Epicurious and Clocks; April and Coffee
京 「If you want to cry, then cry. Decide by yourself whether you are important or not. Even if other people value you, nobody can do anything for you. Ultimately, whatever it is, it's your unique problem. That's why if you live without leaving regrets, then over time I think that your problems would disappear... I believe that.」
With each attempt to begin writing again I find that my writing comes out a little too disillusioned, tainted by the fact that I’m trying too hard to be honest or trying too hard to be imaginative. I can’t find a workable line between imagery and dialogue, showing and telling. They say that you should show and not tell. I’ve got a few thoughts about that but I’m still working them out in my head so I’ll talk about something I’m sure about instead.
I’m halfway through a cup of coffee, and it’s almost two in the morning. I can hear my clock ticking and it reads 3:08(AM) for several reasons. I always set my clock a little fast, because of course, I’m notoriously unpunctual. About eleven minutes. The date, now it’s past midnight, is also the 12th of November. Daylight savings time just visited, and I never set my clock back to account for it (once again for several reasons.) So now, if I subtract exactly an hour and then eleven more minutes from the time either on the red glowing digital clock shining at me from my bookcase or from the same time indicated by the face clock on the wall behind it, I would have a reasonable estimate of the actual, accurate time.
That fact adds to the increasingly alarming subtle sense that this room exists apart from all other space and time and if only I could muster the willpower to remedy it perhaps I would feel more immediately the urgency to attack my commitments. This procrastinating will ruin me completely, I warrant.
The coffee is now close to two thirds gone, balancing on the mattress to my left. I drink it black tonight, perhaps half in an attempt to encourage myself to work and not to succumb to sleep or blind media consumption. Perhaps it is more in the hope that the caffeine might counteract the looming feeling of inadequacy and self-beratement that lurks inside my very body, waiting to drag me into some kind of fit.
I could feel it and I wanted to suffocate in it, as soon as I took the first few sips of my drink. I make a very conscious effort not to drink a lot of coffee, seeing on a very real level what it has done to my mother. I am a teenage girl, it is only natural that I be terrified of turning into her, so I drink it infrequently, substituting tea instead. I believe in my attempt to rationalize when it is allowable for me to drink coffee, I’ve begun to see it as medicinal, almost. When I have no time for sleep and no time for eating before school, coffee is my prescription of choice, because with it I have a chance to stay awake, hold a reasonable facade in place for the benefit of the people around me until I have a chance to eat, drink and sleep.
Under no circumstances do I drink it more than two or three mornings in a row; that would ruin everything. On these occasions I do not generally have the time to consume more than a single cup at a time, either. It’s a rush out the door, no matter what.
For this reason, I do not build tolerance. Halfway through a cup, as I was at the top of this page, the caffeine and the warmth of the drink and the familiar flavor with its promise of betterment in short order have begun to kick in, more satisfactory on a cold autumn night than any soda. The weight of my failure encroaches on the aura surrounding me like something sickly and greenish-black, but for now, for the next forty five minutes, maybe, for the next hour or longer, I don’t have to fight it alone. Trying to get away from it is like trying to fight a shadow that oozes away just before you can turn your head quickly enough to face it and beat it.
My mug is empty but for the grounds swirling in the bottom, now. Brewed it so strong you can’t even see them, but their grittiness belies their presence and I stopped sipping minutes ago.
This isn’t even a bad day, you know.
Today I managed to focus on meager things; a puzzle in the form of a cryptogram and an imaginary treasure map in the mail occupied me for some time. I was able to focus on the little details involved for some hours. Though I didn’t realize at the time, I was happy to be able to exclude consideration of all else for the pursuit of something with no weight behind it. I spent a short time after I woke up (this afternoon) cleaning in the kitchen, too. I tried to get some writing done three or four different times, but look at me, I can only write half-doped and then only about myself, my own insecurities and problems.
Do I really think I can take these feelings and impose them on some character, publish it and expect people to accept that characterization? Might as well write a self-insert. How childish. I feel separated from them. My characters. They’re people, real people, and some of the most influential people in my highly impressionable developmental experience thus far.
