This is just a quick excerpt from an english project that I was particularly proud of. Enjoy : )

The only one in there without a pout
Because he had himself all figured out.
His hair was soft and shined up with some product,
He was well-tended and his lips were turned up.
Widely sought for his romance advice,
The girls in school thought him without a vice.
With parents most traditional and wealthy,
He wound up in the councilor’s, though healthy.
They though his state a curable condition
And considered straightening him their mission.
With no heed to their pettiness, he soared,
Ambitious, witty, tasteful, and adored.
This new age might take him as he was,
No one would think to question who he loved,
Or so his daydreams rested as he sat.

Pathetic Attempt at Poetry

It's been a while.
Lately it's just been the excuse for some illegal excursion or another.
But today I actually went.
The soccer field was a milky yellow plain
Different form the last time I was there,
when it was bright green.

So today I was thinking
of the people in my life.
And all the different people that I am, condensed into one mind.
"I live a hundred lifetimes in a day"
I noticed that you are the only person that knows every angle of me.
And I know at least several of you.

To quote my favorite movie
"There's so much beauty that my heart swells up and I can't take it,
then, when I stop trying to hold onto it, it flows though me."
That is how I feel.
Today I was swinging there
looking idiotic with my eyes shut tight
and a big silly grin on my face.
But I was so happy.
So grateful to be alive
that the love was almost physical inside me.

Expectations

For Claire: I have quit. I love you so much and, for you and your dying grandfather (as well as my own health), I have quit. This time it isn't a momentary inspiration, it's a life decision. Besides, there is no going back now. I don't want to be gasping for air while we climb the peaks of the Andes and trump through the virgin wilderness. And, on that note, for the record, I still want to go. My desire for Latin America has never wavered, though we should perhaps catch up on our plans. It gets closer every day.

For Swank: I have dedicated myself to art. I will be the best that I can be and I will see you again. Someday, when I am famous and selling my art for thousands apiece, you'll hear about it and smile. In the present, I am photographing all my best art and building a show for you.

For Brandon: I am reaching for the dream. I haven't quite got it yet, but I am looking and I am going to find it, only this time, I am not looking for you. Come by sometime to define life with Ms. Stafford and I again.

For Ms. Stafford: I love to hear you speak. You have an uncanny ability to tell me matter-of-factly everything I have been reaching for. You seem to have it all figured. I am so lucky to have you.

For Bess: I am still trying to figure out how to word our friendship. It's difficult because we are both so many different things mashed together. We are different from each other and yet we are parallel. I can build my thoughts off of you. I love you so much and I am here.

For Maggie: Breakfast Club, sugar cookies, 10:00pm, and you. These are my favorite nights. You let me blab and blab about my life's meaning and, even though you know I make no sense, you listen. You get me. I wish we spent more time together, but hey, I'll be seeing you tomorrow, even if I can't see you straight. LOVE!

Losing Grip: Falling Into the Status Quo

I feel old today.

It is as if my skin were rippled and translucent and my vague eyes buried in layers. But, more defined than appearance, I feel old. I am tired, solemn, and vacant. Color, which is ordinarily life, bombards my senses. Tonight I desire a life of creamy, soft tones. This is most unusual.

One thing I lack in this age is wisdom. Rather, I am completely unable to think. I sat in the cold, brown yard sucking nicotine that made me breathe too fast, all the while thinking about how stupid I was being. And yet I went in for another. It was as though my mind and body were disconnected and I might as well have been sawing off my hand. I draw the line here. I have to stop before I lose the ability to.

It is not only that. When I am bestowed time for life, I do what? Squander it before a screen. Why is it that I only understand part of the time? I need to be clutching onto my individuality and pouring my every emotion and bit of energy into sculpting. It is through my art that I will not fall. Proof of this: I am on the computer instead of sculpting

and I am falling.

Back to Brandon

I am making this up as I go
So bear with me.

It has been a long time forgetting you and somehow you keep coming back to me. I haven't seen you since before 10th grade That encounter was tough to swallow because your eyes were pierced by the sun and your face was, no is, the most beautiful I have seen.
It never fails.

Here is the issue: You gave me a new pair of eyes, a new place to go. It was beautiful and you were amazing. You did a good thing for me, but when you left, headed towards your own life, I couldn't keep up with myself. I wasn't ready to live just yet. I still needed you there. So my sight started slipping away and I fell.

