When I was in first or second grade, my sister was in the hospital. She was feeling fatigued and was just sick in general, with chronic colds and the occasional bout with pneumonia.
No, wait. I don't want to tell that story. Not yet, at least. Or maybe never. It's not that important or poisonous to me anymore. I like to guard my stories, guard my poisons from others. My stories are my livelihood. I carry them with me like the machine guns of soldiers, like the coffins of pallbearers, like the water vapor of the air. I am my stories, and my stories are me. They are my blood, my flesh, and my spirit.
At the same time, they weigh me down, rip, and tear at my skin and soul. I must shed them sometime, like layers of a drying onion, flaking and falling away, revealing fresh layers beneath. Slowly, I know they'll be the death of me.
But I can't give them away because they are my composition. To give them away is to give away myself, piece by piece, until I have nothing left. It's the same with most of my secrets. They are also who I am. I am nothing without my secrets, so I keep them. I don't tell people things. Rather, I absorb, I take in, I analyze. I don't have to let anything out, or divulge state secrets, or reveal my programming. Involuntarily.
I have to let some things out. I learned that. It bottles up, pressurizes your mind. It pushes and presses and makes you feel like complete shit, and before you know it, you're screaming at Kierra in the middle of econ because she said that gasoline doesn't harm people. All of my experiences, all of my knowledge, they push and tear to escape and be shared with the world.
In the end of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Rose of Sharon is being suckled by the dying, malnourished man. In one of the creepiest (and in my opinion, most beautiful) scenes ever, she smiles a cryptic smile. The book comes to a close.
I want one of those smiles, the enigmatic, secret smiles. The Mona Lisa smile. The Rose of Sharon smile. To be secretively, undeniably happy. Secret happiness is the best happiness. It's warm, it's filling, and it brightens everything.
I am paranoid. There is no way around it. The internet said so. I'm suspicious of people and their motives. I'm overly secretive. There's always someone out to get me. Well, maybe not me, specifically. But growing up in a conservative county in a conservative state in a conservative country hasn't helped. The fear of being outed was a big one with which to do away. (I must admit that I am in love with how pretentious preventing a sentence from ending with a preposition sounds. Jeeves, fetch the car.)
When I was younger, I always thought that I'd just move away, build my own house, live far away from people. Adopt a child. Be a single parent.
BAM. Sophomore year, first real crush, where hormones lead me down an irreversible path. A famous comic once on xkcd stated that the only way to win love was not to play. My body chose the path of love for me by sending dopamine through my bloodstream when I felt attracted to my first crush.
Then again, I also have pronoia, which is the opposite of paranoia. Anything marginal is done on my behalf, to benefit me. A hello? An undying proclamation of love. A how are you? A statement of attachment. A goodbye? Complete desolation, abandonment, and release.
I stand at the edge of a cliff. At the bottom is the smoldering wreck of a car. It's not my fault. For once, it's not my fault.
I want to run so far away from my family. I want to disconnect, to float away from them, to be free without worrying about them worrying about me. I don't want them to know me.
I don't mean that. I don't mean that at all. I want them to know me, to love me, to stay with me until the end. But I don't think they will. They're just another conservative family in the most conservative county in one of the most conservative states in one of the most conservative countries. There's so many stories like this. Boy likes boys, boy tells family, family runs boy off. Tragic.
But I am not committed to tragedies. I spent long enough here to know that my family, in addition to my stories, are poisonous. I need to get out of this house, this county, this state, and even this country. I need to flee, like people flee a burning building, like geese flee after a shot goes off, like cockroaches scatter when the light is turned on. It's running away, but running away is the only way I know how to solve this problem. Short of honesty, of course.
Of course I want to have a family. Of course I want to come home for Christmas and relate to them, feel loved by them, and love them back. But I can't do that knowing they'd throw me to the wolves. I can't love them back that much knowing they wouldn't love me as much if they knew. So I'm running.
But I don't have a family, then. And everybody else does. I've already seen it happen; friends are preoccupied with their families. They don't have all day to spend with me; they have their families. Well, guess what? My friends are my family. They don't love me any less because I'm gay. They wouldn't toss me out.
I don't mean as much as their family to them, though. Their families come first. And I understand that. But it hurts. Knowing that I put them first while I'm put second sucks. It's what I'm destined for, unless I tell my family.
Telling them would be a great risk. They're helping to pay for college. They're providing healthcare, cosigning loans, letting me live at the house when I turn 18, and they're letting me come back whenever I need to. I know they say their love is unconditional, but just how unconditional is it?
I guess this NaNoWriMO is a bit of a failure. It went from a legitimate fictional story to something like a rambling memoire. But I guess that's how I roll, motherfucker. Ruining stories month by month and inserting some scary rambling response in there.
I watch it burn. I watch it all burn to the ground, knowing only the pleasure of a successful creation: a sustainable fire. I set this, it's all my fault, and there's no going back. But that doesn't matter, because I won. I destroyed it all and that's how it should be. I can, in one fell swoop, take everything and everyone out. I control the light switch of the universe. Click! Where's the light?
