Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (Jalex)

Nineteen - To Be Alive

Thanksgiving came and went with a trip out of town and unfulfilling meal at my cousin's. The cranberry sauce was exceptional and the apple pie was so sugary sweet that I was relatively positive that there was a cavity waiting to make itself known in one of my molars, but the food ran out all too quickly and I could physically feel the crowded wooden table of relatives judging me when I went back for thirds. As far as I was concerned, Thanksgiving dinner could not be considered a success unless I felt the need to skip every meal for the next week in order to make up for the copious amounts of food I ate the night, but my stomach barely even hurt when we were driving home. Despicable.

But, nonetheless, the occasion marked the beginning of holiday season, and while I might not be the most cheerful person in existence, I loved Christmas like nothing else. I was beyond ready to start humming holiday songs along with my favorite bands that had covered them and jam with Mark Hoppus as he sang about how much of a pain in the ass wrapping presents was.

The holidays came with their faults, of course. For example, trying to figure out what the hell to get for everyone - not only were there the usual Christmas gifts that needed to be purchased, but my mother's birthday fell on the twelfth and my dad was literally a New Year's baby. I was always broke by January first.

And, also, you know, finals. They were always really fucking fun.

I'd been complaining bitterly about how we were going to be tested on everything we'd learned that semester in math even though I had absolutely no clue how to do any of it and was literally definitely going to get an F when Alex decided that that was the appropriate time to tell me that math was, in fact, his best subject, and that he'd love to help me study. So maybe I would be less tempted to shoot myself during Dead Week if I had that boy around. And, also, he could probably talk my finger off the trigger. If necessary. Which it wouldn't be. Definitely not. Right?

But the end of the semester was in sight, there were advent calendars on top of the fireplace that had not hosted a fire in years because of some smoke rising issue in our living room, and things could be worse. I mean, I still felt like shit and hated everything about myself, but at least the snow that had started to flit down from the sky and wash the town stark white provided a nice backdrop for my burnout. I made it through ten years of schooling with my sanity relatively intact, and figured I was at a fitting time in my life to hit my breaking point.

I spent my classes watching the second hand tick around the clock, thinking about how I'd rather be anywhere but there, and then finally going home only to realize that I wasn't any happier when left alone. It was when I was nursing cups of hot chocolate between fingers numbed from tripping in the snow on my way to the door and peering out our frosted windows at happy couples with glove clasped hands who I couldn't help but despise that I did my best thinking.

And when I say best, I mean most focused and detrimental to my mental health. So, it was due to that that over the course of spending the holidays inside, waiting to be someone else, I became somewhat obsessed with what it means to be alive.

Sure, there's the easy scientific definition of life: living organisms grow, reproduce, evolve, respond to stimuli. There were all those fancy, complicated qualifications that I'd learned in school once upon a time and forgotten long ago. But hard, simple, scientific fact didn't satisfy what I was looking for.

I'd heard once that everything with life wants, and, yes, that seemed to capture it pretty well. Humans long for love, animals hunt for food, plants grow towards sunlight. Everything tries to capture something else, and that is a true of all animate beings. Still, not what I needed.

Of course, there was always the endlessly useless dictionary definition of alive to offer no assistance whatsoever: having life; living; existing; not dead or lifeless. Maybe I'd be better to search the writings of Aristotle than the Webster dictionary. Or, possibly, lifeless text, black on white symbols weren't capable of answering such profound questions.