I want to attack the part of my brain
that takes a good day
and turns it into a bad night.
Attack the part of my brain
that blocks out the sun
and lets in the storms.
I stood there hoping
nobody could see my shaking hands,
trying to keep myself together
a little longer.
Calm down. Breathe. This is no place for a break down.
But then again, where is?
I freeze when everyone else peels off their skin
in front of me.
What have I got to offer them?
A few scars?
Maybe that’s enough.
There isn’t much to say about love
that hasn’t been said before.
But the stars,
and the moon,
and the clouds.
I wonder what they’re doing right now.
I wonder what everyone is
doing without me.
Probably better things.
I see the rain,
it’s so selfish
and I’m not sure why.
I want to leave my body,
travel to other planets in my sleep.
If I do that I’m not sure I’ll come back.
I don’t know what I’m saying I don’t know what I’m doing I don’t know what I’m thinking.
I wonder where my mind goes when my soul is fast asleep.
How many pages have I filled with useless words that meant nothing?
It doesn’t matter as long as I’ve written a few sentences
with enough meaning to make up for what my other words have lacked.
I’ll fill up every notebook,
every wall,
every scrap piece of paper I find lying on the ground
until I’ve written enough words to fill up the world.
I’m a sucker for words.
Words, words, words. They might as well be all that my universe consists of.
They stay in my head for hours and I know I’d be sad if they left.
I loathe them. I hate them. They flip in a switch in my brain that no other force ever could.
I’m powerless to them. I can’t fight them, so I just give in.
I let them take over my conscience, fill up my mind, consume what’s left of my soul.
I let them possess me. I let them get to me. I let them take control of my actions. I let them get in the way of my judgment.
I love them. I adore them. They take my brain to places that it’s never seen before, places it would never see if the world was filled with silence and language did not exist.
I love all of the things you do and all of the things that you are.
But I will never love anything about you as much as I love your words.
Because without them you would not exist.
A society controlled by religion. We’ll get them at a young age so it’ll stay with them forever. If they don’t learn it at a young age, we’ll wait until they’re vulnerable. When they’re sick or their family is dead or they’re living in poverty. When they’re hopeless and all they want is something to believe in. It’s best when they’re on drugs and can’t think for themselves or even think straight at all. We can own them, keep them under control. We’ll tell them there’s a higher power in control of everything. If they please the higher power, their spirits will live with Him in a paradise after they die. If they disappoint Him, they’ll burn forever in a land of fire. We’ll tell them that He wants us to worship Him. We’ll tell them He doesn’t want us to be lazy, greedy, envious, or lustful. We’ll tell them not to have sex until they’re married because He wouldn’t be happy with them. We’ll tell them not to steal because He doesn’t want them to be thieves, not because taking something that isn’t yours is wrong. We’ll tell them He thinks it’s wrong to be homosexual or to follow a different religion.
We’ll tell them He doesn’t want us to kill.
But we’ll do it anyway.
It’s still there
even when I don’t want it to be.
So I know it’s not all in my head,
because if it was in my head I could ask it to leave
and it would listen
but it won’t.
It sits on top of my cerebral cortex,
chewing on my thoughts
until I acknowledge its presence again.
I stared out my window at the street beside my house, and the empty jungle of trees next to it. I think about how in another world, this very second, we’re walking down the street together side by side. I look at the streetlights, and the Christmas lights, and they look so beautiful in the dark. It’s December and there’s no snow on the ground but that will change soon. The trees look bear, naked, their clothes on the ground in a dirty pile because Mother Nature doesn’t do her laundry. She wants us to rake them into piles and send them into garbage trucks while the trees shiver, during the coldest time of the year. Everything seems so quiet, so peaceful, so calm. That’s what I like about New Hampshire, the calmness of the nighttime. Outside these state lines there’s a crazy world that never sleeps, and things are crazy enough in our heads anyway.
I couldn’t see the stars tonight, but I know they‘re still there and I guess that’s enough.
Sometimes it’s enough.
