I can’t clean anymore. I can’t deal with the mess. I can’t look at the writing and the pictures anymore. I can’t cover it up or take them out of the frames. I can’t read that shit anymore. I can’t burn the paper or delete the files. I can’t think about this anymore. I can’t get it out of my head. I can’t listen to Phish or The Beatles or Neutral Milk Hotel or Pink Floyd. Farmhouse and Abbey Road have been in my CD player on repeat all weekend and Wish You Were Here was the tape we got Evan to play in his car. I can’t play those songs on the guitar. My dad thought it would be fun to teach me Funk #49. I can’t look at a bass. I really wanna learn how to play it. I don’t wanna be fucked up. I obviously can’t stick with anything though can I?
My life seems like one huge contradiction filled with late nights and things that I oppose and lies that I ignore. I close my ears and my eyes to the world around me. I’ve created my own reality. And there I like to stay until I hear the phone ring and my fantasy cracks and shatters around me.
So that’s what I really do when I get depressed. I lay between those three walls on that bed with the music on really loud. Sometimes I close my eyes but usually I don’t. I think about things. I draw things. I bawl. I tear holes in the lace in my curtains. I pull my split ends apart. I paint my nails. I set things on fire (and almost burn my house down). I download music. I play on photo shop. I’ll do anything not to lay there and think of things. Anything not to be alone with the thoughts in my head. The same thoughts that make me insane. Those nights I slam down the phone and something was just so horribly wrong and I sit criss crossed with the music up loud and all the lights on cause I can’t move at all, even to turn them off. And I let it go. I cry uncontrollably and loudly and and dig my nails into my palms and my fingers and rip and dig at my skin and those lace curtains and hit the wall and fracture my middle finger (which hurts less than kicking the door and breaking my toe).
And then it just goes away. I sit there calmly with the music. I turn out the light. I pull the covers over my shoulders and turn to face the wall. I mouth or whisper or mumble the words, probably to a Phish song because I can distinctly remember the last night I did this when Strange Design was playing and I was freaking out and I mumbled the chorus through tears that were slipping out of my eyes slowly and silently.
Breathe out a sigh and decide I don’t have the heart to pray that night because some nights I feel like God’s got his headphones on and a magazine and is too busy for me. And it’s okay. Because that abandonment and that loneliness is familiar and that empty, ragged, torn, defeated feeling exhausts me. So I draw the curtain back and change the song and sigh when I roll my iPod thing to the part of Echoes (by Pink Floyd) that I want to hear. And I just hear it and look out at the stars and the dark tree line. And sink back into my pillow and close my eyes. And sleep takes me (aided sleep in general but not last time).
No one used to know I’d freak out like that. I used to not before I grew up and got fucked up. Before I realized the world wasn’t a nice place and everyone lies. Before I realized that, apparently, love doesn’t mean anything and emotions don’t matter (that’s the side of things I don’t think I believe).
Before my mom said if she didn’t have kids her and my dad would be divorced. Before my dad said he didn’t believe in divorce and that was that. So they’re together and miserable. Before my mom got really sick. Before I had to lead. Before I had to yell at my parents for not paying bills or for having late taxes. Before I had to be the grown up.
I can do it. I can do it with a smile too. And avoid the break down. But it’s hard to be strong and I’m sick of it. I just wanna sink back into a pool of warm water and melt into nonexistence for a time. Or fall off a bridge backwards into water and just feels myself sink down. Just that feeling of relief. Not death. Relief. (Don’t take that the wrong way. I’m not suicidal. I’m just depressed as hell and thinking falling into midday traffic wouldn’t be so bad.)
It’s everything. It’s everything not working. It’s how it was gonna. And we were young and naive and knew not what we were saying. We were foolish to talk and muse about a future that I think, deep down, neither one of us believed wouldn’t come and then both believed that it just wouldn’t. And now my best friend is… is having trouble or too much stress and just doesn’t care about much of anything. And worries me. And I feel like I’m going to lose him. And that connection that we had is already fading fast and I’m trying to hold on because I don’t want the old days and my old friends gone.
But they’re already slipping away. Everyday I notice the aspects of my new life creeping in and filling up the cracks and the empty space. And the transitional period is here because I’ve noticed it. It’s a slow time. It’s a time when I’m feeling far more introverted than usual. And I wanna talk but I don’t. And I have everything to say but want to say nothing or feel I can say nothing.
I’m completely insane. But at the same time, for all the things I’ve come to know and all the flaws I’ve realized in myself, I’m more normal than most and sane in a chaotic sense.
It’s hard to explain and I feel like no one will understand the mechanics in my head anywhere near the way I do. I don’t think correctly or in a very logical fashion. I don’t behave logically. I conduct myself either too maturely or not with enough maturity. Forgiveness when I should be standing up and telling it like it is and spite and maliciousness when I should be shrugging things off.
Basically, I know how it should be and how it shouldn’t be. I hate the way it shouldn’t be. And somehow I manage to act that way everytime anyways. And I try to change it. And it’s getting better.
But despite that everything makes me feel like I’m retrogressing and slipping backwards just because my tongue and my lips form the words I meant to keep between my ears. And everyone lives while I feel like my heart’s stopped (I mean that in a literal sense. I get these chest pains and shallow breathing and worry the fuck out of myself.). And this all perplexes me beyond believe. I could spend hours here typing and having faux epiphanies of one sort or another and explain things that one day everyone else will realize and go “I’ve heard this before somewhere” or say the things that others have lived and realize and so they shake their heads and say simply “I told her so” which they always say anyways.
Oh I smile. Oh I laugh. Oh I joke and enjoy my life most of the time. But some days the sky outside is gray and the day is slow. The phone only rings 3 times and the line is full of static. The music sounds hollow and everyone feels distant. And I get the feeling like all my realistic fantasies about life getting better are wrong. They probably aren’t though because somehow I’m always right (or on the right path) good or bad. And sometimes it’s inexplicable. And it kills.
Maybe I’m a closet introvert. I love people. I love to talk about my ideas. But there’s a side of me that would rather sit alone, isolated, with a handful of CDs and a dark room for the rest of eternity.
I think there’s something wrong with me.
