For the last year, my Wattpad has been effectively my diary. I've caught myself referring to it as the Wattpad and my diary interchangeably. I address you in every post, but it's really just me writing to myself, slightly more assured than I otherwise would knowing that somebody will be reading it. I feel I ought to change that. Give you some room for once.
It's been an astoundingly long time since we last really talked to each other. Obviously, we talk to each other every day, but we talk to each other in the way one texts their parents. It's like, "How are you" or "Wya." I'm not sure if we really know what we're both doing. So, how are you doing, Madison?
I hope your Christmas Break was good. It seems like it was. Whenever Lucas visits, you go away for a month. I always imagine you're traveling, even though you spent this Christmas at home. You're going away from whatever liminal, incorporeal space our friendship takes place in for a little while. I've been thinking about the one summer you went to San Fransisco when I was dating Joey - the Little Dark Age. We didn't talk. The Bay Area seemed impenetrable to me. I had no idea what was going on down there. Later, when Joey and I finally broke up for good, and I was on the post-break-up apology tour, I remember you giving me the bits and pieces of your trip that once were so elusive to me (for understandable reasons). You told me about Lucas's mom, who was on your ass, and the vague, inconsequential, dead-ended bickering you and him would do (not to open up any old wounds). This is not to say I think the trip was on the whole bad, I just try to imagine what the real moments like these will be whenever you see him. I hope you and him are doing well.
My Christmas Break was really wonderful but also intensely fucking strange. A lot of it was spent feeling like I was in middle school again, playing on Photoshop and Steam and listening to albums off YouTube, or being in rooms of people where everyone said something to the effect of "We love you, Ben!" And, as to be expected, some of it was spent with the angst and loathing I use this Wattpad account as an outlet for. All of it I'll elaborate on it in the future. I deleted about 400 words from this post where I go more into detail about this one particular night where I probably experienced something akin to a panic attack, but it felt too one-sided to keep in here. On the topic of my whining, thank you for being its best listeners. That's a weirdly vain way for me to put it, but I mean it. We've been friends for 6 years (8 years if you count our Snapchat era). But you get me entirely. They say that after 5 years of continued friendship, that friend has the real potential to remain one for your entire life. We're now a year over that benchmark, and you remain a true fellow traveler. You get me at my best, but more importantly, I think, you get me at my ugliest. Maybe we feed into each other's misery, given how parallel our experiences of it are to each other.
We can share a room, share a bed, save rent as cellmates
You'd think it was a crime to be alive (that's your depression talking)
We're living in squalor
But you get mine, and I know I get yours. You get me, Madison. You get me without even having to tell me about it. Silent solidarity is probably the only thing that truly keeps the world together. Even if we don't talk for a while, I know we still have that. I think we still have that. We still have that, right? You're not mad at me, are you? We should call tomorrow. We're calling tomorrow.
On the topic of my whining, I wonder if you feel this way: I feel so bitter and horrible. I feel like this gross, angry hunchback freak, but few people be able to tell. I go to my lectures and seminars; I hold the door open for people; I say please and thank you to the cashiers; I make small talk with strangers and acquaintances, I even make them laugh. And my presence being in any way pleasant surprises me. I expect them to be revolted, but they're not. They like me. I am liked. But I constantly harbor the suspicion that I'm secretly despised, or worse yet, pitied. I feel like I live a double life. I was shocked at how much I related to Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor of all fucking things. By day, I'm awkward at worst, but by night, I'm horrible at best. I feel like there's something legitimately broken in me.
Ewan correctly identified Skinterrain as a profoundly cynical character, the kind that goes "All of this is bullshit, but I'm the most bullshit!" A part of me was proud to know I could make something like that because so much of what I like is that kind of cynical. I mentioned Elvis Costello, whose early stuff were these really hearty pop songs with fucking impossibly cynical lyrics. Take "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes" (contender for my favourite song of all time) or "The Beat," which are both songs about feeling intensely pathetic and short-changed. It had never really occurred to me how much I actually identify with shit like that. I have felt like this for so long.
Very often, I feel like an addict who is one bad day from realizing he should properly go into recovery. I don't want to feel like this anymore. This year, I have to have the courage to take the responsibility to get better. I could do this forever, but I shouldn't. I am loved too much to let myself go. I owe it to myself. I love you so much, Madison. Thank you for loving me.