I recently realized that I haven’t heard from them more than a few times since the last release over nine months ago. Nine months. That is a long time for an unhealthily obsessed individual to spend primarily having to revisit old occurrences, taped, recorded, archived and filed away on hard drives of increasingly lessened capacity. Sometimes the fixes come nearly two months apart instead of one as they’re meant to. The waiting is almost transformed from patience to reserved expectancy to excitement to a sort of dull throbbing I can’t identify.
I’m going to get another cup of coffee. My muses are there, I just need to mess around until I tap into them somehow. I don’t even expect to learn how; no, that would be too much of a gift. I just want to stumble accidentally upon something that works, even if I never identify what.
My clock reads 3:55. When I return I expect it’ll be something like 4:01.
More quickly than I imagined; 3:58. A truck just pulled in carrying my mom and, well, a truckload of chickens. I scurried upstairs with a lukewarm mug of black coffee I’d intended to embellish with sugar and milk this time. She’s been in Ohio, showing and selling, I believe. All the lights were on in my street-facing bedroom, streaming through the windows and announcing that I was probably up, but I fall asleep with them on often enough that the possibility is considerable. I expect a check in, soon though. Nothing to be done; I couldn’t know when she’d pull in soon enough to turn them off and avoid suspicion even if I’d been in my bedroom at the time instead of downstairs. So, it is what it is.
I drank the coffee already, quickly because it was already getting cold, more mindlessly than the first cup because the sensation of the first touch of flavor had worn a little. I fancy I can feel the first pangs of gestational discomfort already, and probably can in fact. Being on one’s period does little to ease the effects of stomachaches of any sort.
It occurs to me that black coffee is like DIR EN GREY. Sort of an acquired taste, pungent and a little bit deliciously off-putting, with far more avid and addicted advocates than really are probable. Wonderful, certainly.
I’m sorry I keep hopping from one topic to another; I have to periodically stop typing and stow the laptop until the sounds of my parents conversing and wandering around subside. Then I can retrieve it and stop pretending to have fallen asleep mid-college consideration. My thoughts are unfortunately non-linear enough to begin with, without the gaps in my reasoning where I’m not writing it all down, so I apologize for the leaps. I’m trying to smooth it out, and doing okay at it for the difficulty of the task.
I’m experiencing urges to sleep, to fix the chipped and gross paint on my nails, to vomit, to fold the nearest piece of paper into something improbably small. The pressure behind my eyes is masked now by a fuzziness that tingles when I try to close them, which is how I know I can’t sleep even if I try. There’s a headache there somewhere, trying to make itself known over the cushiony barrier that almost an entire pot of coffee I’ve just drunk has created. I can tell it could be worse at the moment and I’m grateful it isn’t.
I keep having flashbacks to dreams I had months ago. Dreams I haven’t remembered since they occurred. Isn’t that strange? That those memories should surface as I’m focusing my attentions elsewhere. Dreams about running away, about driving a Jeep, about skipping school and breaking into trailers and being frightened and hiding in the woods and a necklace. A sister and a best friend and a body in a garbage dump and treasure in a wrecked and rusty pickup truck. My mother, but my age, a red-headed friend who betrays me and being lost in a bright forest with all the leaves shed; treading on loam, snapping twigs and jumping at the mere sound of wind in the bare branches.
I can’t even remember how long ago that dream was. I felt as though I was being chased the entire time, I remember that. Always someone after me, that fear permeated by some catalystic abandonment. That happens a lot, when I dream. The ones I remember, anyway.
You know, once I dreamed that I made it to Japan. I made it, I had a place, I was meeting people, realizing that most ingrained of dreams. I met a little boy in a supermarket parking lot, and we talked. I spoke to him in Japanese, in the dream. I brought him back to his home.
I met a guy, too, a foreigner like me, but he was two people at once. He was both someone I didn’t know, and a familiar face in a cold and uncompromising inherently unfamiliar place. He was staying somewhere very near to where I was. We huggedwhen we recognized each other and after that couldn’t seem to find the will or the way to let go. The door to his place swung shut on our embrace. We spoke in English, we drank beer from his fridge and we fell into his bed, together. And I remember... that I felt so free.