"I put your world into my veins. Now a voiceless sympathy is all that remains."

Every time I see you, I come back to life, as though I have been asleep under the flow of time, as though I have been watching it pass and accepting this world of text books and makeup and homes from a designer magazine. But, when I open my eyes, the face in the mirror torments me. I feel I have failed immeasurably and the person I see makes me ill. I am artificial, a plastic, mass produced doll with a polyester bra and the label "made in USA." Worse than this, my mind is on a conveyor belt as well.

So now when I see you, it is not joy that I feel in my restored eyes, it is torture in what they see. I wish you were here all the time so that I could live long enough to change.

Now here is the cure: I will have to differentiate between you and my ambition before I can reform myself and pack a suitcase. I have to let go of you before I can utilize your message. I will start now, and let my art take the reins. I will stop trying to change so that I'll be able to.

"We are given life so that we can live it."

Your senseless, muddled friend,
Elise

Barack Obama

So he will be president. This is great news as far as can be projected thus far. We'll see then.

Okay. I'm ready.

Edited

I am there with him. We sit in a caged room cramping with tables. It is the prison meeting room from “Arrested Development” since that is the most prominent prison scene my mind has to offer up. He wears a vivid orange jumpsuit and his face is blackened with a physical misery that has swallowed his entirety. His body has been defeated by the cafeteria food, ropes thriving beneath his skin.
We sit in silence as I wait for thick, soulful words to come to me- words to express- but none arrive at my lips. Instead, I slide my pinkish hand into his and, for the first time since my arrival, he looks at me, but his eyes are too much to handle and I fall away from the scene.

This time it is a memory. His daughter is with him today and is abusing her power as teacher’s little girl by denying the boys in our class of candy. She grins at me and shyly puts forth a caramel apple sucker.

Now I am walking quickly at his side through the grey halls of his church. I am there to help him airbrush skin for a Halloween carnival. A small, vigorous woman with a plaster face and Walmart lips approaches us and grins him in a spouse hug that is clearly for the entertainment of surrounding eyes. “You must be his talented student of the year!” She says to me in a pitch that cracks my eardrums. I am deeply disappointed in his choice for a wife and concerned about his daughter’s upbringing, who is shuffling around with her mother.

Much better.

I'm feeling a lot better and I apologize to anyone who may have read that last one. Things are all better on that front.

: )

That was an interesting day.

For the first time since Brandon, I could think of no words to touch the way I felt. There are still none, so the best I can do to explain is to tell you what happened.

When Maggie's voice rumbled through the piece of plastic in my hand, something in me dropped dead. Excuse the cliche, but my heart stopped beating. I can usually fight those obnoxious little balls of saltwater for a while, but not this time. It was coming with a will of its own, so I ran. Suddenly my life's ambition was to keep walking. I had to know if you were just gossiping, Maggie. Mr. Austin would either tell me truth or tell me he couldn't, but he wasn't going to lie.

I broke a couple of my own rules. First being letting the fear sink into me and take over, second freaking out in front of other people. I lost it. I don't have any reason to lose it more than the rest of you. It wasn't my right to make this my own crusade and pretend like I was alone. I tend to be self-righteous like that.

So the sunshine beaming on this little suburban breakdown I hosted in my room is this: I get to hear you again. It will take a long time for me to consider saying anything about it, but I'm just incandescent to hear you again. You didn't turn me away so, for that, I thank you. I know you haven't been completely destroyed. Mr. Ottman had me scared for a moment.

Bottom line to those who read this (since I know you care like me without the lack of self-control), he'll be alright.

My rope no longer exists

I know I shouldn’t be writing this. I can’t believe I’ve let you get to me but, since you have, I thought this worthy of more than a comment.

Thing number one: rearranging the words in a sentence to make it sound like decent writing is an ineffective method. Maybe you should start saying what you mean instead of trying to sound intelligent because it doesn’t work.

Thing number two: Is there anyone you can think of who is more amazing and deep than yourself. You are irrefutably arrogant. You spend your time complaining about your miserable teenage life and about how there are no people as smart as you. Poor thing. Everyone around you is a daft fool, right? You’re the genius. You’re the poet who people hate because they’re intimidated by your brilliance. They criticize you unjustly when they don’t even know you? Only one, maybe two people know who you really are? But you criticize every single one of those people when you have know idea who they are. And I hate you because I secretly know you’re too good for me, right? No. I hate you because you are blind, weak, and self-righteous.

