Crystal, Gold and Neon

I lie and say reality has become so troubling that I need a break from it, dipping my nights in poisons encased in crystal so they catch the light and make me think I've found gold. I lie and say I love the nights I spend forgetting the days I've spent failing to grow.

I wander back to a warm bed or a warm couch and find myself curled up in the arms of people I love, whispers in my ears of how they’ll never let me go, but the back of my mind has a digital countdown to the day they see my mess as nothing more mysterious than a sink full of dishes (the day they make me someone else's problem, the day they give up).

Because where I'm from we hide the mess. We rake the leaves into neat piles to be picked up by men with trucks and carried to somewhere with high fences, meticulously repainted as soon as weather starts to wear them down. We hide wire and cords behind plaster, laundry baskets behind doors and garbage bins in little wooden huts. We have rules about neon lights. We use fake grass, or truck it in from a farm upstate – purebred like our blood and our pets that cost more than your annual salary.

It's not so bad, to drive along and not see the dirty laundry, to walk among beautiful people with beautiful clothes and beautiful cars and consider myself among them. It's not so bad until nightfall leaves my room lit with starlight and I have to escape out the window to breathe because the voices in my head have taken up all the oxygen. It's no so bad until the idea of feeling beautiful has faded along with the green in the grass and the life in the trees. So here's my mess, my dirty laundry. Here are my wires and cords, my imperfections, my scars, my neon lights. I lie and say I'll never change.

Just Words

They’re just words. God, if only they were just words. If I could speak and not feel like I’m losing a part of me every time a syllable falls out of my mouth. They’re not just words. They’re never just words. Attached to every combination of letters is this deep, entrenched meaning and when you write them on the page they say something specific. So fucking specific.

They’re just words, and you throw them around because you don’t know what they mean, but I pour over my letters and cross them out and rearrange them until they get as close as I can make them to what I want them to say. They’re a part of me, so if I’m going to let them out to breathe or put them on a page, they’d better say something worth saying; they’d better be ready to stand out there fully formed, not just whispers and fragments like the pieces of dandelion in the breeze when you wished for heartbreak to end last spring.

Days when they come out quickly are hard and days when they come out slowly are harder, and sometimes the days I don’t try to make them come out are the hardest of all, like somehow I’m neglecting the best part of me. Maybe it’s not the best part of me. Maybe it’s the worst part of me. Maybe everything that makes me enchanted with the sounds of the keys clicking or disgusted with the image of the cursor blinking is less the picture of the brilliance than the spiral of madness. Maybe I’ve created a personal hell that burns itself more space with each thought I dissect and each conversation I replay.

But words, at times, are all I have – the only thing that keeps me rooted in whatever twisted form of reality I find myself in that day. So let them be just words: they’re mine.

Finding Common Ground

I don't do my laundry enough, I'm impulsive, I swear too much, and I forget to eat, to breathe, to speak. Sometimes I drink too much, and sometimes I spend too much time alone. I am stuck in the painfully complex space between hating everything that I represent and embracing everything that I am.

I am scared. I am angry. I am emotional. I go for months without crying and then I sing along to a song I didn't even realize was sad and my voice starts to waver which is so foreign to me that I almost choke.

I'm empathetic which is cumbersome and hard to explain. Sometimes feelings cut through me like razor blades, and sometimes they can't get past the surface and I feel hardened, jaded. I am all at once cynical and misanthropic, optimistic and in love with the world.

I once thought the only word that could properly describe me was "paradox," and for that reason I felt disconnected, probably at a time where the word "paradox" was darkly appealing, before I made it to full height and before I found out what good music meant.  I've since graduated on to realize that everyone has a bit of it in them, a bit of that Walt Whitman contradiction.  Everyone wants and everyone doesn't want and everyone feels like sometimes they're screwing up.  We line up our scales and frantically throw weights on one end or the other to try to keep them in balance, but they are too many to keep track of, and sometimes one side of a scale hits the ground. But that has to be okay.  We have to let that be okay.

Words Change

My words were going to be so much different. They were paintings of open fields and open eyes and being both aware of my fear and liberated from it, like the moment right before you jump off a diving board for the first time. They were going to be excited. My words were going to be pleasant. Like a toddler who has found a litter of puppies and just falls into their fur and their kisses and she’s nothing but smiles and giggles. Because puppies never give you a reason to be anything but smiles and giggles. Puppies will never break your heart.

