Lonely

            Today I went to the hospital because when I relax my shoulders and lift my chin, you can see a lump on my throat. (Of all the lumps that I have felt there, only this one, the one that doesn't actually hurt, gets attention. You understand, I’m sure.) After paperwork and monetary stress, my wrist was taped into a plastic manacle of information and I was pointed into a room full of chairs and bad television. I had barely settled when someone called, not my name, but a name that is close enough to mine to be entered by an absent-minded professional as my name, and I followed a nurse down a hall and into a room full of equipment.

            She was so kind. I don’t remember her name because I wanted to look at her face, not her name-tag, and it was unusual enough to be immune to sideways glances. She told me everything she was going to do, sometimes more than once. She kept asking me how I was doing. She called me “sweetheart.” She looked at me like her job was to take care of me and only me.

            I don’t know why I had such a strong reaction to her. I wasn’t nervous or worried in the slightest about my health (I think the lump is just a cyst) or the procedure (it was just some pictures) but I felt taken care of and listened-to for the first time in what has felt like years. I even admitted, in conversational tones, as if she cared, that the only thing that I had been worried about was being made to undress. I laughed about how my hands had been trembling from fasting and gratefully accepted apple-juice from her.

            I know this doesn't sound even the slightest bit unusual, but it is for me. We were through in less than twenty minutes, and I didn't want to leave. I shook her hand when I thanked her and I didn't want to let go.

            Now I am at home, paralyzed by things no one wants to hear, trapped between choices no one wants to validate, writing paragraphs straight from a teen-ages girl’s emo diary. Good Lord.

Back

       I've been back in PA for a few weeks now, untangling knots. I tried to write about it before, but I thought that maybe my vehemence was blinding, so I waited. Now I've come back to what I started and finished it.

       I am sitting on a mattress that hurts, in a room that is no longer mine, in a house full of junk, in a place where there is nothing to see or do, and I am angry. I keep telling myself that the world doesn't owe me an instruction manual. I remind myself that no one lied to me on purpose. I point out that I can at least take comfort in that fact that I was right about so many things. None of it helps.

       I can't even have a nice, satisfying rage, because there is no one to be angry at. I can only sit here, stewing in my frustration, trying desperately to have civil conversations about what I am going to do next with people who really love me and deserve none of my muted prickle.

       I'm not disappointed, because disappointment implies that at one time you fully expected something good, and that expectation was somehow dashed. I, on the other hand, have simply returned to a state of desperate longing that was, for a few brief months, lifted hopefully. I am not disappointed. I am back.

Visual Inspiration: Calm Pretty

Visual Inspiration: Green and Gray

Visual Inspiration: Chalky

Aquascaping: Underwater Gardening

       I have a new obsession. I have combed through hundred of pictures from contest sites, perused tags on tumblr, researched articles, and even dedicated hours to writing a blog post about a new type of craft: aquascaping. It is gorgeous, slightly surreal, and scientific, and it even sort-of satisfies my craving for both pets and travel by giving me fish and scenery. Now, I can't wait until I have the resources to grow my own underwater garden!

(continues below the cut: so many pretty pictures!)

Secondhand

       Instead of any sort of personal update, I'm just going to tell you a funny story: Once upon a time (several weeks ago), in a faraway land (the apartment next door, with which I share a boarded-up doorway) there was a party.

       Now, when I say party I mean music and a few people who sounded like they were enjoying themselves, and my laid-back self was not particularly bothered. I might have tossed a little bit longer than usual in my bed against our shared wall, but I have ninja sleeping skills and was soon unconscious.

       The fire alarm went off.

       I found myself upright and awake, in that order, with images of myself outside in midnight Maine winter skating through my suddenly despairing mind. Then I stopped, and I listened.

       "BEEEEEEEP!"

       "I just blacked out!"

       "Shut it off!"

       "BEEEEEEEP!"

       "[expletive]"

       "Turn it off!"

       "BEEEEEEEP!"

       "I'm trying!"

       "Oh my God!"

       "[more expletives]"

       "BEEEEEEEP!"

       I considered the atmosphere. Neon city lights streaked through the window and informed me that, yes, my apartment was full of smoke. I sniffed: smoke, but strangely sweet smelling smoke.

       Oh.

       I groaned internally and collapsed, dragging the covers up over my head. Knuckleheads.

I Don't Understand About Me and Books

       I've been reading books that I don't understand.
     
       I've been hearing the words and seeing the imagery, watching as people run and speak and sit and stretch out their hands for things that they don't believe in, but I won't sit with them. I'm too restless to wait for the feelings to align and tell me a truth other than this is what people feel, sometimes.

       I hate it. It is as if the truth is buzzing past my ear, the harsh, physical whine making me cringe away and swat at empty space. I should know! I should understand! If only I could grab myself by the hair and drag her back over to the storyteller's feet, make her stay put until she found the truth in the storyteller's voice, the listeners' eyes, the space between them. Instead I'm stuffing pretty poetry into a mouth that wants something completely different.

       At least I'm reading again. At least I am back, translating ink into words. Hopefully soon I will find myself translating the images into reality, and when the time comes, Future Self, seriously, re-read Sula, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I know that they are talking about the same things but I can't... I can't put my finger on it and I don't have the patience to sit and steady my aim.

       They both tell stories of toil in the face of misery, opposites actually being the same, segregation, infidelity... Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep delves into religion and artifice while Sula lingers over friendship and sexual femininity, but the two works resonate.

       ...Or maybe I'm insane. This is driving me insane!

I Think About 'Adulthood'

       It looks like a clique, but it's not.

       It looks like a club, a collection of people who know things and do things and are a certain way that others can't put a finger on; but then suddenly you are on the other side of eighteen, or twenty-one, or twenty-five and you don't actually know those things or do those things or feel any different.

       You've graduated without having to pass the class, without realizing it was a class.

       You've felt the mantle drop over your head without ever proving you had the qualifications.

       You've gotten into the room, and realized that you actually just got out of one. This isn't the place where everyone knows and does and is a certain way. That was the place. That was blissful, ignorant childhood; and things that felt important but really weren't; and a few years of parental structure. This is a million choices, a billion outcomes, seven billion distinct universes that may or may not have anything in common. This is where people scramble to make sense of where/who/why they are, and what they are going to do in the decades that stretch before them.

       This is the real world.

       I read "coming of age" stories for fifteen years, and I never fully understood them. They are not about navigating something adult, like death or hardship; they are about seeing the world differently, as something that you are a part of. I guess that once you have experienced death, or love, or some other construct of these, you realize that you have touched the edges of human existence, that no adult has done any more, and that you have to make your own answers. You look up from yourself, and you see the world differently, as if you've passed through some barrier and are looking back. You realize that you are the world.

       Of course, not everyone goes to war or loves an ill-fated pet at just the right age for sudden illumination. Most people just get older, and then find themselves doing adult things, and then realize that if they want adulthood to be any different they are going to have to make it so themselves.

       I'm just going to have to make it so myself.