So all the cups got broke
Shards beneath our feet
But it wasn’t my fault.
And everyone’s competing
For a love they won’t receive
‘Cause what this palace wants
Is release
—Lorde, “Team”
12/31/2015: I keep forgetting about the approaching New Year. At work, customers keep saying it, “Happy New Year!” and every time I regard the polite gesture like a slap in the face. I say, “Wait, what?” instead of the only appropriate response, “You too!”
Just, what even happened in 2015?! Who am I?! Where have the days gone?! I feel like I just woke up from a year long bender, like, the only evidence of 2015 is the crusty sleep sticking to the corners of my eyes as I roll over and interrogate, “Where am I? Who are you? What happened?!?”
I’ve just been so indifferent. I feel nothing about the New Year except: I want to drink.
See, for me, a nice dull state of depression has set in like the weird humid fog that has embraced Western New York in a semi-warm temperature that isn’t characteristic of the holiday season. Like, I think I’ve given up on feelings the same way the climate has given up on winter…
This is nothing new though. I have a habit of mentally checking out for weeks at time. I’ve been this way ever since the first grade when all my teachers told my parents I was mentally challenged because I spaced out a lot and never spoke to anyone. Obviously, however, I was not mentally challenged. I was just bored. You know. I was busy—busy dreaming of a world where people didn’t just assume I was mentally challenged…
Anyway, that’s how December has felt: like a sad dream birthed from dissatisfaction and boredom. Sleeping has become a highlight and avoiding everyone is an effortless pursuit. All I’ve wanted to do these past few weeks is stare into the fridge and eat nothing, read essays by up and coming angry white dudes, day dream at my job that I’m way overqualified for, and drive my car around listening to Lorde’s album on repeat as I feel nostalgic for shit that’s never even happened.
God.
I am so fucking bored—I feel in want of nothing. Nothing pains me; nothing excites me…I just want to be alone and detached, to float past anger and disappointment as if none of these things were ever mine at all…
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! *kazoo!*
So, this morning—New Years Eve—when I woke up from a dream about hiding from an angry mob in a snow castle with a has-been pro hockey player named Chester, I thought: Maybe I should try interpreting this dream, or doing something, anything, remotely out of the ordinary. So I Googled—because I have the journalistic skills of a monkey—“dreams about snow”. And the first explanation I got was, “snow means you are feeling indifferent, alone, and neglected” to which I thought: Okay, no shit. Then I searched an online dream dictionary for “castle” and read, “this dream indicates your desire to escape from life’s daily problems…to live in a castle represents your extreme need for security and protection to the point where you may be isolating yourself from others.” And the gullible part of me that reads horoscopes and takes every word to heart was like: Truuuuuuue. Until, finally, I looked up “hockey” and got a simple interpretation, “hockey is analogous to how you are achieving and protecting your goals. It also suggests that you may have dealt with a lot of hard blows in your life.” After which I deflected: Damn, poor Chester.
Final analysis: I should probably stop hiding in the metaphorical snow castles of my subconscious—this weird state of indifference—and actually start pursuing the next chapter of my life because, you know, years fly by and one day you wake up and shit—you’re a has-been like Chester, or, even worse, you’re MARRIED to fucking Chester. So, armed with this analysis, I started to actually contemplate 2015. I started recounting everything that happened, in retrospect: What happened at the beginning, and what happened at the end? How do I feel about it? What do I want? What does the future hold? Do I have any control? Then I began to form, for the first time ever, a resolution that I think I’ll actually be able to keep.
☁︎
2015 started like this: The ball dropped and, with no one to kiss, Emily and I hugged like the world was ending. For that second, 2015 was beautiful—Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, goddamit!—but then some onlooker, a guy, said, “MAKE OUT WITH EACH OTHER!” and the moment was ruined. Welcome back to reality, ladies. It’s 2015, and you’re still in this slimy bar with these slimy dudes. *one more time, kazooooooo!*
The night that followed involved me accidentally shooting whiskey out my nose and offending a guy because I told him that he had a “body like a cactus.” Who am I even? Another guy put his hand on my leg when I said something about feminism and I felt the incoming of a chastising thought: That’s what I get for wearing fishnets. Then me and Emily made out with the same dude. Happy New Year! I’m gross and so are you!
I remember thinking: It takes years to change, not one night, not one week leading up to that one night. We should reflect on our choices and the course of our lives for more than just the one designated day in the year that makes us feel obligated to reflect in the first place…this is why I have never liked making resolutions. It’s why I’ve never taken New Years seriously. When the clock strikes midnight, we’ll still get drunk. We’ll still make mistakes. We’ll go back to our lives, not much different than the way they were the day before. Real change takes time. Not just this one week; not just this one night, this one time of year. Let’s have fun now. Worry about it tomorrow. Or don’t. Who cares.
“You have a body like a cactus.”
Get over it, or do something about it. Either way, stop taking yourself so seriously.
