I need you to read this.
Please listen to this song while you read this:
There just aren't really words for the way I feel most days anymore.
My ideas come in waves. My fascination with things and people and music and movies overwhelm me. I get so obsessed with things. I fall in love with things until they can do nothing but disappoint me some.
I am so happy with the person I have become some days. I feel as though I've reached into the deepest part of myself and just pulled as hard as possible for months on end. Why do some things still make me feel so lonely?
I yearn for a life painted in all the colors that this one is missing. I want Spain. I want Italy. I want France. I've drowned myself in culture. I love to listen to people sing. I love to watch people dance. I love to dance. More than almost anything I've really found in life until recently. I love to watch Penelope Cruz move, smile and laugh. I love to listen to Noam Chomsky's voice. I love to try to fathom the feelings of people completely unlike myself in places and times completely not my own. I love becoming lost in Allen Ginsberg's paintings of words. I love everyone's talents; their memories; their passions. It gives me hope for everyone I've ever known and will know. I spend some of my lunch breaks and afternoon drive homes going to Guitar Center. I love the drums; I love watching people bob their head and watching their hips start to sway. I love Kanye West's genius ego. I love reading again and the stories and the ideas that start fires in my brain that cannot be put out. I am obsessed with my own vanity and my own aspirations for greatness. There is a pallet of color and light and sound and words waiting for me to let them out and they will decide my life. How do I let go of this fear of chasing my thoughts? Everyone dreams when they sleep, some in more and brighter shades; Some in muggy mushroom flashes, some in clairvoyant acid light. I have let my nights become my days. I realized my own ability to communicate with my brain and hum it to sleep. I have seen through the whole plastic lie logic of my mind and basked in the radiant truths I allow myself. It is so strange to feel loved again, this time just for being myself. You know this line is for you. I have taught myself to let go; to not care about the harsh words and remember every fond one. I am breaking my habits, the good and the bad for the infinite possibilities which stretch out in front of me. I have become the laughing frontman, the ruffled conductor, the pinstriped ring leader and it is always who I was, but never who I WAS and more honest than I was ever able to be. I bought my first pair of jeans that really fit me perfectly. I found a smell to wear that matches my personality. I am skinny and that's okay. I let my father's hair grow on my chest and it's somehow freeing. I drove home my first brand new car this year and imagined sitting beside my Grandfather who is bigger in my mind than you can imagine. His flannels still cascade in my hopes and who's gnarled hands built me brick by brick, yet blank as day. This year I learned who he was and felt inspired.
I remember sitting in the hospital, the back of own hand reading "Keep going." Persevere. Survive. March on. Persist. Resist and multiply. All fragments of songs from my childhood.
In my notes, I read the line: "I'm trying to be everyone's everything, your savior and your medicine, your hero and your heroin." Keep going.
One of the most life changing things I've read, from Extremely Loud:
"So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!"
I've learned to let people new people in, and let too many go. I think my ratio is numerically positive but the weight of the negatives evens this out.
I had dinner with Amber last week. I could go back and obsess on last December when she first told me about Trent. I have. I could think about the last time I saw her, in March at Circa. I have. I told her I was afraid I would not remember her face but it looked exactly as it had in my dreams. The wavy blond hair that has haunted my day to day life. The passion in her eyes. She and I talked for 3 or 4 hours and talked about a missed year in each other's life when we had shaped the 2 years prior for each other, the unknowingly and innocently, the way a child gives carefully sculpted gifts of play doe, unaware of their transience. It was the single most important talk of the last few years of my life. I watched her eyes light up with every new thought. I realized during that conversation that I've been burying who she knew. Becoming someone different. Someone better. Who she needed me to be then but that I was too small to be. Too closeted, too foolish. As we walked towards the exit of the mall, I asked her the question that has crossed my mind every day for such a long time.
"Do you think about me?"
"In my quiet mind, in my idle thoughts, when I am alone. There you are."
She leaves for Las Vegas in a few weeks to start her new life with her boyfriend. I am so proud of her. She said boyfriend outloud as if had never been the most poisoness word she could speak, as it was. I may not ever see her again. Our eyes teared as we spoke, and we smiled as we hugged, and I died and was alive and she told me goodbye. I hope you never love anyone so much and have to tell them goodbye. Again and again.
But you will and it will shape every breath you take from that moment forward. It was the greatest gift I've been given this year or ever.
Merry Christmas. This journal is 10 years of me.