Suicidal thoughts are...odd to classify. Thinking about suicide doesn't make one suicidal. I, for instance, have suicidal thoughts like explosions. A car speeding into a wall, a body flying from a building, from a cliff, into fire, a smoking gun, a fall down stairs. But they're nothing because I'll never act on them. Suicide isn't painless. It's pointless.
I say that everyone has a big challenge in life. One. Whether it's their god-given challenge or whatever, it doesn't matter. Everybody's got one. Mine is being gay. The whole purpose of that person's life is to overcome their challenge. Not to make money. Not to mate. Not to have children. Not to survive. To overcome their challenge, to beat the odds, to win.
My favorite thing to do is to write like a psychopath in my notebook. Big, loopy, bolded letters, struck, ripped pages. Destroyed. Fearful words, like kill, hate, destroy. It's comforting, in a way. To have somewhere to dump the craziest of thoughts, to discard the most useless of urges. Toss them in the notebook. Toss them away, where they can only hurt you if they are discovered. But you'll guard the notebook with your life, so that it won't be discovered.
The only thing more important than your life is your secrets, your stories. If you tell them, they'll live forever, even after you've passed the grave. The little foibles people have, the little things that make them happy, the way they function, their genetic material, their atomic makeup, their stories, their experiences, the number of hairs on their body, their favorite color, and more. All of these are things that compose people. A person is nothing more than the sum of their secrets, stories, and qualities. There is no such thing as one concrete person; rather, the one thing that exists is a fluid body, a shape shifting bogart of experiences, secrets, qualities, and lies. People aren't made up by their physical characteristics multiplied by their personality or experiences. They're a flowing creature, a body of intangibilities. Our bodies are temporary, our minds slightly less, and our stories immortal. We'll all die one day, some of use sooner than others. Our skin will flake off and decompose. Our bones will turn to dust. We'll be colonized first by bacteria, then worms as the coffin buckles and collapses. In hundreds of years, our bodies and bones will be colonized by the roots of a tree. We'll be nourishment to another life form. In more ways than one.
Stories live on. We know of Guy Fawkes. We know of Tutankhamen, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, the Vikings, Ivan the Terrible, the Aborigines, the Native Americans, the Inca, the Maya, and the Aztec. They're all gone. They don't exist anymore; their bodies are piles of ash and dust beneath the face of this planet.
But their stories live on and their secrets are revealed every day. They have passed from the realm of the living, through the realm of the dead, to the land of the immortal. They have played a role in humanity. They'll never be forgotten. As long as we are around to hear about them.
No, wait. I don't want to tell that story. Not yet, at least. Or maybe never. It's not that important or poisonous to me anymore. I like to guard my stories, guard my poisons from others. My stories are my livelihood. I carry them with me like the machine guns of soldiers, like the coffins of pallbearers, like the water vapor of the air. I am my stories, and my stories are me. They are my blood, my flesh, and my spirit.
At the same time, they weigh me down, rip, and tear at my skin and soul. I must shed them sometime, like layers of a drying onion, flaking and falling away, revealing fresh layers beneath. Slowly, I know they'll be the death of me.
But I can't give them away because they are my composition. To give them away is to give away myself, piece by piece, until I have nothing left. It's the same with most of my secrets. They are also who I am. I am nothing without my secrets, so I keep them. I don't tell people things. Rather, I absorb, I take in, I analyze. I don't have to let anything out, or divulge state secrets, or reveal my programming. Involuntarily.
I have to let some things out. I learned that. It bottles up, pressurizes your mind. It pushes and presses and makes you feel like complete shit, and before you know it, you're screaming at Kierra in the middle of econ because she said that gasoline doesn't harm people. All of my experiences, all of my knowledge, they push and tear to escape and be shared with the world.
In the end of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Rose of Sharon is being suckled by the dying, malnourished man. In one of the creepiest (and in my opinion, most beautiful) scenes ever, she smiles a cryptic smile. The book comes to a close.
I want one of those smiles, the enigmatic, secret smiles. The Mona Lisa smile. The Rose of Sharon smile. To be secretively, undeniably happy. Secret happiness is the best happiness. It's warm, it's filling, and it brightens everything.
I am paranoid. There is no way around it. The internet said so. I'm suspicious of people and their motives. I'm overly secretive. There's always someone out to get me. Well, maybe not me, specifically. But growing up in a conservative county in a conservative state in a conservative country hasn't helped. The fear of being outed was a big one with which to do away. (I must admit that I am in love with how pretentious preventing a sentence from ending with a preposition sounds. Jeeves, fetch the car.)
When I was younger, I always thought that I'd just move away, build my own house, live far away from people. Adopt a child. Be a single parent.
BAM. Sophomore year, first real crush, where hormones lead me down an irreversible path. A famous comic once on xkcd stated that the only way to win love was not to play. My body chose the path of love for me by sending dopamine through my bloodstream when I felt attracted to my first crush.
