Invisibility Cloak

I am most powerful at night. I am most vulnerable at night. The darkness is my blanket, but under it I rarely feel secure. It is a blanket that clothes me in nakedness, an invisibility cloak that exposes my innermost contortions  as I blend into the blackness around me. I am exposed to myself and no one else. I am invisible to all other people but my mind's eye, to which I am terribly, terribly visible. It sees pain inside of me that I had forgotten was stored away. It uses my body as a voodoo doll against myself. My blanket makes me uncomfortably drowsy. I am suspended in an aching, lethargic state, unable to close my eyes and submit to sleep.

I am swimming.

I am thrashing.

I make decisions for self-presevation?

My eyes, my chest, my body ache, and they pulse until I suddenly

drop off into a state of slumber.

When I wake up, I grasp desperately at the invisibility cloak around me. It appears different in the daylight, but I cannot afford to let it go. During the day, it keeps me safe. It holds me and protects me. It covers and conceals me. My contortions begin to recede, and I regain a normalcy of sorts. I am not vulnerable when the sun is shining, but I am weak.

It is funny how I have become an incarnation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The Page I Never Noticed

I think I skipped a page as I sat quietly in the corner of the library, flying through books, my nine-year-old self putting all of her effort that was not focused on reading toward adhering to the "Be Silent" rule. And I am convinced that this page I skipped was the worst oversight I never knew I had made.

It would have been nestled in between the Rules I Never Broke (I was never one for adventure novels) and the Thoughts I Locked Inside (I chose instead to live vicariously through the lives of the girls in teen and young adult books). My lack of spontaneity and ease of being intimidated into submission by authority granted me no opportunity to peruse the hidden crevasses of the library, peeking between my packed shelves of convention and anxiety. If only I had tumbled into a pile of the other kids' books, jumbling up my normal pattern, and one of them opened to the page I needed to read and my eyes would have absorbed the rich and exciting information that would have helped me so much in the years to come. Or perhaps all it would have taken was more careful reading of what already lay in my lap, a deeper and more thorough look at what was already in front of me, and I would have noticed that the page I was reading contained a breadth of potential knowledge that would serve me well in the future.

That page is probably still sitting there, neglected and yellowing, waiting for my nine-year-old self to lay a finger upon it. However, my nine-year-old self is ten years gone, and there is no going back as far as I can tell. I am left to wonder if I can ever regain what I lost through omission. Am I forever trapped between the lines?

Les Étrangers d'Amour (or, Thoughts While I Couldn't Fall Asleep)

On Thursday night (rather, early Friday morning), my friends and I were discussing whether we would prefer to fall in love with (a) someone we had known since childhood or (b) a stranger. It was not until we parted that I came up with a defense for my answer. Knowing that my opinion could change in a year, a month, a day, I present my current thoughts on loving a stranger:

I want to fall in love with a stranger because I am a stranger to love. 

I imagine that the more familiar you are to love, the more you want to love someone familiar.

But I could be wrong.

I am tired. I am emotionally exhausted. 

I would rather fall in love with a stranger 

than with someone I have known since childhood because, 

at least for short term,

it would be easier to handle.

Perhaps it also stems from a dissatisfaction from my childhood years. 

Each year, I get farther from the reminiscing side of the spectrum and deeper into bitterness. 

Damn suburbia, damn materialistic blondes, damn popularity contests, 

damn being a smart average-looking awkward blob of girl. 

Fuck security. Fuck safety. 

Fuck being raised in a padded bubble. 

Fuck being irreversibly trained to be contained and obedient. 

Fuck anxiety and self consciousness and depression. 

Fuck lack of spontaneity.

I have lived in a box. I feel limited by the box. 

I am frozen at a juncture where my box is bulging at the seams, on the verge of bursting, 

but unable to do so.  Either I recede back to my suburban, delicate self, 

or I consciously break out of the box. 

Loving a stranger could break me out of the box.

Before I can love someone I know, I need to love a stranger.