It’s one of those rainy nights where you have nowhere to go but you’re not entirely lonely because the sound of the rain keeps you company. You turn off your phone for a while because the sound of your ringtone and all of those text messages just interrupt your thoughts. You take down the calendar because there’s no guarantee that any of those plans you made will work out anyway. You put the clock in your drawer because for once it doesn’t really matter to you what time it is.
It’s time to stare out the window for a while and watch the world wash away. Along with your pride, your dignity, your accomplishments. Along with all of the things you’ve lost and all of the things you hoped for. Your regret, your contempt, your bitterness – that’ll all be gone too. Your future, your past, your family and friends. That will all be gone when the rain stops and time starts again.
You hear the cars go by on the wet roads, splashing water onto the sidewalks. And you begin to envy those cars because they have somewhere to go. They’re probably going places you’ve never been in your life. But don’t envy them too much because some of them may never reach their destination. Cars crash just as often as people do.
You pick up the bottle of pills on your nightstand. Place two of them in your mouth with your shaking fingers. Swallow them with whiskey. Pour the rest of the bottle into your sweating palms.
And wait.
Dark thoughts are running through your head. You lost your job and your husband, your kids are all grown up. All that you have left is the house you live in alone and a bunch of photographs that just remind you of the past. Starting over seems so terrifying And you could just end it all so easily. Die peacefully. Swallow every last pill and finally meet the God you’re not even sure exists.
But you always said you never wanted to die alone. And anyway, you’re not sure you’re ready to find out what it feels like to die. You have a sudden change of heart as you remember that there were things you used to love about life. You decide you want to try finding them again. Starting over might not be that bad.
You drop the pills back into the bottle and go to sleep with the sound of the rain still tapping against your window.
You claim to have no hatred in your heart but I can see it resting in the corners of your cobweb smile, it climbs out of your hollow soul and falls onto your bayonet tongue. You spit it out like fire in your sleep and it burns down every building in your village and you wake up wondering why all you have left is a one-way ticket to a dark, empty jail cell with nobody to bail you out. You think you’re immune to your own fire but you’ve already burned yourself alive.
You’re not the only one who feels alone, sad, angry, hopeless. You just want to think you are. You want to think you’re the only one who feels bad because if you’re the only one who feels bad it means you’re unique. And being unique makes you feel a little better. Being unique is good, right? It’s good to be different. Especially when the alternative is blending in with a world full of dismal inhabitants, a bleak world of hopelessness and other ugly emotions.
But the alternative I just told you about? It’s actually the reality.
You’re not unique at all – you’re as unhappy as everyone else is. Some of them are so good at hiding it that they fool you. They plaster on fake smiles and laugh and talk so much you couldn’t even guess that they were anything but thrilled to be alive. They tell you stories about their boyfriend or their kids or the money they’ve made this week and you think their life is great because you don’t know that their kid is addicted to drugs or their mother is in the hospital.
The people that aren’t so good at hiding how unhappy they are, well, you’re too busy feeling sorry for yourself or envying other people to even notice them. You didn’t notice that girl crying into her cell phone that just passed, did you? Or that old man carrying the groceries he could barely afford? I didn’t think you would. The idea that other people are suffering as much as you are is difficult to wrap your head around, so you ignore every sign that this might be true.
You want to be unique, and you think you feel different, so you try to act different from everyone else. To like certain things, to dress a certain way, to hate certain trends. You want what shows up on the surface to match how different you feel inside.
But I have some unfortunate news for you. Listening to that band doesn’t make you more original. Another kid has those same lyrics on their blog. That brilliant foreign film you cried yourself to sleep watching was viewed by at least one hundred other people this week, and they all told their friends about it in the same coffee shop you go to every night. And I hate to break this to you, but you’re not the first one to read that Kurt Vonnegut book and consider using a line from it as your senior quote. There are a million people that hate that awful reality TV show just as much as you do.
I know this might be a lot to take in right now. You’ve been taught since you were a kid that it’s okay to be different, but they never bothered telling you that it’s actually impossible. You couldn’t fit in, so you did whatever you could to stand out. You thought it would prove to everyone that you were special. You thought that you were the only one capable of feeling certain things, of liking certain things. You thought you really were different.
But you were wrong.
You’re always just one of many, or at the very least, one of a few.
