tie him to a post and break his fingers to splinters.
I am not at church again
I should have gone today, because I'm not sick like last week.
I like church. I like listening to the music and hearing the people talk about beautiful things like God and joy and peace of mind. I like the sun coming in through the windows before you go in and I like listening to the clacking sound my high-heeled church shoes make when I walk through the parking lot. It makes me feel like I am doing something significant.
But I also like being alone in the apartment. I thought about going to church and I got happy, but I thought even more about sitting alone in my room in the quiet and I got even happier.
It is not because I do not like the people who live here. I like them very much. They are kind and sometimes ask me to eat their food, and that is no reason to want someone to leave.
It is just that I like to be all alone. I like moving around in the apartment, putting my hair brush down on the counter, opening and closing doors, and turning on the faucet and knowing no one can hear these things happening but me. It makes me feel like I am in control of things, and that no one is thinking about what I am doing, what I'm moving around - I can do it and move things and no one else will even know or think about it at all.
I like turning on my music, even though I am not listening to any right now. I like to turn it on and know that no one is able to hear it and no one is wondering why I would listen to such weird music.
I like a song that is called "The Mariner's Revenge Song" by the Decemberists. It is supposed to sound like an old mariner's tale and has all the melodic structure of Scottish folk music. It might not be Scotland, it might be Ireland or England - but I can't tell these apart that well, honestly. It makes me a little bit embarrassed because I'm supposed to know all the cultural differences because I like the UK so much, but no one has ever told me the difference between Scottish, Irish, and English folk music. I never thought I would need to know that until now, so I never bothered to read about it.
Anyway, the story is very dark and I can see pictures in my mind when the singers start to sing. The man is in the belly of a whale with another man who years before drove the first man's mother to an early grave by his reckless living and rascally behaviour. In parts of the song the mother's voice comes in and tells the man how to exact revenge on the rascally man - and it is a little bit creepy how she describes it, because she talks about breaking fingers to splinters and burying people alive while they try and claw their way out... but it does not bother me.
That sort of thing never bothered me for some reason. I can hear about people getting mashed up to bits by wood chippers or having their toe nails ripped off or getting their lips sliced open with paper cuts and salted - and it does not bother me just as long as it is not real. Hypothetically it doesn't matter when someone gets sliced from the top of their head down to their belly-button, but when it really happens to someone I start to feel really weird inside and I have to know all the details or else I will start imagining horrible things.
Once I saw a movie called Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and there is a part at the end where a man's face turns all old and starts rotting away while he is standing right in front of the camera. My mom and dad made me close my eyes so I wouldn't have nightmares or get too scared. I could still hear the sounds, all the gurgly noises and the screaming... so my mind filled in its own picture. I would always close my eyes when that scene came on the movie and the same picture would come into my head. Finally when I was thirtteen I watched the real movie and it was not very scary at all - the picture in my mind was much worse.
I think that is like when I hear murder stories. If I hear the truth it is always better than leaving me to imagine how scary things are.
The end of that song does not tell exactly what the first man does to the rascally man, but I think he does what his mother tells him to do - so that is what I imagine happens. I like the song because it reminds me of lots of books and stories I have read for my English classes - because lots of English writers make sad or dark endings. This is because they are trying to make you think.
And when I think about why something bad would happen, I start to understand how the world works a little bit. If a woman has to drown herself in the ocean because society doesn't allow her to be herself then I know that society has to change. This is because we can't just let women go off drowning themselves because there would be only boys and boys can't get pregnant and humanity would come to an end.
Endings like that make people realize that society needs to change - and that is why I want to be a writer... because people could be a lot better than they are if they would just think about things.