Under

Another memory. I think it’s true, the whole ’stranger than fiction’ saying. 

When I was six or seven I used to bathe in the creek at my friend’s house. There were parts of it that were so deep I could stand in it with water to my waist. The water was calm in most places, and clean—melted snow runoff from the distant mountains. It grew into whitewater further down, but that far I wasn’t allowed to go. It was the first place I learned to spend time alone. I’d have a fight with someone back at the house, and I’d go there, out to that creek. The slippery rocks gave me my first scar. That’s how I know it was real.

One of her older sisters has a friend living with them. On the edge of the property are several campers and trucks, most of which don’t run. There’s a truck with a shell that they frequent. The sister steals cigarettes from her mother’s stash. Eventually her mom begins to lock her car. Money keeps disappearing. They are beginning to blame the friend, but I know better. She and the sister are fighting more and more often, but they still disappear for hours at a time.

Their room is filled with incense. It stinks too much for my sensitive nose, so I tend to avoid going in. It’s poster-covered room with a spiral drawn in black sharpy on the ceiling. I’m too young to know that the incense is to cover the smell of pot. I just look at all the Metallica posters every time I walk in. Sometimes I look up at that spiral, even though it makes my vision fill with dots.

The sister usually won’t let us in, but occasionally she does when she wants to have what she must consider a heart-to-heart. This consists of her asking us in several different ways if we think she is fat.  

I stay for days in a row sometimes. Some nights I see shadows across the lawn in the yellow moonlight. One night I hear sounds and walk through the dark to that door. There’s light beneath it. I hear voices. My friend is beside me, and after a bit of arguing, we finally open the door. I catch a glimpse of a teenage boy hurrying out the sliding glass door. The sister laughs and says, “shhh! Don’t tell mom!”

Some nights she sneaks him in. We don’t say anything. Apparently that makes us cool. We play Supermario until three in the morning. Some days we get up the next day and go to school. 

I’m sitting at the table, eating dinner. It’s hamburgers and hotdogs, a staple for the family. My friend is hardly eating. I tell her that I’m going to go get more, and she shakes her head. “I’m too fat. I have to go on a diet.” She’s six. By 14 she’s probably bulimic or anorexic, but I’m not friends with her then. I just see her, collar bones sticking out. I’m later told that eventually she looked like nothing but a skeleton. It happens.

It’s a few years later and I’m out on the trampoline at another friend’s house.  I’m probably 8 or 9. My friend from before is there too. They keep leaving me behind and whispering every time they see me, so I can’t really figure out why I was invited. They’re comparing weights and get angry when I’m the lowest. Suddenly they don’t want to talk to me.

It gets worse and worse. They come over to my house and won’t play with me. My mom gets angry and sends them home. At school they start spreading rumors and making fun of me. They tell everyone horrible, embarrassing things about me. People don’t want to talk to me anymore. They’ve made up lies about my mom, who often comes to the school to help the teachers. Everyone is saying things. 

One day I go back to her house. It’s after things have cooled down a little. My friend isn’t home, but her mother is. I say I’m going to go to the creek. She suggests I go swimming in the pool instead. So I do. She shows up, with that Mrs. Robinson smile of hers and stands in the water watching me, wearing some stupid bikini. She doesn’t swim, she only stands there, talking to me quietly like she does sometimes, like this fucking adder waiting to strike. And I’m 9 and don’t know how to handle her. And then she’s saying things about my mom and I’m getting angry, and I say I want out, so I leave. Leave the adder in her pond to wallow. I want her dead. It’s the first time I really want it, but I want to see her hang. I want to see her bleeding in pain, misery, dying. But she’s not dying. I’m sure she’ll live forever. The assholes always live forever.

I get new friends and it starts all over again.

Nothing changes, not when you look closely.

I was leafing through an old journal for lack of anything else to do. I’m biding my time still, and know that my chances are still incredibly low of getting out of this anytime soon except by an unnatural means. God, I keep saying that. I keep saying it and not doing it, and I still can’t figure out why. It’s getting to that point where whatever conclusions I have drawn are starting to disintegrate around the edges from being over-analyzed. I’ve gone and tattered what little hope there was.

6.26.07

“I want to destroy things. I want nothing less than chaos. My thoughts lately have not been good ones.”

Then another, undated one, just one line.

“Something horrible is growing.”

