compendium

mad girl's love song

mad girl's love song
i shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; i lift my lids and all is born again.

When I was in school, I took a creative writing class, and our teacher was kind of shit, but she was really obsessed with the whole idea that perception influences reality. That perception can even invoke reality.

She was wrong. Perception is reality. You can pretend something is real, and that makes it real.

I can pretend that I am the only person in the world, because I rarely see another human being and that's how my body, my mind, sees it. To me, I am the only person. To other people, I don't even exist.

The world is not one giant, conclusive thing. The world is particular to each individual person. My world is the rooftop of this skyscraper and the cold and William and the lighter and crunchy leaves and empty streets with spiderwebs of cracks. My world will end when I die, but it will go on for everyone else. For my piano wire man, the world is already over.

Just because you perceive something doesn't mean it will be real, but if you pretend it will be it is.

I didn't like creative writing anyway. I just liked reading poetry.

...

When the forest fires decimated the plants long before they all stopped growing, I was partly to blame.

I was stupid and rash, and I didn't know how flammable everything was, including myself. I found a flower, a gorgeous, small thing, the stem bright green and vivacious, the petals spilling outward, egged on by the morning dew, a milky, swirling combination of purple and white. It was so beautiful, and the beautiful things are the best cheap form of entertainment to destroy. I set it on fire, one petal at a time, and it spread too fast, so quickly I burned my pinkie.

I ran.

A few months after, William was with me when I burned an amusement park that we went to when we were in sixth grade. I had eaten cotton candy and then threw up when the Twister hooked my gut right out of me. I burnt the leftover waste in a garbage can, first, and then I used that to set fire to the foundations of the rides, the cardboard displays. We walked back to the nearest parking lot and stood on the roof of a Greyhound and watched as it went up in brilliant bright orange flames, leaping and hissing and crackling at the sky vengefully. Amusement parks were childish. Amusement parks were from the past. Amusement parks couldn't distract you from anything.

William and I stood on that bus and watched the fire until it spread to the nearby trees, and then we sent an anonymous call to the fire department, who were still working at that time.

"Why?" William asked curiously as we walked back to our safe house. (It was William's grandmother's house, built on her orders right at the very edge of the coast, away from civilization. We occasionally had to wade our way to the kitchen for breakfast, but it was nice.)

I shrugged, pocketing my lighter. Fires are fueled by fear and I was very afraid, mostly of getting burnt, in more ways than one. "It's a lot easier to destroy than to create."

...

When I was in eighth grade I found out that I was infertile.

At the time, I was most definitely not thinking about children, and I was fine. I was more okay than Mom was, at least. A few weeks later, we went on a trip with my mom's sister and her husband and children, and I held my little baby cousin on the hotel couch when they were out on the terrace and we were watching baby shows filled with singing shapes and bright colors, and his little fingers wrapped around mine, so tight-knuckled and grasping and dependant that I started crying and I couldn't stop.

I hadn't thought much of children, but I had always just assumed I would have my own, one day. I always thought I would have them inside me, my secret to keep and protect until they could find their own way around. That I could see my features in them. That I could hear the way they stretched their e's like I did.

Oh, yes, it is so much easier to destroy than it is to create.

...

My mother knew this, too. She wasn't infertile - obviously, because I was here - but she had what they called and what we always ridiculed a 'hostile uterus.' She miscarried three times before she had me. If I didn't make it, she said she was going to give up.

Her world was waiting and watching and double-checking, terrified that her unborn child would become blood running down her thighs in just the blink of an eye, just like all the others.

My world wasn't until the relief, the blinding lights.

At least she wasn't here to see her only child dying now, just a little bit later than the others had been.

My mother's world was over. My father's world was over. The world would be over for me when I died, and then, I think the world would be over twice again for my mother.

I think that's just what it is.

At least she wasn't here to see it go cold.