“You have to tell me one objective thing about yourself that everyone on earth would agree with.”

That’s simple, the man thought, there are plenty objective things about me. However, even as the words fluoresced inside his mind, he was remembering something from long ago…

***

He had been in high school once. He had blurred into the lockers, had dreamed of falling into the sky. He had no friends. The only thing that he was good at, or that he thought he was good at, was writing essays. So when, on a March day of his junior year when snow flurries brushed the contracted windows, and his English teacher assigned him to pick one object and write an objective, realistic, non-fiction essay on it, he thought that God, from somewhere beyond the pearly gates, was giving him a chance to redeem his grade-point average, or maybe his confidence. Which one mattered more in the end was an answer no one in high school could seem to procure.

At home that night, his fingers poised over his typewriter, the fresh strip of correcting tape looping around the iron arms, he sat in a straight-backed chair. A rock posed in front of him, balanced precariously on a jagged tip. He had no idea what type of rock it was. Classification and taxonomy and the divisions between categories had always confused him. It was a rock, a conglomerate of material. That’s all he cared to know. No framework he could apply to its name could ever be verified by the scientists that sat all day and stared at the minerals that replaced their lovers.

All of that was brushed from his mind as he started typing. His fingers blurred over the keys. He had large hands that consumed a piano keyboard far more effectively than fire consumed oxygen. He could type faster than anyone he knew. It was one more snatch of self-worth that he filed away in his mind, in that filing system that was so different from everyone else’s.

He knew that realistic literature was written with no ulterior motive and was meant to simply describe things as they were. So, with the preconceived intention of having no ulterior motive, he began writing about the jagged rock. He was proud of the metaphors and similes. Even if he did overuse them, his similes splayed out across the paper like small pregnant women: they were cute, fat, and undeniable. He wrote about the swirling of granite colors that tainted the surface of the rock. He wrote about the razor-sharp edge that had drawn a perfect globe of blood from his thumb. He wrote long into the night, and when he was done he turned the dial on the side of the typewriter to claim his last sheet, piled the papers together, and shoved them in his book-bag. The chance of him not receiving an A on this assignment was as slight as the chance of the moon undergoing spontaneous combustion.

For two weeks he floated through his existence more agitatedly than usual. Instead of drifting away from posts and large objects obstructing his path, he stared at his shoes distractedly and ran right into them. The acidic laughter that followed him hurt far worse than the throbbing pains. Laughter, more than any sort of depression, had eaten into his cardiac muscle, chewing his last defenses to shreds. He could not ignore it. It would not flow over him like everything else.

The tension building up inside of him, the desire to see his grade on the essay, was almost unbearable. He knew, like any good high school student, that his grade mattered far more than anything else in his life. When his English teacher finally passed out the essays, attached to the various objects people had chosen, he felt that the rock he had written about had migrated from the recesses of his memory into his throat, where it tore at the tender tissues. The teacher, her flat shoes clicking and her skirt dutifully sweeping her ankles, set the essay face down on his desk with the rock beside it. He could no longer breathe. The carbon dioxide in his lungs was diffusing and recycling itself over and over. The alveoli lining the visceral tissue could not handle the lack of oxygen. He felt his mind dissect into shimmering confusion, skating on the apprehensions that crested like waves, so he decided to turn over the paper before he fainted. There, scrawled in unforgiving, thick red lines, was the D. He had never thought of a letter being hideous before, but he had never been repulsed by anything as much as he was repulsed by that scarlet D.

The comments on the back were not vague. They were written in tiny, looping handwriting, almost illegible and gleefully flourished.

The assignment was to write objectively about this rock. You have not fulfilled that objective. The rock doesn’t swirl with granite; it is more brown than gray. The rock does not have a razor-sharp edge. That edge is slightly rounded. Your adjectives are based solely on your judgments. You are not in tune with unprejudiced reality. More importantly, I can tell you that you wrote this with the ulterior motive of not having an ulterior motive. The point was to avoid ulterior motives all together. I’m sorry that I have to give you this grade, but I have to be fair.

His eyes glazed over. He didn’t really see the paper. That night he burned the essay in an iron can and smashed the rock to bits with a hammer. Every blow felt like some sort of justice. It wasn’t fair, really. It wasn’t fair at all.

***

The man looked back at St. Peter in his tatty bathrobe. He remembered the depression that had filled him up the day his teacher passed back the essays, the depression that had still been there that morning when he slipped out of the boxcar and into the sky.

He tried to think of one thing in his life that had an obvious truth, one thing that had a single undisputable taxonomical classification. He stared at the freezing gates of heaven and the snow filled his hollow, spirit-bones, an ill substitute for marrow in his medullary cavities. His lips grew numb. Time passed the flurries of snow and left him in a motionless ether. People drifted in and out of the gates. He saw his wife pass. He asked St. Peter why she did not have to answer the same question as him.

“Everyone has an individualized question. It would be unfair to ask everyone the same objective question, because not everyone could have the same answer.”

There seemed something twisted about the whole affair, something unfair like that scrawled D so long ago, but he was too cold and too tired to find it.

As time coalesced into viscous droplets, he sat outside the steely gates of heaven struggling to think of an objective truth. In the end, he could not cease the inexorable tape of his memory, replaying again and again a life of subjective isolation. St. Peter wrote with spindly, blackened hands; ashen faces passed from darkness into light; the snow fell in filmy sheets of ethereal glory, but the man only drummed his knees and nodded his head, hopelessly lost within himself.