My oldest one is falling apart. The pages detach from the slightest touch, so it’s been wrapped with a rubber-band. The earliest entry is dated 12.25.04, since the journal was a Christmas present. There are several passages about God that I don’t recall writing. It starts off fairly benign, then progressively becomes more hateful. It sounds much like me, but different somehow. The bitterness isn’t quite so strong. There’s, dare I say it, hope.

1.13.05

“I keep thinking I want to die, but do I really? I’m not quite sure anymore. There must be something better than this, somewhere.”

I love my naivete. It’s sickeningly sweet, makes me want to jump into a time machine and go corrupt myself early. I was still in highschool in these entries, as there are references to my friends outside of school and my trouble with the very few “friends” I made in the home school program.

12.25.04

“Is it normal to have such hatred for people? Or am I just insane? I ask others—and they hate people—but they still seem to like to be around people. How is that hate?”

I know who this is. It came to me the minute I read it. Those few ”friends” (who insulted me more than befriended me; my first taste of a purely selfish friendship where I had no attachment to the individuals), were the first open ‘misanthropes’ I ever met. It was the first time I heard it spoken about openly–the hatred of all things human with a pulse—even if it all was garbage from a bunch of ignorant, sex-starved morons who were more or less cowards when I finally confronted them. There was a short period where I idolized them for being so open. But then, as the year went on…I changed.

When I finally had gotten what I needed—gall—I tore their egos down without a backward glance. And they shattered. The feeling of power was so new and fresh to me, and the vitriol tasted better than anything. They had belittled me, laughed, yet  reluctantly acknowledged me because I didn’t ask questions and didn’t reveal their secrets. In truth, they hated me because I wasn’t openly cruel, because I didn’t seem like a bully. I was shy beyond belief, in a very innocent way. I used to let my anxiety overwhelm me back then—it still does sometimes—but I was so consumed by it that I never stood up for anything, I just hid away in a corner, willing it away.

But then it all made sense finally. They didn’t hate me. They liked me, because I was the sort they thought they could torture and get away with it: I was the perfectly willing masochist, painfully sycophantic. But…the snake always had fangs. And I bit. I snapped like a twig when everything came crashing down at home, and that sadistic, hateful bully inside finally snatched onto the hole in the curtain and ripped it clean open. Instead of hating only myself, I hated them, I let the evil in me lash out at someone new. 

And when the shy, demure girl in the corner struck, nobody saw it coming. They stopped talking to me. And all it took were well-placed words and a withered, pathetic ego that I distorted to the size of a cathedral. They were all talk. They were afraid. Action wasn’t something they did. No, they were the sort that laughed and harassed, believing that nothing would come of it, that there were no consequences. So when I was the one to stand up and ‘do’ something, it was enough to send them running, tails between their legs. And I always thought they were so brave. Fuck, I was such an idiot.

Undated, sometime in 2005.

“Everyone is their own god, their own devil, it just depends on which side we favor and allow the world to see.”

I honestly don’t remember any of this. When I open the pages, it’s my messy, twitchy script in black ink, but it feels like I wrote down someone else’s history. Was it really mine? I keep forgetting that I was once normal and had friends and people who were acquainted with me. Nowadays I walk into the local store and no one knows my face. Since moving, I’ve barely left my house. I stay home without leaving for a few months at a time sometimes.

There’s a strange awakening of hatred when I read what I’ve written. I guess it is the bitterness. I hate that there are weaknesses in those words that are so glaringly obvious to me now, but were only harmless words when they were pressed into the pages. I know that if I do manage to make it ten years (the thought alone is daunting) I’d end up staring at this and laughing hollowly. I’d tear it all apart like I seem to do with everything these days. I’d see the flaws, standing out starkly in the neat type reflecting back at me from the monitor. I’d look at everything I’ve accomplished and disregard it with a wave of my hand as a time when I was too dumb, too young to know better.

And by now, I should know better, but this time around I’m not stupid enough to think that this is all I can learn. There’s always room to become more bitter, to hate everything just the tiniest bit more. To lose even more of myself along every winding trail that I walk, without even noticing until it’s all fallen away.

It’s no use trying to explain. Just give up.

I’ve been in a less guarded mood recently. My constant secrecy has, in a way, gone out the window. I feel like this is my pathetic ‘cry for help’ phase that I’m going to get over, hopefully soon.