Thing number three: You’re nothing special. You’re just more effected by the teen syndrome than most. (My life is terrible, the world doesn’t understand me, all my peers are idiots, I have a creative, unique mind that’s much better than all the others.) You are the essence of self-absorbed, pathetic American youth. You’re not above any of the high school bullshit, you’re just filling a niche. Every school had an emotionally damaged asshole like you.

Thing number four: Michael is so much better than you and he deserves Bess. You just can’t stand that, for once, the person you preyed upon saw you for what you are. Someone should warn your new tease.

So, I guess what I’m saying surmounts to this: fuck you. : )

For Maggie

Everyone has enough reasons to be happy, so be happy, you daft Americans!

The night after seeing you.

I'm still awake at two in the morning of August 14th. My mind is racing and I've finally hit the tears. I grab a Sharpie and write in small letters on the wall: 1. I need to leave. I need to rupture the framework of this reality and break into a new one. Live a different life than is handed to you. It's getting too easy to be... nevermind. I lost the words in a drop of saltwater tainted with a wish.

"Silence is the loudest parting word you never say. Now a voiceless sympathy is all that remains."
~Ben Harper

In another spurt of this strange sob sessions, I write above it: 2. Do REAL good fro humanity. Get out while you still can.

On a different wall this time: 3. A pair of eyes are always staring in at me. I wish they were real.

4. I'd like to go crazy now. Maybe I should try my skills at resisting the words of therapists and mental institutions. Maybe that would do the trick. At least I would have something more to escape from then my own selfishness.

5. The only thing I'm fighting is myself and my accidental acceptance of the world in which I live. Silly me. Of all rebellions, I had to pick the hardest.

6. Sleep deprivation makes great fuel for thought. It maddens the spirit just enough.

7. When my lips are dry, I put on chapstick. How many people do that?

For some reason I found no number eight the next morning.

9. Whatever I do fresh from high school, I hope it is physically uncomfortable to prove I can be content anywhere.

10. This is the last one because I dropped the better Sharpie behind a shelf. I'm entertained to imagine reading these to find I have idea why I wrote such random, trite shit. : )

And I honestly don't. It really is a sad thing when I try to be dramatic, but this is how my night went, I suppose. You can check my walls to find the thoughts of a maddened heart staring back at you. I'm glad I saw you again, person. I was hoping I would.

Here is the truth, finally

To quote Ricky Fitz, “never underestimate the power of denial.”

This sentence has been striking the framework of my thoughts lately and I haven’t known why. What exactly am I in denial of? The fact that I am becoming dependent on substances I ridicule all the time? The fact that I am living about five different lives right now? The fact that I am watching myself sink into a life I never wanted and doing nothing about it? Or is the fact that I am rushed with guilt every time I think of you (Make that six different lives, come to think of it.) How can I explain to you that the only part of me you have ever seen is an absolute lie? A blatant, intricate lie.

You would hate me if you knew me. This is the simple truth. I am the very essence of everything you are against, but how can I say this to your face? Surly you must know somewhere within you that the concept of “me” is not real. I hope that you have known this for a long time. I trust that you can feel it. I have been so terrible to you and now I have nothing to do but continue on like this, hating myself in the process. You seem to love me so wholly. You are so trusting and I don’t deserve that. I am not to be trusted. You are treading your water way too far from the shore. You are in danger. Get out now.

So now I have but to hope that you will read this soon. I hope you are not broken. Just don’t trust me anymore, please.

We can’t be together. You know that. I can’t keep living inside of this lie. I can’t let you in and I can’t come out. I love you so, so much, but for that reason I have to let you go. You deserve the best and I think I finally have the courage to say that isn’t me. I was in denial.

Claire,

We have a lot to learn. Get ready.

oooookay

So this has been a different kind of day...