I don’t feel free here, now.
I feel cornered, all the time.
Cornered on the bus ride to school, cornered sitting exposed in a classroom, cornered walking the halls alone and trying not to let my gaze linger on anyone, ever. Cornered trying to find a place to hide away during free periods, cornered leaving that oppressing building, cornered getting off the bus and walking into my home. Cornered watching television downstairs. Cornered lying in bed, confessing to my friend and confidant: this laptop. Cornered waiting every second for footsteps on the staircase. Cornered waiting for the twang and cling of the spring mechanism inside the twisting doorknob. Cornered, all the time.
I think I’d like to feel lost. Lost physically, and not metaphorically. I’d like to be somewhere new and exciting enough to make me forget to be afraid of what I’m running from to begin with.
Did you know that the probability of falling in love is heightened by some ridiculously large percent when a person is immersed in a foreign environment?
… Am I afraid of new commitment? Of commitment at all?
I don’t think I could be realistically afraid, not for my own sake; I wasn’t exactly ruined the last time, not immediately. But I can’t deny that since April two years ago I have not even once seriously considered dating anyone for real. Not that I haven’t maybe technically been on dates or planned them since that time with different people, but something in it was closed off completely to the prospect of a relationship. What is that about?
No, I know. My reasoning for at least the last year or year and a half was that there was a good chance that I was really getting out of here; I was going to leave, jet to the other side of the planet and what was the point of creating something just to break it into pieces? And I suppose the six months to that point was a combination of trying to make sure I wasn’t unknowingly shielding myself from the reality of the end of the only real thing I’d ever had, and a period of trying to judge whether I was over it or whether I had dealt with it and what was reasonable waiting time. Between trying to understand my own coping mechanism and trying hard just to stay afloat in school and developing my escapes and guilty pleasures I didn’t ever develop a relationship.
Kind of good, really. Nothing like having a crush to make yourself feel like the shittiest version of yourself you’ve ever been. I’ve got enough of that without feeling like I need to be something whole for someone else. More than whole: capable and reliable and charming and enticing and able to be there for them. I don’t think I can handle that.
Glad to know I can go from coffee and clocks to introspection and relational catharsis.
… I’ve gotta face everyone, everything, in about four hours.
Fuck, you know?
I really love Radiohead right now. Karma Police has been on repeat for at least an hour in my headphones... I don’t mean I love them right now as in a recent phase, I mean this specific song out of nowhere since I’ve had this document open. It’s basically perfection, everything I could have asked for in a song and instrumentals and vocals and tone and theme and effect for this mood I created somehow.
Daydream radio
daydream radio, you know?
This is nothing but what I deserve, my reward based on what I’ve done, blah blah blah. Thom Yorke, you are perfection, my friend.
Come to me, my friend.
Help me, my friend.
If there was ever a time I needed it, now is not probably the most pressing or desperate I’ve ever been, so even in my own timestream I outweigh my own need for a dreamstate miracle like this.
It’s okay, you know.
It’s okay. I’m the only one who can help myself and if I refuse, I’m to blame. So coddled and useless, but hey, who will that ultimately hurt?
Just me.
It’s okay.
Worthless or hard worker, it’s just me. Really.
It’s okay.
Karma Police, you know?
Cry if you feel like crying? Am I important? Value me, stand out of my way? Those problems will melt someday.
It’s okay, I know. It’s okay.
Once upon a time someone told me that telling someone it would be all right was the lowest kind of lie and false hope.
That person never combined Radiohead and three exceptionally generous cups of really strong coffee.
It’s okay, I’m okay, really, I swear.
Right now, that’s the truth.
Everything
is
okay
…you know?
My toes
are cold
and
I'm out
of coffee
and my room
smells
because I live here
and
my clock reads
6:11
and everything
is just
sticky
but I'll be okay
you know?
I know.