I keep dropping hints; one here, one there. To some idiot, so called ‘friend’ on IM, and then a few today to my mother. Her reaction was the most funny, which I’ll get to eventually.

My old friendships have seen a sort of reniassance. That really is the only word that properly describes what has been happening. It’s as though, all of a sudden, at the exact same time, everyone wants to ‘reconnect’ with me and maintain what they believe to be, still existing relationships. Pity they are all so blind. I’m bored, I use them like toys, little pieces of shit to take up all the spare time and give me less of it to stand around contemplating whether or not death is the best option.

So, if it’s not long IM conversations, it’s emails, where I come across sounding normal. How I manage, who knows. Doesn’t matter. But anyway, it is all this faking that is poisoning me. I feel like I am back at my old house going to my old school, trapped with a bunch of people I want nothing more than to get away from. It was fun, at first, to reminisce about old bullshit and laugh, but bitterness takes over, when I remember that it was that life that made me. Here, now, what damage has been done? Nothing but a slow rotting that when I think about it, isn’t half so terrible as living those years all over again.

I would live a thousand of these darknesses, because I can’t bear to glimpse the light anymore. It is filled with a generic, disgusting nostalgia that serves no purpose but to remind me of what it is to be human, to be…in essence, just like everyone else. Blind. Needy. Weak. I don’t want that for myself. If I must live, let it be anything but in that hollow ungenuine world. I won’t go back. I’ll scream, I’ll fight. Because I won’t. No. Never, ever again. I had my moments there, but that place is what has killed me. It started this. I would die in rebellion, protesting, hating, without conversion. They will not have me. I will not have them. That I will ensure. They will go on in their stupidity, and I will not participate.

I am a joke to the world. Something to be laughed at. I am nothing but someone gone insane according to them, and even my own mother doesn’t take me seriously. Like I said, I tried to speak. She says something along the lines of ‘I knew you were going to give me a lecture’. I still tried, even after that, but she does not get it. I told her I have no goals, and all she said was ‘your goal is to own a house’. It was. Once upon a time. Now I just say it so I have something to say, so that instead of creating A SOCIALLY FUCKING AWKWARD SITUATION by saying ‘my goal is to get enough gall to blow my head off’, everyone can go on with their merry fucking lives and pretend that everything is FUCKING PERFECT!

Yes, I wouldn’t want to ruin anyone’s pristine universe, now would I? That would be wrong. To, for once, need someone to listen to me for for five fucking minutes and ask advice, that’s TOO much. I took on everyone’s burdens, I carried them. I held their fucking hands through the pits of hell, and I can’t even have five minutes…. It’s no wonder I keep folding in on myself, disappearing bit by bit. It sounds like I pity myself, but I don’t. I know I haven’t had it as bad as some, I know to some people this is completely inconsquential, but I’ve earned five minutes. I won’t have it though, not ever. No one resipricates. I was the moron who went and helped people and expected something in return, anything. No more though. I can’t remember the last time I offered help to someone without biting their outstretched hands off. Chew, chew, chew.

Being alive is my hell. I can’t be alone here; I’m always surrounded, never to get away. They caged me up. I want solitary confinement.

I’m not working well tonight. I’m somewhere else, trying to decide which is the part that haunts me in my sleep and whispers suicide, and which is the piece that screams back ‘no’ in absolute rage…are they the same thing? I want to separate them, I want two. If we’re not one, then maybe I can think something sane for a little while, just a little while. Then someone will decide something and I won’t have to wait anymore, mindless and robotic. Waking up because it’s required, and going to sleep because I am so sickened and bored with what it is to be alive, to be human. There should be an end to all of this, one I can tie up in a noose and call a day. But it goes, and goes, taking me along with it. Or do I take it along? I’d love to think so. Control is my pathetic little illusion I allow myself, the one I hold close.

Everything will come back to haunt you.

This week has been ‘reconnect’ week or something. All of this shit has finally hit the fan, at the exact same time, rendering said fan utterly useless. It’s as though irritating news travels in packs, just to spite those who are already crumpled to their knees from the burden of life strapped to their back. It never goes away once its started; it always comes back. It’s the way of things, of the world, of the people in it. They just cannot let things lie, they have stir you all about and try to get you to react, negatively or positively.

