Changes

Its today: all of yesterday
Dropped away among the
Fingers of light and
Sleeping eyes of the night.
Tomorrow
Will come in gentle footsteps
To remove sorrow;
The ascent of the sun
Has already begun.

....

From memories
Of the birds that chanted to me
That sweet morning,
From the
Beginning notes of yearning,
From the thousand
Responses of my heart never to cease,
From the
Myriad aroused words:
Words stronger,
More potent than any;
Such as now
starts scene revisiting.

Shine! Shine! Shine!
Pour down your warmth,
Great sun!
While we bask,
We two together.

Winds blow north,
Or winds blow south;
Day come white,
Or night come black;
Home, or
Rivers and mountains away from home;
Smiling all the time,
Minding no time,
While we two keep together.

Low hangs the moon;
It rose late.
It lags:
I think it is
Heavy with love.

I wake up every morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounds and as impossible as it actually is, happy. But during the course of each day my heart will descend from my chest into my stomach. By early afternoon, I am overcome by the feeling that nothing is right, or nothing is right for me, and by the desire to be alone. By evening I am fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of my grief, alone in my aimless confusion, alone even in my loneliness. I am not sad, I repeat to myself over and over, I am not sad. As if I might one day convince myself. Or fool myself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because my life has unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. I fall asleep with my heart at the foot of my bed, like some domesticated animal that is no part of me at all. And each morning I wake with it again, in the cupboard of my rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon I am again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.

He Puts Himself On A Pedestal and They Go Down On It

No one does this. No one objectifies a list of 35 girls, ranking them on a points system based on attractiveness, performance, and availability (the virgins or one's with boyfriends score higher). Some of them he hasn't even been with yet, and when he gets into their pants he crosses their name off. No one walks over countless amounts of people with no ramifications. Most importantly, no one does this to me. I PICKED YOU UP FROM THE FUCKING ROSEBOWL WHEN YOU STAYED AT UCLA ONLY TO FIND OUT YOU HAD A THREESOME THERE THE NIGHT BEFORE?!?!?! And not only did you cheat on me, you cheated on the OTHER GIRLFRIEND YOU'VE BEEN WITH FOR 4 MONTHS?!? Sorry. Excuse my burst of sudden anger. But the hardest part for me to understand is how so many other people simply allowed things like that to happen. Most people have a problem embracing their worth, with knowing how they deserve to be treated.

As far as it goes for me, in the beginning all I wanted was the feeling of being cared about. You might not know, but for someone as depressed as me, that warmth, that assurance that you are in fact important to someone, is like a drug to a heroin addict. And I was stupid. You go into a relationship looking for safety and security, and it's easy to forget that while this irenic quietude may shelter you from the teeming masses, it also puts you at the mercy of one person. And in the end you will most likely feel varying degrees of pain from a million betrayals, ones big or small. He spoon fed me bullshit about how he was in love with me, and I, too willingly, believed it.

I have never met someone who turns women into play things. He had two girlfriends- *excuse me apparently 3 now?- one of whom took him back after doing this to before. Cheats on everyone he's been together with. Compulsively lies not just to us, but to his friends about where he's going, or even about what he ate for breakfast. Everyday he works out, putting forth all of the effort towards getting girls. All he talks about, all his ego is built upon, is sex- which is something he isn't even that great at. Mister D1 athlete- whose scholarship he lost- puts himself up on a pedestal and girls go down on it- again, and again, and again. I felt like I had to do something to finally teach him a lesson.

Yelling at him would do nothing. The words would just make me feel like I was severely fingering myself. They're just words is all. Powerless. Vocabulary. I wanted every girl to know the kind of guy he is, so I posted that status on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=175613269123102&id=675367542). Getting high fives in the hallway all day pumped me up even further, and by break I was so livid I couldn't even see straight. I resorted to mutually assured destruction, and after fun things went down in the ceramics room with his back pack, things finally escalated when I poured a water bottle on him during passing period. It felt so good.

So fuck you for luring me into a life of nihilism, but listen here you beautiful son of a bitch. I am not like the rest of the girls from your past. I am not a lifeless Stepford Wife who cooks, cleans, and fucks with a blissful, idiotic smile. Nor am I some simple, easy girl who can be reduced to the stereotype of a slut. I know my worth and you do not deserve me, and I hope through all of this you have learned you cannot fuck with me. But more importantly I hope that you no longer treat women as toys.

the night I found out

It is Sunday night, we're about at that point when it's Monday morning, and I am curled up into the fetal position on my bed. I sit here with my face in my hands as if to catch my head, to keep it from rolling across a field like a soccer ball that someone might kick by accident.