I'm Back

Okay, so the past few days I have been utterly and completely released. For a long time now I have had all these ideas solidifying in my stomach, all these great, breakthrough, abstract ideas stacking up on top of each other, but with no way out. I have not felt like the inspired, reckless, and haunted person I am. I have just felt blah. A couple days ago, I let it all out. My mom said something upsetting and I absolutely lost grip on my sanity. I stampeded into my room and began tearing things off the walls. You may say I had a temper tantrum, but I was not mad at anyone but myself. I've since realized that this is what exactly i needed to do. I began pulling all my exiled ideas up and molding them into reality. No more expectations, no more self-control, no more logic. Just pure, human madness. It felt so good.

I took my most important possession, a painting by him, and just shredded it. In that instance, I shed all these psychological dependencies that have been wrapped around my ankles for the past year. I let go of him, finally. Now I'm free. I have some great, radical ideas about the space in which i live. I got rid of all my furniture and my bedroom has become an ever-changing, pulsing cocoon of creative thought. I want to live through my art and for my art to live through me. This is my purpose.

When I let go, I also realized how close Sam and I have become. Have I been truly blind? He knows a core in me that i did not know I had exposed. It is so strange. We are opposite in every imaginable way, yet here we are, two people thriving on our love for one another. I know him, which is more than i can say for Ian. We thrived on our hatred. It was always a competition. Now I have even been able to let go of that. Ian, I respect you as an individual and I am so glad we have found our own ways. We were never any good for each other.

So you see, someone, I have recaptured my essence, but this time it is my own, not my own image through him.

A Wave- Unabridged and Scattered Thoughts

I don’t want to wait anymore. I want to go far, far away and I want to stay there until I have learned to be strong. I want to endure and here there is nothing to endure. I am suffocated by the structured, organized way of life. I don’t feel free. I feel like I cannot do as I need to do. I am not the person I need to be, the person pulsing in my veins. I want to scream and scream and scream until everything around me melts away.
I feel like I’m in limbo, like I am treading water. I feel like I’m weak. I feel contained. I want to get rid of everything. I want to strip myself bare, to beat all this out of me so that I know what I am. Get rid of the crust, the mile-deep weights of society and suburbia and stare at what’s left. That’s me. I am what remains.
I don’t know how to scrape everything off here. I just don’t see how to wipe off the cell phone, the TV, the cozy mattress, the shelf of niceties, the heap of rules- not after dark, not this weekend, there’s a family dinner tonight, your cousins will be in town, no hours alone, no, no, no, no, no! I want to be the one to say no, not them. I want to decide. I want to GO! Let me go, let me go, let me go, let me go, let me go, let me go, let me go! I need to leave now. It’s time now. I need to endure. I need to vanish from practicality, I need to rip myself out of the ground. They can’t let me go. They are prisoners of practicality. For God’s sake, I don’t want kids. I will become a prisoner of practicality and restriction. I will wall myself in with responsibility. I will drown in an orb of thick meaninglessness. Take your cell phone, not after dark, family dinners, cousins in town, I don’t feel like making a decision....no, no, no. Dependency. Tons and tons and tons of dependencies. I’ll fall in if I’m not careful. I’ll let it soak into me. None of that. I’m after freedom.
If I can successfully strip myself bare and see what’s left, if I at least know what I am, I will have happiness- like stone. I will have spirituality. I will have freedom. I’m sick of waiting. I don’t want to get sucked in. I’m already mostly there and I have three more years to go of limbo, of prison. I’m serving a sentence for being a product of suburbia. Thus far, it’s all I am- that I know of. But I don’t know what’s inside me besides the screaming sex desire of a teenager.

I am hard on myself, she says. You are too soft on yourself. This is who I WANT to be, not who I am forcing myself to become. This is what I WANT! Deal with it.

My least favorite thing about myself is my lack of compassion. I am selfish. Haven’t you read these pages? All I ever do is complain and this itself is even a complaint. I wish I could be satisfied. I want to bear no judgment on anyone, I want to help other people, I want to be forgiving. I want to love everything I see, and yet all I ever think about are my wants, as demonstrated by every sentence. All I ever do is bitch. As far as I know, that’s all I even am. I am the essence of hypocrisy. I am bitching about how much I bitch. It’s even laughable. I say not to judge as I judge, I say not to complain as I complain, I say to love as I hate, I say to help as I hurt, I say to forgive as I hold grudges near my heart. I am a suburban teen, classically. Wow. Let’s get rid of these actions and focus on the speech. Scrape off your hypocrisy with everything else. Go home.