I tell the world, again and again, I do not want friends. I want no connection to anything, nothing to tie me to this place or to abuse me past this point I’ve already reached. For some reason, a few nights ago, I got it into my head to mess around in a chat room, just to see what would happen. I end up talking to this person who starts getting emotional about everything we’re talking about. They go on the defense constantly because they seem to assume that I am talking to them, thus I must want to hurt them in some way.

This person says to me ‘you’re all the same’, and I just sit back in my computer chair and laugh, thinking to myself, ‘if you only knew…’. Somehow we ended up talking for a few hours, after several attacks in my direction (based on ridiculous assumptions no less), but we still manage to have an interesting conversation between all of that. Then all of a sudden, nothing. I wait about 20 minutes, get impatient and shut off my computer. My tolerance for human beings runs at about 0, so the only thing the conversation did was get me angry and prove my point that people are assholes anyway, so it shouldn’t really matter.

I get up the next morning, switch everything on, and am bombarded with offline messages. Not only did the mystery person leave me a few, one of my old friends (who I admittedly consider dead at times) has decided to message me. Mystery person had logged back in a few hours after I left, because allegedly their power shut off. Now see, the night before, I thought I’d get away with it clean. I made the stupid mistake of going into a chat room in the first place, so really, I probably deserved to get burned, but I was hopeful that I would disengage myself from the entire activity all together with no reminders.

Mystery person has sent me a friend invite, which I mull over for a few hours, trying to gauge my own reaction. The main reason I couldn’t decide? I knew that if I didn’t accept the invite, I’d be bored. How fucked up is that? When I sat down and thought about it, I didn’t even give a flying fuck about the person or their problems. The only reason I talked to them was because I had nothing better to do at 2 in the morning. While I’m busy thinking about that, I get sent 2 emails. I go to check on those (while IMing with long lost friend). They turn out to be forwards from my mom, but going into my email account I realize there is an email in the ’spam’ folder. I click on it. Guess what? Another long lost friend has decided they want to contact me. I haven’t talked to her for probably over a year now. I look at the email in amazement, thinking to myself, “now I already sent you to the land of the dead, goddamnit…stop being resurrected!”.

It just isn’t fair, it really isn’t. Why can’t these people go attach themselves to someone who gives a shit? By the way, I ‘declined’ mystery person’s friend invite without a backward glance after recieving the email from my long-suspected dead friend. I don’t need any more people latching onto me when their attentions are completely unwanted. I have one person I talk to, and that’s it! (And you know who you are…). Everyone else, well, I’m sorry (okay, maybe I’m not…) but fuck you. I’m sick of your pathetic attempts at friendship and being thrown in the garbage when you find someone ‘better’.

I have plans for all these people now, perhaps some revenge, who knows. Dish best served cold, right? I’ll participate, I’ll treat you good…then I’ll drop you, just like you stupid fucks deserve. They always come crawling back once they realize what they’ve lost. Too bad they lost more than the person they used to know (she no longer exists), but they’ve lost what little chances at redemption that they had. All in all, they lose. I win. And that’s all that matters.

As for coincidence…. It’s bullshit like this that makes me want to believe in fate. But I don’t. Mostly I just like to think of it as hateful thinking bringing about the beauty of the universe. This beauty, it’s revenge. And it’s been a long time, a long wait, and I’ve had enough happen to me to deserve a chance to cut through these people, sever whatever is still human in them. I don’t believe in the ultimate ideas of right and wrong, but I do believe that the strong can do whatever is in their power. Tearing down the weak and needy is first on my list of priorities. I’ll have to save my plans for myself for a little later, if I can convince myself to continue waiting, that is.

Writing, failure, and a will to do better.

“Bad art is tragically more beautiful than good art because it documents human failure”

The first time I heard that, I laughed uncontrollably. That’s how I like to think of my “art”, as failures. I never quite get what I want out of it. With writing, I hate how I can’t articulate, and with drawing and painting, I never can quite create the image in my head. With drawing and such, I realize that one has to practice in order to accomplish anything…and I don’t. Haha. So it is understandable that I can’t draw for shit sometimes. With writing, however, I have no such excuse. I write more often than anything else, I breathe writing, day in, day out. It’s a constant in my life, because it allows me to forget where I am and centralize myself around one thing, whether it be writing a useless entry about how I’m feeling, or writing a story. I read other people’s stories, normal people, mind you—not famous authors or poets—and can’t help but want to strangle myself for not being able to pull that calibre of writing from my own brain.

