Britney

I notice things more these days, as if high school has given me a microscope and placed humanity into a slide for me to examine. The fleeting moments that used to escape me are now settling into the palm of my hand, probably because I’ve given up the forced jadedness that I used to think was necessary. I don’t think that I have to go all out to be happy; I can sit under the covers reading Rimbaud and Patti Smith while listening to Led Zeppelin and Nirvana and feel like one of the luckiest people in the world.

I’m obsessed with creation now. I want my hands to always be moving, filling up pages and pages with thoughts and pictures and blurry black lines from my hands smudging the ink from my pen. My journal has stopped being a cemetery for rants and for snarking about how disgusting people are. I don’t want to destroy anything, save for the grief that sometimes plagues me. But I want less and less to smash things, to rip apart thoughts and emotions.

It has a lot to do with my school’s philosophy club, which is a free space where people lie on tables and upperclassmen sit around eating and talking about hedonism and mortality. I never thought I would feel so unobstructed, so bared to the world, but I do there, and I don’t hate it like I thought I would. I feel like I have pulled back a slipcover on my mind and not only absorbed so much, but let pieces of myself out. I feel more whole, like I don’t have to suffocate certain parts of me.

There is still a sadness underneath all of this that battles with the contentedness. I feel it rising inside of me like bile sometimes; other times, it explodes and I wake up sobbing, promising myself that this will be the time that I get help, that I tell someone what is happening. But I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to sum up the thoughts, the worries that penetrate the happiest of moments sometimes. It’s gotten easier to stifle it, though, to shove the feeling away for a while. ♦