Posted by Keith on
7 February 2010 with no comments
I grabbed the pills—I don’t know what for; I hadn’t planned to do anything with them. Or maybe I had and just didn’t know it yet—and started to move towards the door. But she got there first. For her petite frame, she was much stronger than she appeared. I tried forcibly to move her out of the way, but couldn’t. Get out of the way, I whispered, conscious of the presence of the neighbors, but raggedly, in a way that attempted to convey the urgency of my desire to leave. But she wouldn’t. She knew all too well what I was capable of and what I was not and she knew that I would not hurt her to get what I wanted.
I ran back upstairs, not because I was giving up, but because I realized I did not have my keys with me. That got her out of the way of the door long enough for me to slip past and out. But once I was outside, I had no direction. I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going or what I actually wanted. I got a block from the house and stopped. I started to cry. I looked in both directions, then started back towards the house.
When I got there she was on the phone, slightly frantic. I had tears streaming down my face. I threw the pills on the floor in her room and said I was sorry, then I left again. She hung up the phone and chased after me, down the stairs and out the door. But I was already off the porch. She called my name and I stopped and turned. She was blurry because of the tears, as if everything was melting.
She stood in the doorway and she said, “I still care.”
“Me, too,” I said, and left.
Posted by Keith on
6 February 2010 with no comments
My failures live and breathe and walk around me and give me reason all the more to be unhappy with the person I’ve become.
Posted by Keith on
2 February 2010 with no comments
I don’t know that I ever realized before how easy it was in the past to simply not worry about what was coming next because, traditionally speaking, most of childhood and adolescent growth in the U.S. is so plotted and planned. It was easy not to worry in school because what was next was always more school. Always. I worried about other things, certainly. Whether or not I’d make friends. How difficult it may or may not be. I would tell myself that I was worrying about what was next, but that wasn’t really true. There was always something more ahead. And it was easy. And over the past few years I’ve become more and more detached from that worry about what comes next. I was never less worried in my life than when I moved to Seattle from across the country and—so I’m told—that’s not an easy thing to do. At a certain point maybe it’s just that we worry less about things we can’t control and just worry more about… other things we can’t control.
I’m getting to my point, I think.
Lately I’ve been so anxious to get to the “next phase” I guess you’d call it. I am quite ready not to have roommates. I don’t dislike my roommates, but having them complicates things. I adore my job now more than ever, but not working full time is a little more complicated. Living alone, at face value, seems simpler. Not having homework and classes seems simpler. Working full time seems simpler. Not having a “significant other” seems simpler right now (the self-loathing aside). In all actuality these are probably just my impressions of a life I’ve never lived; as Palahniuk puts it in one novel, these kinds of projections are an “extension of life as we know it.” I can imagine living alone with no girlfriend and a full time job because it’s a projection of life as I know it now.
But I’m noticing (and by noticing, I mean that I just had this thought and decided to type it out on a whim) that when I think of post-academic life, in a deeper way I can’t imagine anything. It’s like my life is going to end when 19 March hits. It’s this big blank because at present it’s hard to imagine a life without homework, without class obligations. I’ve been told by friends who’ve graduated with the class I was supposed to’ve graduated with that it’s a lonely sort of life, isolated and noticeably less active (although I don’t like that word, because it’s not exactly what I mean). Less social, maybe? I don’t know.
In any case, what my point is (I think) is that for the first time in a while it’s really difficult to imagine what happens next. And I wouldn’t say that for the first time in a long time I’m worrying, because I’m not. But I might be a little bit… daunted, maybe. I don’t know if there’s an English word for this kind of trepidatious feeling. It’s the feeling that, for my entire life as I’ve known it, it’s always been pretty clear what was ahead and now that’s not as much the case.
Then again, perhaps I’m misreading the past and there were in fact times that I didn’t actually know what was next, but, now that it’s the past and not some nebulous “then” future tense, I know how the story went. And furthermore it could be that the future is cloudy to me now because I am unconsciously obscuring it because I don’t want to have to think about it for one reason or another. Long story short, I don’t think there’s a conclusion to this post. It was a fleeting dark scary thought about my own nebulous then that I couldn’t conclude for myself, that I would never realistically be able to conclude for you.
Posted by Keith on
2 February 2010 with no comments
When I started blogging it was on Livejournal in August of 2001, two years after it launched and two years before you didn’t need an invite code to register anymore. I’m not one of the real oldies from the early nineties, but it’s still weird to think I’ve been in the game that long.
Since then I’ve used everything from Blogger to Xanga, currently residing on Wordpress (and Tumblr, too).
An interesting question, I think, is: is it blogging that makes me a self-righteous, self-indulgent prick, or did my keeping of a blog just happen to coincide with the age at which that kind of thing begins to develop in a person?
Posted by Keith on
1 February 2010 with no comments
The First Day of The Month:
- Email professor and give lame excuse as to why I am not in class today. Write poem that was supposed to be due. End up unhappy with result.
- Email internship faculty supervisor and catch her up on 4 weeks of what I’ve been doing at my internship, emails which should have been sent each week.
- Sit alone in room.