I've been wrong. So incredibly wrong. She didn't tell anyone and nobody could understand why she was doing this to herself.
My God Maggie.
I'm sorry.
I'm just sorry.

To one of my best friends... I'm sorry for this

I’m about to be very hard on you, so be prepared. Know that I love you to the roots, but you must know what I feel. You need a slap in the face, so here it is:

You stupid, arrogant American. You shut yourself in your room and wallow in a luxurious puddle of self pity. What a perfect life you lead and yet you can’t stand it. I’m sure you have to look really hard to find something worth the blade.
You think you’re deep? You are one of the shallowest kind out there, one of those selfish suburban teenagers trying to find a place among people who suffer, people who have a reason to suffer.
Oh, but here’s something new, a distraction from all that simulated hurting. Something to drown you and make you feel strong, like you’ve had to endure, like your life would mean something. You’ve been waiting a long time to drown yourself. I can imagine how great that would feel.
I understand the curiosity. Hell, I’ll be next to you for a while if you don’t come across this, but your weakness has made it a need. You need an excuse to suffer, otherwise you’d be in danger of growing out of it. You’re such a conformist. You’re so pathetic.
Do it for the good time, not for the lifestyle.

Oh, and get over yourself.

Happiness like a smooth stone

February 17th, 2008

Elise:
Please refer to this letter often. You frequently need reminding as to why you should live your life the way it will, must be lived.
Understand that you are ignorant. America is a vast realm of ignorance. It isn’t real. Our borders keep out the world like it is an unpleasant secret. We live in a cocoon of meaningless business and politics. The life you have lived so far is not a real life. So far, your life means absolutely nothing. You have done no good and you will always be hollow if you do not escape.
You say and love to believe that you have a kind of internal strength beyond that of most who surround you. I now believe this to be true, but you must also fear that, if it isn’t put to use, you will let it vanish. I hope this fear will give you incentive to leave, to do hard miserable things in your life, to push you out of your ignorance, no matter how cosy and bright it is. I hope you will learn to find the meaning of pain, so become selfless like you only pretend to be.
To live with no physical comforts and no dependency on pretty things will allow you to feel the internal happiness you have always groped blindly for. Not an airy, momentary bliss, but a deep, spiritually dense happiness, a happiness like smooth stone.
Until you have the age to drive your own life, the airy bliss of your youth will suffice, but when you are finally able to search for something more permanent and more concrete, please, please go searching for it. Don’t fall back because the concept looks relieving and delicious. Go searching for your life’s meaning, even if you don’t want to, when you finally reach the brink of it. Find that meaning in other people or in the sky or somewhere else. Don’t take the easy way out. Don’t dismiss this because I am young right now. I currently have a clarity that I my not find when I reach the brink, so I am leaving this to give you a forward shove. Don’t waste it.

Elise

Waking up to the screams of Darfur

February 16th, 2008

Fulton has been wonderful. I am in my bliss right now, though also more than slightly disturbed. Today I bought a book about ending the genocide in Darfur at a non-profit hippie store because I fell in love with the cover. So far I have read a mere 19 pages and already i have a different perspective on life than even earlier today. It is extraordinary how ignorant and bubbled up Americans really are. I am astonished by how little we as a society care about the mass murder and slaughter of innocent human beings. It is called a genocide because entire villages are targeted for extinction and wiped off the face of the Earth every single fucking day because of their ethnicity and religion. I can feel Bob Dylan’s words rising in my chest: “How many times can a man turn his head, pretending he just doesn’t see.” I am sickened by our uselessness and blindness. We are really and truly blind. Of the plathura of things Brandon said to me of his discoveries, one means everything to me: “Something Australia made me realize was the extent of America’s waste. All the waste!” Beyond his meaning of physical things such as water and plastic and natural resources, I see now our waste of power. We are the superpower, even if we are to fall, and we do nothing worth-while with that. What are we focusing our efforts on right now? A pointless, expensive, religiously-based war where we meddle with Iraq’s politics. That’s all we seem to give a damn about- politics. Not lives or the crimes against humanity smothering Africa. Well wrap your narrow fucking mind around this, America: 4000 fewer people exist because of their religion in just a part of Sudan. Millions of people have been displaced, millions of women have been raped. The government uses starving as a method of murder, poisoning the wastelands meager water supplies by dumping corpses into them. In is beyond inhuman. In Africa today, human beings are slaughtering other human beings by the thousands.
When will America start seeing? When ill we begin to notice what other people are suffering? The answer is blowing in the wind.