And the thing that's really bugging me, as I lie curled up, is the scene that I'm enacting reminds me of my entire life.

These are the same tears I cry when I hear the gospel song that goes This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine, and I think of the way ordinary people are able to triumph, in ways small or large, over adversity. And I remember crying like this after seeing Robert Redford in The Natural, crying over the way determination and conviction can make a simple baseball player do supernatural things. And everyone thought I was stupid, but I wanted to tell them that I was crying because whatever my gifts- the pieces of good buried inside and under so much that I feel is bad, is wrong, is twisted- are less clear than the ability to hit a ball with a bat. My gifts are for life itself, for an unfortunately astute understanding of all the cruelty and pain in the world. My gifts are unspecific. I am an artist manque, someone full of crazy ideas and grandiloquent needs and even a little bit of happiness, but with no particular way to express it.

Now I'll go smoke a cigarette, return to my room, watch the 11 o'clock news, and fall asleep with the blue light of the TV still on, feeling completely pathetic.

Senior Year

The weirdest part about me being a senior is that I have felt no change and have felt a tremendous change at the same time. Being a freshman, you could spot out the older girls... the well-dressed ones who seemed to radiate coolness through their confident, more-mature mannerisms. I don't feel older, I don't feel a heightened sense of fashion, and aside from losing the doe-eyed look in the halls, not much has changed. I still identify myself as me from 8th grade me; I can remember memories from then up until now as though they were yesterday, and not only that but all my previous emotions are still so tangible to me.

At the same time, however, nothing is the same. My outlook on things are completely different, the way I act is completely different. I never EVER could have imagined myself at where I am right now. Two years ago, if you were to tell me I would smoke weed daily, get a tattoo, go on vacation with Lacey, or even become best friends with Katy Conti, I would have laughed in your face.

I can't explain how I got here. I know that I have felt anguish, and it was often blank, undifferentiated. Rarely would it carry a clearly written label that also contains its motivation, and any label it did have was mendacious. I've learned at this point that someone can believe or declare their self to be anguished for one reason and be so due to something different. You can think that you are suffering facing the future and instead be rapt with the passed. You can think that your suffering for others, out of pity or compassion, but deep down you know that it's for your own reasons- more or less profound, more or less avowed- and sometimes they are so deep that only specialists, analysts of the souls, can exhume them.

Regardless, I feel immense excitement gearing towards this year. Reasons include: taking Kirsten and Katy to school every morning, Katy being in my 5th period philosophy class and leaving everyday with her, my new-found friendship with Lacey, no longer being the ostracism and receiving general acceptance from my peers (this eliminates my fear of nutrition break), having two jobs, and having an easy schedule.

The Snowball Effect

Can someone please explain it to me? How is this possible: First I'm in a good mood, but my eyes get watery because Ali, the glamorous Bachelorette from season 6, clearlyyyyy made the wrong decision in the end. But as the tears start pooling together, it's like all my problems flash before me. The reality T.V. series gets me worked up over the heartbreak, then some stupid person said some stupid thing that got me upset over a similar heartbreak of my own, and then, before I know it, I'm a wreck. So first its Ali then its Nick then its loss then its Katy then its nostalgia then its Jordan then its back to loss then it's the cause of all the hurt I am, and soon enough the tear drops that were once plump and perfectly round are falling down the side of my face at such an uncontrollable rate that you can no longer see the perfect streaks left behind, but instead just a blotchy, red, wet complexion. It's like the filter of recall is itself altered, so that it blocks out anything but the darkest colors of the spectrum. Being unhappy precludes all else. The feeling is narcissistic, nothing that does not resonate with my unhappiness can interest me. That's when time becomes palpable and vicious. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, gets wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tighten and ache. At that point I fade into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis creates a painful blank where my mind used to be. I feel the numbness come over me. It's so familiar, yet each time it feels worse than anything, I'm sure. Numbness is an understatement. It's more of a deep freeze, in which the ice threatens to crack at any minute, except underneath there won't be water, there won't be any fluid at all, just more and more layers of ice... ice cubes and icebergs and ice floes and ice statues, where a girl used to be.