To Who I Am

Tossing Back Life Like A Shot Glass...

I feel like I am being drained of life. Sitting here in this room on this chair. I feel like I'm being pulled into the sway of this crowd or that and at the same time getting pushed out of it. The feelings that envelop a junior high student are too strong to refute. Emoting only angst and disgust, here we learn how to function in a way that doesn't screw with anyone around us. It's simple. Stay on your side of the hall and in your own thoughts. Let the lockers brush against you rather than the bodies you'd otherwise have to let by. The patterns we augment have existed for so long.
So I've learned the rules. What the school unintentionally promotes by keeping its doors open for all kinds of students. I'm not good enough. In this building. In this world. I'm not a favorite. I'm not even a special one. Because special one's know how to drive the car, and the rest of us are just passengers. We are the ignition to the key. What's one without the other? I'm not even a kind one. For the thoughts that encompass my brain's source of power shut me down. A negative anti-chamber of whatever lies beneath my simplistic feelings. Emotions are so different in a way that can only be felt. Not understand. Other kids don't know how heart strings snap suddenly without a catching floor and how bus wheels sag under the pressure of too much immaturity. No one sees the way the world falls apart beneath our glances. We are staring at the tops of heads but not the faces that contort right under them. What are we supposed to show? Emotion or feeling? Anger or placativity? If we were made to endure such powerful things-things that can drive a knife into your friend's gut or your own-then why aren't we made confident enough to show them? It's a question that balances off a teeter totter in our very own minds. One side weighing another to the hollow ground. For the mind is the only center we can rely on. Each person concocting different thoughts at a synchronized time. Though none resemble anyone's else. There are those whose heads cloud with thoughts of school and braces and grades that overshadow like a towering tree suffocating the sun's rays. But there are those who notice the way the celestial body of the sun shines through the window, the way eyes blink beneath calm heads. These we must pay mind too. Watch out for them, protect them not and you will see how the world turns in on itself. Because the world, too, can give up on us. By choosing to focus on all that makes itself bad rather than the beauty which completes it. The Earth can lose itself in abandoned street corners or gray and bulky city skylines rather than the dancers who kick up their feet so high it's like sun ray's peaks on a wooden balance bar. These people-brimming with ingenuity-remind us that when our own life crumbles, the Earth still rotates in a way that the light can dig it's way through our atmosphere. The sky still gusts clouds round and round-completing an eternal rotation. The grass still finds a way to lean into its companions, but we pay it no thought or mind. Our feet stamp out the ground's life, and our daydreams blockade the faces before us. We become vacuous only to appease the ravaging thoughts snaking like reptile skin against branches on our prickly brains. It feels like each idea is holding a pitchfork to our heads, challenging us: you dare ignore me? Why yes, dear, frail little thought-I will turn my mind the other way from you. Watch out for the jeering thoughts beeping their car horns from the oncoming traffic-you won't be able to send them away with a few cuss words and a much-needed glare. They are there to run you a red light.

I have learned by now in the flipping of calendars of my life that there are no good days. Or even bad days. They are all just days seamlessly stitched together by the back ends of their successional peeling. Monday peeled down to reveal Tuesday to reveal Wednesday and so on so on. The peels and memories collected as though in a heap on the floor. Our feet grinding into a paste of what was once a week of our time, then a month. All of it helplessly wasted.

Oh, yes. I know it so well by now. Don't even ask. I am a middle schooler! I have indefinitely learned that it is so utterly intoxicating to hate oneself. No, not in a way that I want the world to know and see. Not in a way that I can feel in every seizing cell. But in a way I can nod along too, agree with. Yes, it's easy. So, so easy. In Jr. high when we have no grip on our hormones, no way to bundle them up and save them for a later argument-we lose our speciality, our stand on the statue's plaque. It all requires too much haste, and a lot of distaste. My bed is no vessel that can carry me away, my arms not a port hole that can show you my pain. But I still don't like myself. I can't feel myself, not in touch or out of touch. Merely corrupted in the idea that I can't mentally appreciate who I am when others appear not to. Everyday I wedge the blinds open further, my eyes open wider in hope. For the people I do not talk to, I lose a little courage. For the ones I stand in front of and can do nothing but let my shoulders roll back in helplessness, I lose myself. The girl who always speaks. A mouth oozing words that don't always fit. For the grades I cannot fix, I feel anxiety racking my heart. Hanging up a coat to stay a little longer. Every morning and night people grate on the very edges of my fingernails, or maybe that is just my own teeth wearing them away. I hate that I am a pedestrian in the walk way of life. Nearly missing a whizzing car or not turning my head just enough in each direction to make sure my foot-followed by my other-doesn't lazily find it's way into the street. I am the knife that levels the flour clean into the bowl. Except I'm pointing the knife towards myself. So I hate who I am and possibly who I could become if I kept kept hating. But sadly my cycle finds no hitch, only a gaunt and heavy ditch.

And now, what fascinates me most after health class and arms glimpsed with sleeves stripped back, I've realized certain activities make a grand old time, but what is it exactly that we have to look forward too? Another round trip of the earth or another round of these dreaded days awake? Awaiting eagerly to toss our life back like it's a shot glass that can be drained all too quickly. That's us. Us teenagers. Some adults who never grew out of it, too. Still carry the same trusty shot glass around in their pocket. A few people consider cutting the best time there is of all, where else on your body do you experience so much raw emotion? Hence, the sleeves peeled back. Yet others experience euphoria by slamming down a friend who appears too tough a match. And others just like propping up their feet, butt nestled into the crotch of a warm couch. Some like remembering. Glaring is favored as well. Others like to kill. The boats that we set afloat-whatever sits in them is ours. So let yourself have it, let the world have it. Anger. Frustration. Euphoria. Sink your boat or anchor it. Imagine yourself bursting open and then alongside you everyone else is folding-then see how it really feels to be standing in a canyon of scars dragged through dirt devoid of any rain. When you look down on the world, all it really says to you, implies to you in a messed-up sloppy way is that we're all still here, with you. Struggling right next to you or a hundred miles away. And even if it's hard to feel that way about the world when living in just one tiny neighborhood in this itsy bitsy life of yours, you remember the world is a lot bigger than it's supposed to be and you are a lot smaller than you're supposed to be. But the two can always equal out.

I'd dig a trowel ten thousand miles if I knew I could find hope at the center of our beating planet's heart. But I can't, so I just have to remember it's there. If there's one thing I can understand about myself; it's that.

-mine and yours,
s.l