Click to viewThere just aren't really words for the way I feel most days anymore.
My ideas come in waves. My fascination with things and people and music and movies overwhelm me. I get so obsessed with things. I fall in love with things until they can do nothing but disappoint me some.
I am so happy with the person I have become some days. I feel as though I've reached into the deepest part of myself and just pulled as hard as possible for months on end. Why do some things still make me feel so lonely?
I yearn for a life painted in all the colors that this one is missing. I want Spain. I want Italy. I want France. I've drowned myself in culture. I love to listen to people sing. I love to watch people dance. I love to dance. More than almost anything I've really found in life until recently. I love to watch Penelope Cruz move, smile and laugh. I love to listen to Noam Chomsky's voice. I love to try to fathom the feelings of people completely unlike myself in places and times completely not my own. I love becoming lost in Allen Ginsberg's paintings of words. I love everyone's talents; their memories; their passions. It gives me hope for everyone I've ever known and will know. I spend some of my lunch breaks and afternoon drive homes going to Guitar Center. I love the drums; I love watching people bob their head and watching their hips start to sway. I love Kanye West's genius ego. I love reading again and the stories and the ideas that start fires in my brain that cannot be put out. I am obsessed with my own vanity and my own aspirations for greatness. There is a pallet of color and light and sound and words waiting for me to let them out and they will decide my life. How do I let go of this fear of chasing my thoughts? Everyone dreams when they sleep, some in more and brighter shades; Some in muggy mushroom flashes, some in clairvoyant acid light. I have let my nights become my days. I realized my own ability to communicate with my brain and hum it to sleep. I have seen through the whole plastic lie logic of my mind and basked in the radiant truths I allow myself. It is so strange to feel loved again, this time just for being myself. You know this line is for you. I have taught myself to let go; to not care about the harsh words and remember every fond one. I am breaking my habits, the good and the bad for the infinite possibilities which stretch out in front of me. I have become the laughing frontman, the ruffled conductor, the pinstriped ring leader and it is always who I was, but never who I WAS and more honest than I was ever able to be. I bought my first pair of jeans that really fit me perfectly. I found a smell to wear that matches my personality. I am skinny and that's okay. I let my father's hair grow on my chest and it's somehow freeing. I drove home my first brand new car this year and imagined sitting beside my Grandfather who is bigger in my mind than you can imagine. His flannels still cascade in my hopes and who's gnarled hands built me brick by brick, yet blank as day. This year I learned who he was and felt inspired.
I remember sitting in the hospital, the back of own hand reading "Keep going." Persevere. Survive. March on. Persist. Resist and multiply. All fragments of songs from my childhood.
In my notes, I read the line: "I'm trying to be everyone's everything, your savior and your medicine, your hero and your heroin." Keep going.
One of the most life changing things I've read, from Extremely Loud:
"So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!"
I've learned to let people new people in, and let too many go. I think my ratio is numerically positive but the weight of the negatives evens this out.
I had dinner with Amber last week. I could go back and obsess on last December when she first told me about Trent. I have. I could think about the last time I saw her, in March at Circa. I have. I told her I was afraid I would not remember her face but it looked exactly as it had in my dreams. The wavy blond hair that has haunted my day to day life. The passion in her eyes. She and I talked for 3 or 4 hours and talked about a missed year in each other's life when we had shaped the 2 years prior for each other, the unknowingly and innocently, the way a child gives carefully sculpted gifts of play doe, unaware of their transience. It was the single most important talk of the last few years of my life. I watched her eyes light up with every new thought. I realized during that conversation that I've been burying who she knew. Becoming someone different. Someone better. Who she needed me to be then but that I was too small to be. Too closeted, too foolish. As we walked towards the exit of the mall, I asked her the question that has crossed my mind every day for such a long time.
"Do you think about me?"
"In my quiet mind, in my idle thoughts, when I am alone. There you are."
She leaves for Las Vegas in a few weeks to start her new life with her boyfriend. I am so proud of her. She said boyfriend outloud as if had never been the most poisoness word she could speak, as it was. I may not ever see her again. Our eyes teared as we spoke, and we smiled as we hugged, and I died and was alive and she told me goodbye. I hope you never love anyone so much and have to tell them goodbye. Again and again.
But you will and it will shape every breath you take from that moment forward. It was the greatest gift I've been given this year or ever.
Merry Christmas. This journal is 10 years of me.