the midwest

Love is a strange thing, I realize as sweat drips down my back and stomach and thighs in the sweltering sunlight. Only for love would I do this to myself, hiking for hours and hours and hours, gazing out at the vast reddish-orange canyons around me. Poets write about lush flora and the sparkling water from which it springs. But nothing, nothing can match the unfathomable splendor around me, and I wonder at how the parched grounds dotted with cacti on the furthest plains never fail to leave me breathless. I inhale the beauty, miles and miles of dry, cracked sand and clay kissed by the sun. I’m not in love with a person, no. I’m in love with these brilliant, lifeless lands, the heat that presses slowly, persistently into every inch of my skin, the wild freedom and solitude that envelops me from each and every direction, further than the eye can see.

it

 

i hear it panting as i push the door open

i feel its hot breath on my skin before i turn on the light.

it shrinks as brightness floods the room

but i know it is hiding, out of sight.

it skulks in the corners, just out of reach

waiting to be joined by its shadowy friends.

it lurks without worry of being discovered

for it knows that light penetrates, but never bends.

midnight

 

midnight was once a mystery.
dark matter somewhere in the deep recesses of night that I
would never reach.
a time separated from me by four whole hours
but then
an hour was once a lifetime.
midnight was once a menace.
a dark creature sprung from the shadows of bedroom walls,
a messenger of the cobwebs that inhabited corners,
a hole into which I fell out of dreams.
strange, then, how
midnight is now my reality.
the hour I religiously avoid but inevitably find
in the bright white light of my room
glasses reflecting the screen I face.
as the rest of the world sleeps,
I am awake
greeting midnight as an old friend.

reluctance (by me)

 

 

reluctance

i don’t want to
but i must
so i pad softly down the stairs
wincing as each foot kisses the cold, hard stone
i stretch each leg in turn
folding the other beneath my weight
and my knees crack each time
though they know what is to come.
i sigh and press “play”
and my thighs clench instinctively
my feet begin to stab the floor
merciless
and suddenly
the pain is gone
the sigh is gone
the languor is gone
gone
gone
gone
as my lips curl into a smile

i dance.

the end of summer

I had to acknowledge it eventually. I’m still reluctant to use the word. But I guess I probably should. School.

It isn’t so much school that I hate, not as much as the way it slithers into my personal life with a wiliness I find despicable. Who gave it the right to follow me past the pale green tiles and rotting blue doors into my home? My mind? My dreams? My existence? Who gave it the right to center all my actions, my thoughts, my commitments around itself? All I can talk about is school. All I can offer as an excuse is school.

I’m absolutely not the only person who feels this way, and all I can ask is why? Why, in response to thousands of students losing sleep and moaning that they hate school, does the administration simply add more to our workload and continue to have us taught in a way that arouses a corrosive hatred inside of us for education? It wasn’t always this way. In fact, it still isn’t. I enjoy education. That’s why I attend a school for math and science. But I don’t enjoy this. I don’t enjoy being taught things I’ll never use and tested on things I was never taught. School takes in bright, motivated, excited students and swiftly strips them of all energy, joy and desire to learn.

I’m so drained, I barely remember how to write. I’ve lost my urge to read, to write, to draw, to dance. I’m always tired. Always. Something needs to change, and fast. And until it does, I’ll continue to drag myself to school in the mornings with a heavy, empty void in the pit of my stomach, wasting away until summer arrives once more.

a beginning

I’ve been sitting here for about twenty minutes, and my dilemma has been whether or not to capitalize the first letter of my sentences. Why? Because it would look nicer to leave it lowercase. You’ve already formed your impression of me. I can tell.

Not that I care. Really. Pretty much everything I do is for the aesthetic. I sound so stupid right now. But is it worth sounding stupid if my blog is aesthetic? I think yes. No idea how I became so shallow. It probably began around last year, when I decided that if I couldn’t be the kind of girl who is the life of the party, I’d settle for a compromise between my mildly outgoing self and the mildly cynical author inside of me.

Because, you know, this isn’t my first time blogging. Although a lot of people don’t know that. Ever since I entered high school, there’s plenty about myself that I’ve kept bottled up inside of my heart, and I’m fairly certain my old friends would consider me a bit of a stranger. Une étranger. And there’s a reason behind this, of course. Mostly because when you start to hang out with a different crowd, you know, you have to keep up a certain image. And that sounds stupid. But it takes a lot of bravery to not give a shit about what people think and just throw your real personality out there. And it’s not like I’ve changed my personality. It’s just that some parts of myself are, like certain embarrassing posts on Facebook, hidden from my timeline.

Then I wondered what my blog should be about. I’ve had a lot of blogs in the past. I started off with your typical MySpace-type blog, with glittering text and Google widgets, and everything you would expect for an 11-year-old’s blog. Then I got serious, in middle school, and regularly pushed updates to a blog that was certainly interesting, but also possibly the most cringe-inducing thing I’ve ever written. The thing is, most of that blog wasn’t a collection of my thoughts. It was more like me trying to be funny and witty. I took thoughts from other articles and combined them in silly posts like, “Why Disney Teaches Us The Wrong Lessons” and “How To Write A Good Password”. Basically, I wanted people to come read my blog.

Now, of course, I still want people to read my blog, but that doesn’t matter as much as the fact that I want to enjoy writing my blog. I want my blog to be about me. I want it to reflect my deepest musings, my outlook on life and most importantly, my own style of writing.

I considered making this a fully anonymous blog because I didn’t want anyone to see it and know it was me. That might have been a better idea, because then I could talk shit about whomever I wanted without a care in the world. But I’m too proud of my own writing for that option. As far as I’m concerned, if someone thinks my blog is good, I want them to know that I’m the one who wrote it. And, recently I’ve decided that it’s time I stopped giving a shit about what others think and do what makes me happy. And that happens to be writing. So welcome.