A friend said to me once that my characters are too angry, and that she hated my main character. I thought that statement was sort of funny…it hurt a little, but the sadist couldn’t help but find the irony hilarious. I have the problem of projecting myself into who I’m writing. It’s an urge that I never seem to be able to completely ignore. Every time I write a character, whether I like them or not, they are almost alwaysgiven a piece of myself. With my main characters, there are admittedly several…ahem…similarities between them and myself. My main character in my novel for instance…the one my friend hated…I don’t know how much more obvious I could have made it. You hate my character, you hate me. That was why I laughed. My character shows the side of myself that I hide from the world, and captures the very few traits that I happen to like about myself.

Writing is like a field full of mines. There are so many things I used to avoid talking about, so many characters that never sprouted because I was worried what others would think of them. I found myself writing a very odd story the other day, one I plan to NEVER let anyone else read. The characters are different from many of the others I have written. For some reason, every time I sit down to type a paragraph or two, I end up with pages of writing without even meaning to. I don’t have to think about what I’m writing; it’s just there…as though it has always been. I tap into it, and I write. I don’t worry about plot, this story is purely for character development. And that’s the conclusion I’ve come to as well: I am not the entirely plot driven author with the somewhat bland characters. My stories are completely focused in character and little else, that is my weakness. I make myself imaginary friends…people who seem real to me. I lose myself in it so much, that I forget sometimes that these people aren’t real. They are more a part of my life than anyone else…I guess because they are incapable of harming me unless I will it.

You only get better through practice, that much is clear. I think I just need to stop trying so hard and allow the words to come to me rather than bashing in my skull in a vain attempt to get them out. If it takes 6 months to get out a chapter, so be it.

No country for old men? No, there isn’t.

It’s sort of funny how I often find myself relating to the previous generations rather than my own. I’ve noticed that when I sit down in class—if I’m forced to pick a seat next to someone that is—I gravitate toward the people who are more my parents age than my own. They feel…less threatening. I understand them better, where they’re coming from. When I sit next to a 20 year old I feel like I have little to nothing in common with them. They’re almost alien to me. Perhaps this is just a byproduct of being an only child who lives with her 45 year old parents. I don’t have siblings or friends, so naturally the people I’ve learned the best and relate to the most, aren’t the same age as me.

It’s strange to think, but I have the feeling that were I born of a different time, I would have had an easier time of it. What I see now, it is of little interest to me. Technology is fun, to be sure, but honestly I think I would have been much more pleased without it. The texting, the constant gabbing on the cell phones, it grates on my nerves, irritates me to no end. I’d miss videogames though, but I guess if I didn’t know that they had ever existed there wouldn’t be a problem. This stupid way of living life as though it’s some game show to find the best companion as fast as possible…. Don’t get me wrong even the older generations are full of complete idiots who did the same thing. Humans have been and will always be stupid, far more than any other animal. But the fact is, with each passing decade what they are brainwashed to believe in is altered ever-so-slightly. I just like what they used to be brainwashed to believe. Like dying when it comes. Not struggling. Accepting fate. Not getting Chemo because you’ve already lived a long enough life, that sort of mentality. That is something I find…almost…endearing.  

What was, is no longer. There is no going anywhere without someone knowing about it. Sort of like that entry I deleted a few weeks ago yet recently discovered on a website, picture and all, somehow pulled from the grave of electronic deletion, a deletion…that is never complete. It’s a sorry state, to say the least, for someone as paranoid about it all as I am. I want no fences, no leash. Let me free of this virus….

My brain is stuck in the past. Hell, even the way I do things is old fashioned, the way I think, all of it. I’m not stuck in “go, go, go” mode, instead I just watch lazily from my anarchist armchair waiting for The Fall of Man. Maybe that is what keeps me breathing sometimes—that desire to watch everyone I’ve ever hated, everyone I’ve ever cared for, get their heads handed back to them on a glistening silver platter. I want to watch them fail. They always thought that they were so superior to me, yet I am the one who is at least attempting to make some sort of life, while they whore themselves out to their array of boyfriends. I win. And it’ll just keep getting better. They’ll degrade even more as time wears on. It’s a great thing, time. It will wear on me too, but I won’t fight it, I’ll revel in it. The older you get the more you learn. If I make it long enough maybe I won’t turn out to be a complete idiot after all.

Wouldn’t that be something?

Imagine that, it almost sounds like optimism, doesn’t it?

Almost…