"Dear shadow alive and well:
How can the body die?
You tell me everything,
Anything true..."
--Fleet Foxes--
It felt a bit like prying open someone's insides--stretching back yanked wide skin and needling through the boney bit-- reading other people's manuscripts. Everything all double-spaced and decipherable; just like literature was never meant to be. Never did I prepare myself for neither of such things: One being, that I would be instructed to hold the audacity to read someone's hard work, and deem it invalid. Two being, that I would later be standing in an incredibly large line of people in steamy Postal Office fanning myself with a fistful of rejection letters. If there is another way Agents get off, please do let me know.
Now that I have a couple*jobs* (though the worst of which is the only that pays me, and meager amounts at that. Please, World, may I have some more?) on top of being a *student* (though this would require validating my Summer class as an actual...class, and I'm still not so sure it's qualified), I have become a day-walker to this land of hustler transvestite Teen Sensation citylife. With a messenger bag brusing the upper part of my thigh running to the Path Train, or my boots catching on the cobbled street of Bond, I am beginning to feel more and more like a fraud; having let the city buildings seep into my blood stream and fix themselves under my fingernails.
This has been one of the toughest weeks I've had mentally, on many levels. I revisited many things in my head and really re-lived them a bit, on the train, and suddenly I'm thrown into a whirl-win of confusion. I shut parts of myself out when I don't take to them anymore, and though some of those dusty knobs should never be touched, I still find myself placing my fingertips on the rusting hinges, wondering when exactly I ever buckled myself so tightly. Sometimes I'm not the little girl I thought I was, and at other times I wonder if I'll finally learn to be a little girl. Somehow I feel not many people see the lighter side of me anymore. If they ever did. I don't know if many people ever felt like I was someone they could relax around. But I was always the person they came to for advice. Like I was the wise old tree who had seen many paths and taken many of them. Of course I know this isn't true, and though I have taken many paths and seen both wonderful and terrible things alike, each life is for each to live and for me to be spouting out advice or talking the talk is as similar to telling a wall to simply get up the courage to tell the chair how it feels, and get on to it. Each person needs to make their own way. Follow their own footprints and no one else; even if it ultimately leads them in circles.
Perhaps one of the reasons I fell in love with writing is because I felt it was the only cognisent way I could possibly be organized, in the lightest of terms, within my own head. Though I know the main reason I fell in love with it is because language is one of the only things humans have to communicate and truly connect with one another. Otherwise we are just our own worlds, gravitating towards one another before we are launched back into the oblivion, only to return to star dust when we breathe the heaviest sigh.
I suppose today I just feel a bit like an old cardboard box full of letters and photographs of places I've seen and amazing people I've known-- that I swear I've never forgotten, just mis-placed, if just for a while-- in the back of an attic, feeling cramped and weary. How am I ever to figure where I belong, when I know the gypsy whose spirit embodies mine will never have peace. Unsatisfaction is what drives me forth, and admittedly always will. Somethings about myself will never faulter. And I suppose for that reason, my rambling ways will never quit and I will always find my next road.
I know I scare people, sometimes. I've also pissed a lot of people off. But I only know what I know, and I don't always claim that I'm right. I know everyone is just doing the best they can, and I wish they could tell that I'm only trying to do the same; though the people that should really pay attention to that, never will. But that's always how it goes. In any case, I am what I am and who I am is a person who is perhaps at times, frighteningly independent and not afraid to be herself. My friend Cris once told me I had an "unforgiving" personality. I was also told by my director, Josh, that I was "fearless". I think of all words to be used about me, these two stick out in my mind the most. I won't validate them and stake them as true, because that's for other people to label me with, not me. I don't try to cage my amoebic self into a container. But I like to think they have a sparkle of truth, somewhere hid in their individual definition.
Sometimes I miss the raw, reeling emotion I felt in my younger years. Even though some bits of those constant searches for meaning in life have stayed with me, I still feel I was much more soft to the touch emotionally, and perhaps a bit more permeable. But I guess that comes with age. I don't know that it would be mentally safe for me to be like that anymore.
Isn't it amazing? Only twenty, and already I feel the shifting weight of my life's encyclopedia's starting toward the edge of my shelf. I'll be amazed if my shoulders aren't past my waist within the next ten years.
I just wish I was able to be satisfied and relaxed. More like, I wish that's what I wanted. I never know what I want. I suppose that's the other reason I freak people out. I'm a riddle constantly re-wrapping itself. And when people come to me, bleary eyed, asking what my answer is, all I can do is shrug.
You don't know any more than I do.
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