Elise

Sick of it All

Ugggghhh. We’re fighting.

If I were to try and tell you what was in my mind at this present moment, it would come out as a jumbled swirl of aggrivation.

Maybe you don’t see it, but you seem to like her very much, the kind of like where you think about them and give them things.

I thought for a moment’s time that you wanted me back and were trying to ask me without asking me, because you have done that before. I was trying to tell you that I would be afraid of doing that, because of where you seem to be with her. I suppose I have misread everything.

Last night, my words didn’t come out the right way. I was blinded with anger.

You were once in love with her and you once made a huge mistake driven by that love. To me, it looks as though you are trying, in the pit of your mind, to let go of her, but that doesn’t mean she is gone from you, you only want her to be. But that is just what I think.

I’m not sure I want to talk to you anymore. The whole thing is such an irrelevant part of my life. You aren’t a part of it anymore and talking to you only keeps those wounds from healing. I want to heal right now and you aren’t letting me. This isn’t a fault of yours, nor is it anything you can change. I want to erase and move on. I’m going to move on now.
Sorry

An Autobiography of No Point

What is there for me to say? I can feel things to say, but I cannot catch them and lock them into words. I guess, for that reason, I’m not writer. I can write words, but that isn’t the same thing. I often think myself an artist, but that doesn’t depict who I am in this moment. I have something I want to say, but it will not mean what I intend until you, the reader, know who I am, so I will begin with that.

I live in Oklahoma City, a flat, republican place. I go school, learning things for the grades and therefore, through an endless series of proving myself worthy in the form of national exams, am secured a position in the American realm that will keep my family fed (because it is assumed that I will have children and lead a good, American life). I feel bound to tell you that I hold myself exempt from the blindness that is required of all true Americans. I intend to escape the luscious ignorance America breeds within its borders.

My life so far has been one of a classic, upper-middle class student. Like the other youths, I am strangely selfish and I have the luxury of scorning the perfect life I lead simply because of its perfection. I have a need to note specifics, though they will strike you and any sensible person as dull and pointless:

My mother is an artist, currently building a series inspired by the death of her father. Her hands are an endless source of creation and guidance to me. They define what mine would do if I didn’t have the eternally unsatisfied and unfulfilled brain that I have. I couldn’t live the life she lives and be happy, but it is wonderful to daydream about what my hands could do once they became as broken in as hers. My father, contrastingly, is a health-care lawyer. He isn’t one of the lawyers that are in the business for its wealth, but rather because he loves it. Frankly, I find love for the law an unfathomable source of confusion, because I resent it so, but I respect that it’s his passion. It is his art, strange as that may be.

I have one older brother, who is as much an idol to me as he is a book of how not to live life. He will graduate from college this spring and he hasn’t the faintest idea where he will go from there. Home again, I suspect.

I, in contrast, hope to be self-supporting as soon as possible. I want to travel with my closest friend to the Latin Americas, the wild Latin Americas, and experience. I want to live a life that I find meaningful. Everyone has something different that makes them feel fulfilled, and, apart from my creations, I have yet to find it. As soon as I have the age with which to escape, I will go searching.

I could continue on and on about my petty life. I could tell you about my art, my odd connection with the local Jewish community, my self-pitying boyfriend of 7 past months, the person who opened my eyes, or the person of my current fury, sympathy, and want, but they all seem to be finicky details about someone you care nothing for. I will save those monotonous accounts for another time. Now for the things I have wanted to say:
Wait, I have forgotten my original intent in writing this.

Just one little comment.

I'm going to let go of you now.

Dear Claire

I know you won't read this, but I want you to know something. Not pretend to know it, but really know it. I am here for you. Not in the superficial way you would see on a greeting card, but in the way that means something profound. I'm always going to be here, right next to you, so if you secretly doubt it, if you're secretly worried, don't be. We're not going to lose this friendship. We're going to go to Latin America, I know we are. You aren't the only one who thinks about our futures when you wake up every morning. I can't wait for the adventure that our lives are going to become. So jus in case you have doubt in your mind, you have to know that I will always, always, always be here.