I wrote this a long time ago (in 2003), but I still think it's nice:
"don juan says it is important to forget your personal history in order to stop the world. abandon your friends, your lovers, your family. they all create, through their opinions, sheets of a personality with which they tuck you in at night. although most of us are not aiming to be warriors, we drop these people who are too judgmental. the ones with the harsh truth. after you've gotten over the niceness and the companionship it only takes one shared secret. we've all been there, always late at night, always laying around. 'i've never told anyone this before...' staring up at the ceiling, fidgeting. we've all been there."
It's like a letter I wrote to my future self. Stumbled upon it, now, while I'm wrestling with this desire to be nicer.
We never asked each other, "What do you mean?" You know that person. You have an exchange in public and smile, crinkly-eyed, at each other because it is a shared laugh, only for the two of you. I thought, maybe I thought, I could wipe away the anger and the negativity. But it turns out I'm moody too, I guess, and he once said, "You don't realize you have the power to completely break me apart with one sentence." Well, I'm trying again now for the fifth time to make something with this little heart and these little hands and I'm feeling very small. Looking inside from the outside, there are hand-holds handy but my foot-falls still travel too far away. I don't know what to say, honey, just let me go out back to stand motionless, bare skin in the grass, mindful of slugs, exhaling up towards the clouds.
3 comments:
oh man, there's a lot in this one.
i remember when you wrote that - the image of a personality made from sheets of others' opinions stuck with me. what you wrote after that did too, for some reason, but you saw that.
addressing my future self is the reason i've bothered with 90% of what i've written. except for me, it's more like making a present of an artifact than a letter.
"You don't realize you have the power to completely break me apart with one sentence."
that is eerily close to something i said once. she didn't understand either.
you're lucky to live in a place where slugs are all you have to worry about in the grass. a week after your first chigger attack, or seed tick invasion, or weird spiky caterpillar encounter, that innocence becomes a distant memory.
I understood what Nate meant when he said I could break him apart. I understand it but I don't know how to control it. And I'm pretty sure my response was, "Yeah, you too."
WHAT THE FUCK IS A CHIGGER OMG OMG
oh, and anais nin once said something clever about how writers write for two reasons. to document for other people and to document for ourselves, later in life. yup.
HOLY FUCK LOOK AT THIS CATERPILLAR
http://newsdesk.si.edu/images_full/images/museums/zoo/Rainforest_Caterpillar/large%20caterpillar.jpg
GOD I HATE THEM SO MUCH. EVERY ONE. UUUUNNNNGGGGHHHH.
HAHA I WROTE ALL OF THIS WHEN I WAS HIGH LAST NIGHT BUT FORGOT TO CLICK "POST"
and chiggers are awful. they attack in swarms in hot weather from exactly the kind of grass you'd want to lie in. if they get to you, they drop some kind of enzyme down into your pores that irritates the fuck out of them and makes you itch for a week or so, like oozing hives or poison ivy. but the worst part is that by the time you realize you've had chiggers on you (they're too small to see), they've already dropped the enzyme, started the damage, and moved on.
i've had my entire torso and legs covered in chigger bites (they're not really bites, exactly, but yeah). i was disgusting and so very grumpy.
i think i remember reading that the enzyme doesn't even work right on people - they can't eat the things it brings up cos they evolved to use it on some other animal that hosts the bacteria they like. so the whole deal is a fruitless mistake.
itching, flu-like symptoms, and you're guaranteed the sex life of a leper for those two weeks or so. basically, chiggers are the fucking worst.
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