I used to love sitting in the bath, putting my ears below the waterline so all sound was muffled and strange sounding. It was comforting, a world all my own. I now find myself wishing I could recede into myself and just lay with my ears below the waterline, a world all my own. I’m treading too hard keeping my head up, the floor’s receded it seems. No longer a bath, a pond, a lake. Just to lay back and float would be excellent.
I won’t ever do that again. We used almost all the tissues, crayons scattered all across the floor, glowsticks dying in the corner. These aren’t exactly the tools for a massacre, but they did just fine. The aftermath was worse, how much longer can this go on? I’m losing it, I want to run. I want to fall off the edge of civilization. I want freedom.
I have so much I’d like to say, and I haven’t found the right tools to express it with. I see people with such great artistic talents and they make it look so easy, but they aren’t exactly saying much. Maybe I try too hard. This is probably my main struggle at the present. I’m too conscious of things and it’s only when I’ve let my guard down by some means or another that I can finally express myself and connect with people. I’m getting better, but I still care what others think..not all, only people I care about.
Recently I figured out why it bothers me so much when people express supernatural beliefs. It’s because reality and existence and life are so fucking absurd and beautiful that to say someone snapped their fingers and created it is just plain insulting. It’s like they didn’t even think about it, and yet they shrug it off as not important, something they know about. All the elements in the universe were created in stars, were fused out of protons which are composed of even smaller particles. These elements then massed together to form planets, and on at least one of them an ocean of molecules formed. These molecules were rolled and tossed and swirled about by the currents and patterns eventually emerged created complex arrangements of these compounds. These compounds became more and more complex until the basis of life was formed, and through the process of natural selection learned to take advantage of other life forms. This continued until a mass of matter was able to ponder this whole process, to gaze at the universe and try to understand it. We are all made of stars and everything we know is powered by stars and the laws of the universe. How could anyone shrug this away to some finger snapping? People seems so caught up in the trifles of their life that they don’t see the complexity and beauty of what’s around them and it just enrages me. What good is existence if not to investigate it?
Reveling in the beauty of a day to day triviality, often times I stop to ponder the profound. Not today, however, today I curse obscenities at nothing in particular, at many things that in fact couldn’t care less. Some of these are my responsibility, some are my misfortune, yet they seem to amount to more than usual. Maybe my mindset started off badly (the proverbial foot) and only when I returned home was the foot in the right place. Once the joy of having bested the demons of this daily existence wore off, however, I was left with a longing; again for nothing in particular. The one brief escape from the day occurred when I came across you, and it seemed to propel my mood upward while it lasted. The only thing detracting from this occurrence was uncertainty: me? I don’t know. You? Yes, very much. Us? We’ll see.
I have to stop letting other people’s emotions affect mineI have to stop letting other people’s emotions affect mineI have to stop letting other people’s emotions affect mineI have to stop letting other people’s emotions affect mineI have to stop letting other people’s emotions affect mineI have to stop letting other people’s emotions affect mineI have to stop letting other people’s emotions affect mineI have to stop letting other people’s emotions affect mineI have to stop letting other people’s emotions affect mineI have to stop letting other people’s emotions affect mineI have to stop letting other people’s emotions affect mineI have to stop letting other people’s emotions affect mineI have to stop letting other people’s emotions affect mineI have to stop letting other people’s emotions affect mineI have to stop letting other people’s emotions affect mine. OK.
I know this and yet IT NEVER SINKS IN. I want to just let go and do whatever the hell I want without worrying about others, but for some reason I can’t. I’d feel irresponsible if I didn’t take others into account, and yet it’s psychologically damaging. I was taught from a young age not to brag about anything ever, and it’s now progressed to the point where I don’t like to take credit for anything. This leads to me not having a reputation for anything and as a result I feel somehow less than everyone and this in turn starts the cycle all over again. I’m going to give a great effort from now on to say whatever’s on my mind regardless of what it may mean to others and not worry about making anyone happy. I was brought up to be kind and generous but it’s just not realistic, and I realize now that that’s not what people actually like.
A few nights in a row last week I woke up at around three in the morning, dragged myself to the bathroom and then was sideswiped by an epiphany. This epiphany was the same every time, and it was none less mind blowing and frightening. If I had to label it I would say it was a mystical experience. Whether it was the result of a still-dreamy mind state with its inhibitions weakened or whatever else it doesn’t make it any less true or real. It’s truly hard to describe and putting it in writing doesn’t do it justice. Trying to describe it to a friend was met with an empathetic glance, trying to give the impression of understand, but I know I couldn’t convey it in words.
This is the best I can describe it:
At that very moment, it became very apparent that I would die, not now but in the not too distant future. I don’t mean some premonition that I would die an early death, but rather the fact that since I was now living, I in fact had to die. The feeling was synonymous with the death of someone very close, once the knowledge that it was irreversible is finally accepted. In a way maybe it was exactly like that; after all, who are you closest to but your own ego? People know we die, everyone knows it, or at least they all say they do. The difference is that I actually felt it, I wanted to escape, to not be alive, because it meant that I would die. I felt like a death row inmate. I collapsed back on my bed and fell asleep and by the next morning I didn’t feel any of that experience lingering, but I still had the memory and it still seems very important. The next couple of times it became easier to accept, and now it’s a permanent component to my consciousness. I think letting go of things like this is important to living a more fulfilling life as cliché as that may seem.