Then again, I also have pronoia, which is the opposite of paranoia. Anything marginal is done on my behalf, to benefit me. A hello? An undying proclamation of love. A how are you? A statement of attachment. A goodbye? Complete desolation, abandonment, and release.
I stand at the edge of a cliff. At the bottom is the smoldering wreck of a car. It's not my fault. For once, it's not my fault.
I want to run so far away from my family. I want to disconnect, to float away from them, to be free without worrying about them worrying about me. I don't want them to know me.
I don't mean that. I don't mean that at all. I want them to know me, to love me, to stay with me until the end. But I don't think they will. They're just another conservative family in the most conservative county in one of the most conservative states in one of the most conservative countries. There's so many stories like this. Boy likes boys, boy tells family, family runs boy off. Tragic.
But I am not committed to tragedies. I spent long enough here to know that my family, in addition to my stories, are poisonous. I need to get out of this house, this county, this state, and even this country. I need to flee, like people flee a burning building, like geese flee after a shot goes off, like cockroaches scatter when the light is turned on. It's running away, but running away is the only way I know how to solve this problem. Short of honesty, of course.
Of course I want to have a family. Of course I want to come home for Christmas and relate to them, feel loved by them, and love them back. But I can't do that knowing they'd throw me to the wolves. I can't love them back that much knowing they wouldn't love me as much if they knew. So I'm running.
But I don't have a family, then. And everybody else does. I've already seen it happen; friends are preoccupied with their families. They don't have all day to spend with me; they have their families. Well, guess what? My friends are my family. They don't love me any less because I'm gay. They wouldn't toss me out.
I don't mean as much as their family to them, though. Their families come first. And I understand that. But it hurts. Knowing that I put them first while I'm put second sucks. It's what I'm destined for, unless I tell my family.
Telling them would be a great risk. They're helping to pay for college. They're providing healthcare, cosigning loans, letting me live at the house when I turn 18, and they're letting me come back whenever I need to. I know they say their love is unconditional, but just how unconditional is it?
I guess this NaNoWriMO is a bit of a failure. It went from a legitimate fictional story to something like a rambling memoire. But I guess that's how I roll, motherfucker. Ruining stories month by month and inserting some scary rambling response in there.
I watch it burn. I watch it all burn to the ground, knowing only the pleasure of a successful creation: a sustainable fire. I set this, it's all my fault, and there's no going back. But that doesn't matter, because I won. I destroyed it all and that's how it should be. I can, in one fell swoop, take everything and everyone out. I control the light switch of the universe. Click! Where's the light?
Suicidal thoughts are...odd to classify. Thinking about suicide doesn't make one suicidal. I, for instance, have suicidal thoughts like explosions. A car speeding into a wall, a body flying from a building, from a cliff, into fire, a smoking gun, a fall down stairs. But they're nothing because I'll never act on them. Suicide isn't painless. It's pointless.
I say that everyone has a big challenge in life. One. Whether it's their god-given challenge or whatever, it doesn't matter. Everybody's got one. Mine is being gay. The whole purpose of that person's life is to overcome their challenge. Not to make money. Not to mate. Not to have children. Not to survive. To overcome their challenge, to beat the odds, to win.
My favorite thing to do is to write like a psychopath in my notebook. Big, loopy, bolded letters, struck, ripped pages. Destroyed. Fearful words, like kill, hate, destroy. It's comforting, in a way. To have somewhere to dump the craziest of thoughts, to discard the most useless of urges. Toss them in the notebook. Toss them away, where they can only hurt you if they are discovered. But you'll guard the notebook with your life, so that it won't be discovered.
The only thing more important than your life is your secrets, your stories. If you tell them, they'll live forever, even after you've passed the grave. The little foibles people have, the little things that make them happy, the way they function, their genetic material, their atomic makeup, their stories, their experiences, the number of hairs on their body, their favorite color, and more. All of these are things that compose people. A person is nothing more than the sum of their secrets, stories, and qualities. There is no such thing as one concrete person; rather, the one thing that exists is a fluid body, a shape shifting bogart of experiences, secrets, qualities, and lies. People aren't made up by their physical characteristics multiplied by their personality or experiences. They're a flowing creature, a body of intangibilities. Our bodies are temporary, our minds slightly less, and our stories immortal. We'll all die one day, some of use sooner than others. Our skin will flake off and decompose. Our bones will turn to dust. We'll be colonized first by bacteria, then worms as the coffin buckles and collapses. In hundreds of years, our bodies and bones will be colonized by the roots of a tree. We'll be nourishment to another life form. In more ways than one.
Stories live on. We know of Guy Fawkes. We know of Tutankhamen, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, the Vikings, Ivan the Terrible, the Aborigines, the Native Americans, the Inca, the Maya, and the Aztec. They're all gone. They don't exist anymore; their bodies are piles of ash and dust beneath the face of this planet.
But their stories live on and their secrets are revealed every day. They have passed from the realm of the living, through the realm of the dead, to the land of the immortal. They have played a role in humanity. They'll never be forgotten. As long as we are around to hear about them.
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