Friday, August 20, 2010

How I Started to Cry

How I Started to Cry: a  Somewhat Poetic Rant

I am not special. I am not beautiful. I am not happy, and I may never be. In fact there’s a great chance that I wont be. I won’t be where I want to be, ever. I will never leave an impact on this world. I am not driven. I am not talented. I don’t want to try. to be useful. or productive. I want to abandon every project or endeavor I had ever begun or planned out. I am no writer. Everyone is a writer, no one is discovered. I may never love the way I dream to. I may never love at all. I dream too big, yes there is such a thing. The floorplan of my life is imaginary, it’s based on other people’s fiction and realities. I am not a good human being. I am a lie. I am the façade. I do well to rack up karma points that I hope will one day buy me the life I’ve spent too much time fantasizing about. I’m beginning to doubt my potential. I have not yet succeeded at anything. I am not noteworthy. I am not memorable and no one will remember me. I am nothing BUT a memory. A face in the crowd of someone’s life. The girl I knew in 6th grade. I haven’t cried like this in a while. I have not sobbed. I have not curled up in a ball, kneeling into the floor attempting to degenerate myself into matter. It’s been some time now. The things I worry about are absurd. Will I have money to buy toothpaste, or shampoo, in the next week before college starts? Will I be able to afford getting my sheets laundered and my jeans altered? I am not noble, and I have no story to tell. I suck at fiction. I do not want to try so hard, work my life away to be a writer, or a doctor, to revolutionize fertility, or be an activist, I don’t want to bring a voice to anyone… I barely have my own. I can’t live with myself as being the person who sits on the couch marathoning decade old television episodes. being a spud. I am inconsolable most of the time. I have used up my free sympathy passes and never truly have anyone to turn to, that I will not regret the next morning. I am not great. or good. I can’t breathe through my nose. It is stuffed. I have been alone for too long. I have nothing of my own. I have not been inspired. and I am not inspiring. I am selfishly kind, if at all. I am prettiest after I spend my time crying. I am trying to ignore the fact that I have not and will not shower today, lie it away, believe my own lie and make it disappear, not because I am depressed but because I am lazy. I am running out of words, my attempts are getting shoty and way too calculated but I can’t stop typing because the lifeless, worthless, not empty per se, more like decrepit, feeling is still there. I firmly believe that I am too difficult to love and that those who may begin to explore feelings for me will find that I have standards that they shouldn’t try to live up to. Yes, I too have standards, while I don’t have the right to. I expect to meet my ideal and for that I may be foolish, no, I most definitely am. I am tired to of being relied on but I am good at nothing more. I spend my time proving myself to someone who isn’t there. And what for? To be remembered by few, and famous to virtually no one. To leave nothing behind. Living life as merely going through a series of motions. a procedure with no wealth. I saw the sparkle in her words as they surely were in her eyes when she wrote them and realized that to some she was an idol, while others had never heard of her and that’s how I started to cry. I would never meet her or get to love her. I would never be her. Her optimism soars and she believes in the best in people and in art. She herself is an artist. She has the luxury of being herself and loving it, even when she doesn’t know it. And I fear I will have none of that.
I have a hard time believing that you can mean everything to some people and still mean nothing to others. What does it take to live happily and what can we teach the world?


Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Community College Cafeteria

Written in response to ABC Wednesday's C prompt:

Photo by 76spread on Flickr

Community College Cafeteria
clears out at about three or four in the afternoon
reminding me somewhat of an airport gate
people wait
for something to arrive
or depart
Vending machines dispense cheap overpriced candy
to students eager for a sugar fix
to make it through the day
And I can't concentrate on anything
two papers due
not a single one started
Whose brilliant idea was it to take summer classes anyway?!
The cold air conditioning torments
but refuses to awaken me from my daze
another force of destruction working against me
I stare out the window
and the trees outside are waving their limbs
inviting me to join them
but I am stuck here
between table, chair, turkey and cheese sandwiches, my computer, old episodes of Smallvile, and a
Literature textbook with tomorrow's assigned reading still unread
And it will all remain as such
until eight o clock p.m.
when I am forced to go to History.