A definition

What does it mean to be alive?
Most people say breathing, but I'm ready to believe otherwise. The moments to which people attribute feeling most alive-- the moments where you feel you are really living-- are when your breath is taken away or when you are out of breath. Neither of those things involve breathing.
If breathing is the determining factor in whether or not a person is alive, then how can I be sitting here, feeling the rise and fall of my chest, yet feel so terribly not alive? With every inhalation and exhalation, I feel the pressure within me escalade then subside. It throbs in tandem with the thump thump of my heart, propelling the blood that surges through my veins, bringing nutrients to my lungs, collecting oxygen to pump into my blood stream, at which point the cycle repeats itself. Over and over again.
I am caught in a cycle that needs to be broken. It is a foggy glass ceiling, a cramped locker, a straightjacket.  I can see there is something outside of where I am, but I can't tell what it is and I can't break through. I've been crammed in a corner all my life by a bully, but it's hard to fight the bully when she is yourself. I feel emotionally and psychological restrained to the point of it becoming physical.
My feet pace while my legs fidget while my back tenses. My fingers jitter while my hands wring while my arms slowly contract. So much energy rushes under my skin. I can feel the blood pounding, pounding, pounding through me, and I just want it to RELEASE! I want to tear myself open and let it all come out. I want need to be able to feel something flow out of me, pour out of me, until I can see it before me and just SCREAM at it. YELL at it for letting it take control of me. Beat it and punch it and kick it and throw it and cut it and burn it until it is all gone. Forever. And I will feel free.

Free.

What does it mean to be free?

One Month

It has been a month since my last post.


I have been so busy I've hardly had time to eat and sleep, though I figure I would feel less busy if I were not a freshman. Over the past 30 days, I've rollercoastered from happy to complacent to miserable to happy, around and around. I've wanted to curl in a ball and die. I've felt like the prettiest girl alive.


Ultimately, though, I do not know what to write.

hungry.

my stomach aches, and my vision

blurs until i have to focus on what

i'm looking at in order make out

definite letters and shapes. my

body needs food, my body is so

hungry

but i can't get up. i don't have the

energy to leave my room and go

get something to fill me. i've put

off eating this long- all i've eaten

today is a latte, yogurt, and two

Pop Tarts- so is it even worth it to

muster up energy i don't have just

to prowl alone, like an animal lost

from its pack, to find a little bit of

food?

it is late and my stomach's pain

blurs with the writhing of my

heart within my brittle form. why

should i appease my tangible

body when my heart cannot be

appeased? why should i taunt

myself like that? if i could, i would

feed my heartache. and if could, i

would make the aching inside of

me, the ever present aching within

me, go away forever because this

aching is more overpowering

than any physical hungry i have

ever felt. there is no remedy for

when your heart is hungry, for 

when your shelves are bare,

dust accumulating from waiting

for love to fill up its empty space.

so i'll close the pantry shelf and

sit in my room listening to songs

of passion and lost paths, suppressing

my bodily hunger until i wake

tomorrow morning, hoping i'll feel

just a bit more... together.

My heart is blonde and brands a sparkly guitar.

If I had to pick an artist whose songs consistently resonate with me, I would pick Taylor Swift. Go ahead and ridicule my taste in music, you pop-country haters. I laugh in the face of ridicule. [Muahaha.] Her words so eerily parallel with my life, it's almost like we have an ESP connection. Like we're the same person. With the exception of her being ten times more gorgeous than I am, and with the exception of her actually having a dating history, I listen to her music, and hear myself.

I'm not a princess, this ain't a fairy tale.
I'm not the one you'll sweep off her feet,
Lead her up the stairwell.


If you could see that I'm the one who understands you,
Been here all along, so why can't you see
You belong with me.


He's the reason for the teardrops on my guitar,
the only thing that keeps me wishing on a wishing star.
He's the song in the car I keep singing, don't know why I do.


It goes on and on... and I love it. Her music is real and relatable. I can cry to it, or it can lift me up.

Thank you, Taylor, for putting into words what I can't always articulate well.