Lately I've been forced to sift through the relics that document my past, what with putting up my senior show, and with this way finding project. I've been reflecting a lot on the journey and the people along the way. Of which you are of course a humongous part. It was when I was looking through my photo album that I had a startling revelation. There is a part of me that will always see you as a boy. Your face flush with the weight of the very young, clad in that white t-shirt from cooperstown, black sweatpants, and the ever present slip on shoes. I remember how you hated shoetrings, jeans, and leaving your shirt untucked.
I can literally watch you grow up all over again in photos. Watch your body lengthen and widen, your jaw define itself, your eyes lose the glow of happiness, only to regain it again in later photos, tempered this time by living with choices and consequences. Watch your cockiness become a mantle that rests on your shoulders. Watch all the little infinite changes that happen so naturally no matter how closely you look, you can never really be cognizant of them happening.
I look at you and I see the little boy whose soul understood mine right away. I see the angry lost teenager just living recklessly. And I see the man you are becoming. Turning twenty is a weird quasi period of transition, it was a year in which I learned and grew so much. I hope those same things to you. And know that no matter how old you become, how much you change, there will always be someone who remembers where you came from and how you got here.
I love you. Happy Birthday.
4.30.2003
4.26.2003
nigh
the end is drawing nigh.
Out from under the pressure I can see the culmination of the stress and rush and hair pulling. I'm gonna see the other side of the tunnel. I'm not so scared anymore. It was hard to see past the immediacy of the moment, it doesn't make the problems and the struggles any less important, just filled with more perspective. It's the process of anything I guess, you keep whittling away until you have it at a level that you can manage.
I made the trip to be with my friend when he got his test results. Negative. He says he's changed for the better because of this experience, that he's getting his life on track. I can't have anything but faith in him. And when he stumbles I will be there to help him up without the I told you so's.
2 weeks. And I will be free again. How did the Indigo girls put it?
"I spent four years prostrate to a higher mind, I got my paper and now I'm free"
yeah, I couldn't have said it better myself.
Out from under the pressure I can see the culmination of the stress and rush and hair pulling. I'm gonna see the other side of the tunnel. I'm not so scared anymore. It was hard to see past the immediacy of the moment, it doesn't make the problems and the struggles any less important, just filled with more perspective. It's the process of anything I guess, you keep whittling away until you have it at a level that you can manage.
I made the trip to be with my friend when he got his test results. Negative. He says he's changed for the better because of this experience, that he's getting his life on track. I can't have anything but faith in him. And when he stumbles I will be there to help him up without the I told you so's.
2 weeks. And I will be free again. How did the Indigo girls put it?
"I spent four years prostrate to a higher mind, I got my paper and now I'm free"
yeah, I couldn't have said it better myself.
4.08.2003
really...
I'm not that unhappy and things are never as bad as they seem. But I tend to let things build up until I have to get them out of my head, hence the immense overflow of words that is the previous entry.
And today is looking up, I have an open space to live in the city of my choice. Now I just have to come up with the dough. Yeah, that'll be easy.
So I'm flipping off the slammed door and crawling through a window.
Fitting for a thief.
And today is looking up, I have an open space to live in the city of my choice. Now I just have to come up with the dough. Yeah, that'll be easy.
So I'm flipping off the slammed door and crawling through a window.
Fitting for a thief.
simplicity
I have a tendency to be melodramatic. It sometimes feels like breathing to me. I have tried to hold my breath until my lungs burn and I think maybe, just maybe this time I might lose consciousness. This time I might be able to rest. But I always let go with a great gasp and draw another breath, rapidly, one after the other.
I graduate in exactly one month and two days. I get caught sometimes in a fold of time, so that I'm still present in the now, but overlayed smashed together is some scene, some memory from four years ago. And I stop and remember, the people that brought me here, and I remember the person I was. I find myself getting nostalgic at the weirdest times, so caught up in the past my heart actually aches; to the point that I'm clutching my chest and clenching my eyes closed.
I'm absolutely petrified. My greatest fear is about to come true. I've spent four years and 100,000 + and I'm coming out the other end still lost. Still floundering, still looking, still on the fringe. And I can't figure out if that's because I'm still running from the things I should be facing, if I'm still telling everyone what they expect to hear, if I'm still putting on the same old mask when everyone already knows my secret identity. Or if it's just because I'm not ready to be who I'm supposed to be yet.
Everyone tells me this is normal. This is natural, everyone feels this way. It's the 22 year old freak out.
Well A. I'm not 22.
And B. I guess it's normal to have some fear and be confused, but to feel total apathy for the future? I'm pretty sure that's not normal.
