concept limbo

Most times when you’re growing up, people stop patting you on the back for completing mundane things. I guess that’s expected. You get a big fucking hurrah for graduating high school, which really will be the easiest thing you’ll ever do for the rest of your life. But once you leave that shit hole and enter “adult” world, people not only stop blowing sunshine up your ass, but they also stop saying nice things in general. They start seeing you as an inept bitch, something cruising through the world that they think they earned their place in. People stop saying nice things, even if what you finished was of enormous worth. You stopped throwing up. You stopped drinking so much. You stopped slitting your wrists and popping pills. You’re growing up. Good job. I bet you haven’t heard that in a long time. All you’ve heard are questions about your major, your job, and your plans for the great fucking future. Questions and hard, hard criticisms because no matter what you’re choices or opinions are, they are not “tested” and “experienced.” Basically, they’re not good enough for anyone anymore. So you start doubting yourself…You were probably top of your class in high school or something of that sort. Super smart AP/IB type who took Calculus junior year. Suddenly all the looks of awe and accolades are gone. You’re just a fucking child and you’ve been through nothing and you’re self-absorbed and you’re all these things that 18, 19, and 20 year olds are. They don’t think or seem to remember what it was like to enter the skeptical world. So here you are, crying on the floor, looking for that last bottle of vodka somewhere at the bottom of your closet in your parents’ house.

Fearing of Flying

After this year, any remnants of fear I felt for failure must absolutely be gone. If I had ever felt afraid of failing, then it must be a long ago memory because I realized today at 4:38 A.M. that I began this year grappling with the prospect of imminent failure multiple times in majoring of Physics.

I don't fear the close explosions of a bad homework grade. I used to hesitate at the top of my pencil, waiting for hours and hours on the blank lined pages. If I knew how easy it was to just start writing and scribbling and doodling what came to mind, then I may be much better off now. The fear gripped my hand and kept it suspended for so long, putting off the fear and the progress and the success.

But now that I think about it, I feared failing. And by default, the options of quitting or trying again. Maybe I was afraid of hard work because I never was a quitter. The woe of being a determined, lazy teenager.

Forget deflowering

There's something painfully poetic about burning flowers, watching as the white petals darken to a crisp and evaporate into the night as if it was always an unadmired essence of nothing.

Maybe I find it so because I used to think I was like that white flower, subtle and quiet, as I hung on the low branches waiting for a stranger's quick glance in recognition that maybe it was a beautiful flower in existence. But burnt, the charred petals and limp sternum was something more recognizable to me in the mirror. Nobody sees burnt flowers as a conventional beauty, if at all, but as an unnatural occurrence mutilated in chemistry by a twisted God whose love for fire and destruction wrought a strange irony in what should have been an aromatic but useless piece of shit in nature.

This is not what I am because I don't want to be a flower anymore. They're fragile and pointless and dainty and conventional for the simple minded mongrels whose mindless admiration is as insulting as being plucked as a bud. I'm not a burnt flower or any force of vegetation, but I'm beginning to think that I am the aftermath of massive destruction: The ash, the smoke, the mild burn at the back of your nostrils. This is what I am as a girl, grown from the dirt of rejection and ray of pity.

Waiting

It's a strange thing to think that I've been waiting all this time for summer. I've been waiting and passively passing time until the fifteenth of May so that I could strip and run open-armed into the ocean under the scathing sunlight. I've been waiting for months and I've just another before I look back and realize that I'll only have two more weeks of my first year of college and I've done nothing progressive except take a few classes and hardly pass with grades that would get me no job and no accolade.

I've been waiting all this time for something I think will be great, but these months have been great and where was I to enjoy them but in a constant mental state of anticipation for the next best, unobtainable thing.

Summer plans

1. Get my damn license already
2. Go to the beach, read, eat a million acai bowls
3. Launch summer menu
4. Apartment furniture shopping
5. Paint in the nude
6. Do more photo shoots
7. Pick up kickboxing

Some days

Most days, it's okay. I wake up, look out the window, and feel perfectly glad to be alive.

On some days, I wake up to wish that I didn't. It seems like for no good reason to have fallen out of love so randomly. But that's what it is. And for the rest of the day, it gets harder and harder to fend off the urge to get in bed and cry and heave and sleep. The world around seems different on some days, muffled. But I'm staring at all their faces and it's as if they don't see me as the air gets used. That's just some days, scattered throughout existence.

We are not friends

For a long time, I thought that we were friends. The beginning was nice. It was casual with pretty dresses and wry smiles and good arguments. The beginning of everything is damn nice. And towards the middle we shared our problems and talked about the serious stuff and made promises that we couldn't keep.

For a long time, I thought this was friendship. I thought that you and me would be okay not talking for awhile because you did your thing and I did mine and it was good to be able to say, "Hey, I don't talk to my best friend everyday and that's fucking fine." Let's be honest, it's been kind of shitty.

I pushed the idea back that maybe I'm just overreacting again. I might just be dramatic and crazy and sensitive...all the things I hate in myself. So I pushed the idea back, pushed back the thought that we are not friends. We have not been friends for a long time, you and me. We stopped talking, and stopped thinking about what we'd talk about next, and how the other person might be feeling at some random given moment.

Maybe it was just me at the beginning who felt all that crazy stuff because I tend to do that a whole lot. It makes me sad, if I'm being totally honest. If I'm being super honest, I don't really know if I'm mad at you or if I'm mad at me for giving so many fucks from the start of something doomed.

We used to know each other. We could have been friends, but you haven't texted me anything meaningful in awhile...just a nonchalant, "hey, how've you been?" followed by silence while I listen in on the faint chatter on your end of the conversation with other people.

I meant to tell you how I felt, but I couldn't do it because you're doing so well now with your health and your school and your new friends. I'm glad I didn't find you by the river, hanging on a tree. I'm glad, and that's what I tell myself because if I admit otherwise, I'd really have to reevaluate myself as a person and that's something I cannot do without you.

We are not friends. We have not been friends for a long time now. I had to let the world know somehow.