So my point with all this? We shrug off all of life’s complexities and oddities and barricade ourselves in another reality. This is not the only reality, and for many this fact is particularly unnerving. To actually begin dismantling this barricade is frightening on many levels. Sure there are sciences and mathematics and things have logic to them, but all of these are within the context of the human reality. When you get down to the fundamental questions there are no answers as of yet. If you want proof just follow any branch of science backwards to its source. Why do we even exist at all? What is reality? Religion tries to answer these questions, which is a major point in my dismissal of it. Religion was invented by man to solve these fundamental questions, and as a result they are no closer to answering them. The answers cannot be put into words, and I’m not even sure if humans are capable of containing them. By expanding our minds we can get close to feeling the aspects of these answers, and that is mind-blowing enough as it is. So life is boring? No it isn’t, blow down a wall or two and you’ll see.
I hate everything I’ve ever written, even things on this page, even what I’m currently writing probably. I can’t stand to go back and read what I was thinking even a month or two ago. Can I really change that much in a month’s time? Even a couple of weeks? Maybe it’s that I can never really express what I want to say in a way that’s completely true, so it feels like what I wrote was trite or painfully forced into ambiguity. Ambiguity. My life’s been revolving around that word lately. I can’t make decisions, I’m not sure who I am, what I want to do, what I want to be. I have an idea for the future, but anything immediately pressing just weighs on my mind until I just shrug it off and do nothing instead. I should be doing a million things but I’d rather just sit here. I miss companionship and intimacy and close friendship. Maybe I idealize these things and I actually have some of these things and I just don’t realize it. I think about the past too much, about decisions I made even a couple of minutes ago, wishing I had chosen differently. Of course this is apparent just by reading the previous two entries. I want someone to pat me on the back once in awhile, congratulate me on something, just some sign that I’m not completely fucking everything up. I know in the back of my mind I’m not, but it’s nice to have some kind of confirmation.
This is nothing more than a place to put some of my more troubling thoughts or emotions that have been keeping me up at night, and I’m not sure anyone will even read this or care about what it has to say. Either way it’s served its purpose.
I came across that video we made seven years ago in my basement. We were making an action movie starring Aladdin and his princess in a doll house. It had a brief commercial break featuring elmer’s glue and Snoke-a-cola(?). You kept zooming in on my teeth and face, and I shied away due to my even then severe self-consciousness. At some point you shouted “Everquest rocks!”. Watching it brought back the feeling that I was back in those days and although I was incredibly goofy awkward and more than a little chubby after a years worth of homeschooling I was happy. I always looked up to you, I still lurk you every once in awhile to see what you’re up to. I haven’t felt as close to anyone as I did back then. Even if it was awkward seeing you at first, an hour together and we were as close as ever. Sure I have friends now, but none who truly empathize with me, and I think that’s what I’m missing the most. That’s the source of all my nostalgia, why anything that even hints at happiness makes me yearn for those days again. As stupid and as painful to watch as that video was it let me revel in nostalgia and pretend we were friends again. I hope you’re happy.
I miss you. I miss my childhood which is now nothing but a nostalgic collage of synaesthetic memories. I miss you because I miss those memories. I can still visualize everything with every sense, and the whole thing combines into another sense altogether different and hard to put into words. The antecedent whom I miss does not apply to any one person, it applies to anyone I’ve ever had memories with in the past. More exactly it applies to the more distant past, to the point where memories begin to merge into that other sense that I still don’t know how to define. This seems to happen after I’ve moved on to a new era of my life. Just where these are divided is hard to say, and they overlap and lay on top of one another, but that extra sense seems to define these eras, each unique in my mind. Back to you though. Everything that I experienced in your presence seems to add to what later will make up these eras, and though you may be a different person altogether now than then, it is who you used to be that adds to it. You may be killing yourself slowly, or destroying your future, or turning over a new page of your life, yet there was a point where the future was unknown and you were great. Everyone starts out themselves, and it’s only with time that you are molded into the mass, and whether you like to think you aren’t a part of it, we all are. We never had a chance for anything else, we would die otherwise. Childhood isn’t when everything was simpler, if anything it was more complicated, because we didn’t have the confinement that we would later envelop us, we could wonder about the world and be ourselves. We now don’t have as much freedom, maybe we didn’t really from the start, we will follow the path that makes us most comfortable within the constraints that enable us all to live. This doesn’t mean we can’t think about what everything really is, we can still wonder about the world, our minds are the closest to free we can ever hope to be. Expand your mind. I’ve gotten off track again, though. I miss you. I wish we could be together again, but I know that it’s impossible. After an era apart the bonds between us are gone, and we’re nothing more now than friendly acquaintances. How are you? It’s good to hear from you. Goodbye.