I can't help but look at exactly where I'm going to be in roughly four weeks. I'm going to be homeless. I'm going to be beyond poor. I'm going to have no direction and no aspirations. I'm going to have no job. I'm going to have a pretty piece of paper that's supposed to mean something.
And what's worse is that all of these wonderful things that are going to happen are my own choices, whether through fault or chance.
And there are still more choices at hand: there's always San Francisco, or Chicago, or New York. And Michigan. I always have choices, but I've already established that I'm just looking to fuck up my life (I think I've done pretty well so far, let it never be said that I did anything halfway)
At a time when I should be happy and excited and looking toward the future with great anticipation, all I can think about is death.
My best friend called me Saturday, he'd just gotten tested for HIV. He has a week to wait for the results. A week that is tearing him up inside as he relives his past choices over and over in his head. It hurts to know that he never learns until the lesson is his life. There are an infinite amount of ways to throw your life away, and I swear he is working on them all. Not that I have much room to talk.
For as long as I can remember I've been afraid to pick up the phone. Because it always heralds bad news. Sometimes I sit and stare at it, letting each ring go unanswered as the digital tone slips into my ears and shudders down my spine. If I let it ring, everything will be ok for a little while longer. Harboring delusions and living in denial isn't healthy, I know. Is it wrong to avoid your loved ones, your friends and family, because you know you can't take one more thing. You can't take one more hospital visit, or doctor's report, or cat scan. You can't take one more death, one more broken heart, one more sob filled phone call. Because you are in no position to do anything to help. You can't even put your arms around them because you are at least 700 miles away from anyone who ever mattered to you. And that's all you want to do, make it all better with the force of your presence.
I'd like to let the melodrama go, to make my life a model of simplicity. Equate breathing with the taking in and letting go, the natural cycle of things. Like the waves on the shore, so that if I'm weary it's because I've lived a long life of being worn down gradually, gracefully.
I graduate in exactly one month and two days. I get caught sometimes in a fold of time, so that I'm still present in the now, but overlayed smashed together is some scene, some memory from four years ago. And I stop and remember, the people that brought me here, and I remember the person I was. I find myself getting nostalgic at the weirdest times, so caught up in the past my heart actually aches; to the point that I'm clutching my chest and clenching my eyes closed.
I'm absolutely petrified. My greatest fear is about to come true. I've spent four years and 100,000 + and I'm coming out the other end still lost. Still floundering, still looking, still on the fringe. And I can't figure out if that's because I'm still running from the things I should be facing, if I'm still telling everyone what they expect to hear, if I'm still putting on the same old mask when everyone already knows my secret identity. Or if it's just because I'm not ready to be who I'm supposed to be yet.
Everyone tells me this is normal. This is natural, everyone feels this way. It's the 22 year old freak out.
Well A. I'm not 22.
And B. I guess it's normal to have some fear and be confused, but to feel total apathy for the future? I'm pretty sure that's not normal.
I can't help but look at exactly where I'm going to be in roughly four weeks. I'm going to be homeless. I'm going to be beyond poor. I'm going to have no direction and no aspirations. I'm going to have no job. I'm going to have a pretty piece of paper that's supposed to mean something.
And what's worse is that all of these wonderful things that are going to happen are my own choices, whether through fault or chance.
And there are still more choices at hand: there's always San Francisco, or Chicago, or New York. And Michigan. I always have choices, but I've already established that I'm just looking to fuck up my life (I think I've done pretty well so far, let it never be said that I did anything halfway)
At a time when I should be happy and excited and looking toward the future with great anticipation, all I can think about is death.
My best friend called me Saturday, he'd just gotten tested for HIV. He has a week to wait for the results. A week that is tearing him up inside as he relives his past choices over and over in his head. It hurts to know that he never learns until the lesson is his life. There are an infinite amount of ways to throw your life away, and I swear he is working on them all. Not that I have much room to talk.
For as long as I can remember I've been afraid to pick up the phone. Because it always heralds bad news. Sometimes I sit and stare at it, letting each ring go unanswered as the digital tone slips into my ears and shudders down my spine. If I let it ring, everything will be ok for a little while longer. Harboring delusions and living in denial isn't healthy, I know. Is it wrong to avoid your loved ones, your friends and family, because you know you can't take one more thing. You can't take one more hospital visit, or doctor's report, or cat scan. You can't take one more death, one more broken heart, one more sob filled phone call. Because you are in no position to do anything to help. You can't even put your arms around them because you are at least 700 miles away from anyone who ever mattered to you. And that's all you want to do, make it all better with the force of your presence.
I'd like to let the melodrama go, to make my life a model of simplicity. Equate breathing with the taking in and letting go, the natural cycle of things. Like the waves on the shore, so that if I'm weary it's because I've lived a long life of being worn down gradually, gracefully.
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