- Scan stupid handwritten notes and/or stupid random shit that I’ve found and think is mildly funny.
- Spend a minimum of fifteen minutes dreaming of living alone.
- Spend a minimum of ten minutes dreaming of driving across country alone.
- Spend a minimum of five minutes writing retarded fucking blog post, pitying self.
- Realize I’ve been making unconscious efforts to isolate self from surroundings and others over the past two years.
- Further realize that said isolation does not make me creative, smarter, more interesting, or more philosophically deep and that attempts to isolate self in order to be creative would largely be a waste of time, because it follows that any output will be equally as uninteresting, stupid, and self-serving.
- Check Tumblr, Twitter, Gmail, Flickr, and Facebook a minimum of five times each, none of which will be updated. Check anyway.
- After forty-five minutes of doing useless shit while sitting at desk, shirk all responsibility and play X-Box instead.
- After two hours, feel like a total dickhead, then try to bandage self-depricating feelings by pretending not to care and assuring self that not caring makes me cooler (when in fact it does not).
I’ll get started in a second, I swear.
Posted by Keith on
24 January 2010 with no comments
“And I told you to be patient, and I told you to be fine!”
Justin’s brittle falsetto bursts from the Sebring’s surround sound speakers. You said you wanted it turned all the way up, so that you could sing along. I assumed otherwise you wouldn’t. It sounded as if my ear drums were going to burst. The car was going a million miles an hour and you were singing those words. I put my arms at my sides and looked away from you, out the window, and just wished for the car to stop.
She was driving, high, though we wouldn’t know until after she parked the car. He was high and drunk and in the passenger seat, quietly watching Seaview Avenue blur away. You were drunk as I would ever see you, screaming Justin’s words at the top of your lungs, slamming your hand, palm open, into the seat and singing directly at me every few lines. ”I told you to be balanced, and I told you to be kind!” I was high, and terrified. The song ended, you stopped singing, but she didn’t turn the music down. Everything was happening all at once.
I thought everyone was there to hurt me. I know that it’s a silly stereotype of these kinds of experiences, but those are always the ones that inevitably turn out to be true: I had never been more paranoid in my life. When we arrived back at your place, I sat in the chair from your grandmothers house, the yellow one with a floral pattern and those useless armrest covers that would never stay on and I could never understand why they existed. I liked that chair and I felt safe there, so I didn’t move from that spot. I sat there, arms at my sides again and tried harder and harder not to be high, which inevitably only made me feel even more high.
It’s incredibly ironic to think about now. You and she and he, you all sat on the floor in front of me, talking and laughing and watching me. She kept saying, “Let’s just listen to what he says,” which made me feel self-conscious and more paranoid and ever more aware of my intoxicated state. You all kept saying, don’t worry. You’re safe. You’re in a safe place around people who care about you. I remember all this now and I wonder, was I really safe? Were you really not all out to always hurt me at every turn, whenever you got the chance? Did you really care about my safety or well-being at all?
At one point you told me to cuddle with you on the floor because I felt so scared. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than that. And I think you knew. But I couldn’t. You were so intimidating and I didn’t know what your intention was in that state. So when I wouldn’t cuddle with you, you turned on me. You suddenly became very mean and distant, you threw the blankets on me while I was on the floor and you slept in your room. The couch alone held me the night.
Everything the next morning was awkward. She left early and we got breakfast with him, for which he so graciously paid. You would barely look at me, and I was angry about the way I was treated. That weekend you went back to your hometown for the Fourth of July and you offered for me to come back with you. Secretly, that sounded like more fun than anything else, but I wanted space from whatever it was that happened the night before. I hope you understand, I said. This seemed to make you very sullen, as if you had no recollection of how you’d just treated me. It was at this moment I should have turned and run. I should have known that my happiness, my well-being, my safety wasn’t a consideration—that it never was.
But I didn’t. I kept going and I got exactly what I deserved, despite all of the warnings you gave me without even knowing you were giving me them.
“And in the morning I’ll be with you, but it will be a different kind; and I’ll be holding all the tickets and you’ll be owning all the fines!”
Posted by Keith on
22 January 2010 with no comments
I don’t know why you were brought to me. I met you randomly at a party of a friend of a friend. Our quasi-friendship was a complete accident, a series of happy coincidences, if you could call them that.
I don’t know why you wrote me such wonderful letters while I was away, incommunicado. But I liked it. You were the only person I’ve ever had pick me up from the airport that arrived prior to my arrival; you were there, waiting, with cautiously worded love letters written on pink lined journal paper.
I don’t know why you chose me. We were so different. It never could have worked. Could it? Now I don’t know, but I was so certain that it would, against all odds. I thought the fact that you were so different would open me up. In some weird cosmic roundabout way, you were exactly what I was looking for.
I don’t know why you felt the need to leave. If I’d done something drastically objectionable, I certainly wasn’t aware. One day it simply was over and I wasn’t awarded a fair chance or the time to state my case or even to think about what had just happened.
I don’t know why I still feel like I love you, even after all this time.
— January 19, 2010
Posted by Keith on
21 January 2010 with 1 comment