My words were not going to be a vague reference to anything because I promised they wouldn’t be. They were not going to be a story stolen from the pages of my journals, written about no one and nothing, and I was working so hard to make my words be about something different entirely. Something completely unrelated to the thoughts that had been running through my mind all weekend because I wanted to let you read something that didn’t feel like a public display of a private moment.

But the moment doesn’t seem quite so private anymore. It feels disposable.

I’m wiping the slate clean and letting myself be as easily convinced tomorrow as I was last week that I don’t need these walls. Because puppies are wonderful, but sometimes you need something that will talk back. Sometimes you need someone even though they might break your heart. Because it turns out the diving board is more like a cliff, and it turns out that the cliff is just a little rockier, or a little higher, or the waters below are just a little murkier than you’d like them to be. And giggles and smiles are great, but you’re not a toddler anymore.




Less eloquent post here, if you please.

Losing Control and Looking for Change

Losing control liberates in ways unanticipated. Free from responsibility. Free from worry. Granted, it lacks a certain satisfaction, a certain pride, a certain fulfillment, but the freedom from care feels like compensation. And even in less than ideal circumstances, anxiety makes itself scarce. As long as you’re well fed, clean and relatively comfortable, anything is bearable. The boredom might dull you or harden you, but it won’t break you.

It releases you from the reality of constantly competing with yourself to do better, to look better, to be better. Worrying if you made the right choice, waiting to find out if you messed up, and trying to figure out how to fix your mistake or deal with the consequences starts to wear you down.

Make money. Be social. Learn. Get enough sleep. Go to the gym. Eat healthy. Keep in touch. Pay your bills. Sign here. Act like it all makes you smile. Finding time to do what actually makes you happy, makes you genuinely smile (not just pose-for-the-picture smile) becomes just something else to add to the to-do list, second to doing your laundry and third to watching the episode of Dexter that’s been on your DVR for two weeks.

So you take your evening, the few hours to yourself, to take some time to not think. To take a sip of scotch and let the sounds of the night wash over you. (The buzzing in your ears and numbness in the tip of your nose mutes your tendency to over-think, to overanalyze.) To call those people (whose names you always forget because they’re saved in your phone as the name of the bar in which you met them) whose company you can’t stand because he’s too arrogant… or she’s too ditzy, but God, that thing they do with their tongue…

Then you get to a point where your hot shower and the Law & Order marathons don’t mask the vague hollowness you feel when you think of those moments you were happy and realize you aren’t anymore. It’s time to change. So you pack, get on a bus or a train or... any form of transportation, really, and go.

It’s just for the weekend. Maybe a little longer. To visit some friends you haven’t seen since last Christmas, to meet up with your ex for the night, to forget the sounds of the city and the monotony of your daily routine and breathe.

"What’s different now? What was I doing in that moment I was happy, in that time when everything seemed to be going right, that I’m not doing anymore?" you ask yourself. And you go through every aspect in your life and you try to figure out who or what toxic thing you let in. And God, it feels good to know that once you figure it out, once you determine that thing that makes it hard to wake up in the morning and even harder to fall asleep at night, that it will be so easy to just let it go.

Reasons to Be Angry in Taco Bell Parking Lots

I had always wanted to have a really good reason to be angry with someone.  One of the reasons that are so justified, going into a blind rage would be understandable.  Not that I ever particularly wanted to go into a blind rage, but I’m just so good at mapping out those conversations in my head.  “What right do you have?” I’d say.  “What makes you think that’s an acceptable way to behave?”

When actually faced with any justifiable reason to be mad, though, I crack. I talk to everyone who’s not involved until I’m so separated from my anger I feel like I’m a spectator.  First, I might take it out on the wrong person. Like, say, in a Taco Bell parking lot during a torrential rainstorm. 

Then I might drown myself in coffee or tequila (depending on the day of the week) while I try to rationalize, try to remove the emotion, try to see their side.  With coffee, I’ll end up with a few nights of insomnia, with tequila a few regrettable make-out sessions and the awkward aftertaste of drunken slumber because it’s a maze, working backwards through someone else’s thoughts.  I always expect to uncover some kind of evil, some kind of deep-seated malice, but usually what I find is simply human.  A petty little mistake too proud to apologize for or too ashamed to admit to.

Then all that rage, those, “you couldn’t be more selfish”s and these, “look at me when I’m lecturing you”s don’t seem as useful or poignant as they did in fiction.