☁︎
12/31/2015: All the Christmas gifts I received from my friends this year seemed to share a common theme: Laziness. No joke. Every single gift I got from my friends emphasized a different component of my newly developed I’m-Indifferent-To-Life complex. The first one being: Social Laziness. I ripped the tissue paper off a wine glass that said, “I will never be drunk enough to like you.” Then, the second one: Professional Laziness. I uncovered a T-shirt that said, “I hate my job.” (My friend would defend this purchase by saying, “You know, you like writing. But you always hate your actual job…that’s why I got it. Don’t hate me.”) And finally, the third: Hygienic Laziness. Another T-shirt that said, “Straight ‘Outta Bed”, in the style of “Straight ‘Outta Compton”…
I remember sitting there, in a pile of I-could-care-less-about-everything-and-you paraphernalia and wondering: Wow, is my lethargy THAT obvious? I really thought I was doing a good job at faking an interest in being a functioning adult…
Which only led to more self-conscious thoughts like: Maybe this is the year I finally cross over and become a full-fledged nihilist. I sleep next to a crusty bowl of yogurt every night. So. Yeah. I’m preeeeetty hedonistic…
Brief hiatus: Recently, at work, a customer mocked me to my face.
I was just trying to explain why her dumb ass gift-wrap was ringing up a dollar fifty instead of fifty cents—I know, right? God forbid she pay one fucking dollar more than what she initially expected. But anyway, I simply said, in a monotone voice, “This wrapping paper was originally three dollars, so like, you’re still getting the fifty percent off sale. It just wasn’t one of the dollar rolls. That’s why it’s ringing up this way.”
And I shit you not, she closed her eyes half-way, swayed her head around like she was trying to keep her balance, and made this weird monotone stoned-person voice as she restated what I’d said, “So like, you’re still getting the fifty percent off sale…Who’s your manager? Where’s a real worker?”
My jaw actually dropped. It took everything in me to not say: You presumptuous cunt—YES, SHE DESERVES EVERY CONSONANT AND VOWEL!—forgive my lack of enthusiasm. I’m not exactly happy about being overqualified, underpaid, and then constantly shit on because of trite crap, like your dying dream of getting gift-wrap for free. But I didn’t. I clenched my teeth. I hissed out a smile and directed her to a “real” worker, “The store manager is over there. Have a nice day.” *poop and sparkle emoji, bitch* (I now wear my “I hate my job” T-shirt underneath all my work clothes. I delude myself into believing that a world exists where I can rip off my work polo like superman and reveal who I truly am: I hate my job; I quit. Thank you for the gift of semi-liberation, Emily.)
Anyway, the whole point is, on top of my apathy—I. Am. So. Angry. At all times. I honestly believe my conscious effort to maintain a state of indifference is actually just my only alternative to not being in a constant state of rage. So yeah. 2016? Suck my dick. I don’t have the time or energy to contemplate resolutions, new beginnings, “looking forward” to a glittering something. Because, right now, my main focus is maintaining a certain level of cool—not ripping the first person to rub me the wrong way a new one, every second, of every day. Like: Don’t explode—be cool—don’t explode…
Well-meaning customers say, “Happy New Year!”
And I think,
I hope the sun explodes so I don’t have to.
Right before I smile and lie,
“You too!”
☁︎
2015 ended like this: Life sucks, guess I’ll wear a giant bow. I put the gaudy thing on my head and felt satisfied with myself for a whole two seconds. I strapped a sparkly pink purse shaped like a unicorn to my body and thought something insane like: Now I’m ready. I’m ready to be happy. Emily and I pre-gamed and watched Pippi Longstocking as we got nostalgic for A Little Princess. “Oh my god I loved that movie more than anything,” she said, “I think I’d cry if I watched it now.” And I said, “Dude, I was that girl. I daydreamed and made up stories all the time because the world felt so boring until I had time to rearrange it all inside my head.” Coincidentally, I said this as Pippi Longstocking punched the shit out of a dunce cap and, eventually, flew away from all her problems.
Later, at the bar, an acquaintance sat down next to me and asked, “How’ve you been Cat?” and with my social-filter worn thin by vodka I said, “You know. The standard. 100% indifferent to everything.” He said, “Same.” Then we giggled over Nihilist Arby’s tweets like: “Dildos, Arby’s, and the finality of death”, and “Your life will be forgotten, enjoy Arby’s”, and “Come to Arby’s and contemplate how old you’ve become”, and, finally, my personal favorite, “Pretend you’re not dying. There is no God, from Arby’s”. After that one, still laughing, I said, “What if that was how people capped off casual everyday statements? Like: Happy New Year, there is no God…Why is it so funny?! How did roast beef find nihilism?!” He laughs and I’m so glad he gets the joke. I’m so glad he’s got sleepy blue eyes that understand why I need this pillow-y dream called depression. I’m so glad that something about him reminds me of a Dalmatian Ty Beanie Baby…But—you can only be comfortably drunk and enjoying the company of a guy who actually appreciates you for so long before your vices sense your newfound fun and decide to disrupt everything via text:
Where are you?
The whole time I was thinking: Do not text back. It’s a trap. It’s always a trap.
But a knot in my gut—a reckless hope that maybe he was finally ready to be normal—had taken control of my thumbs and, suddenly, I’d started typing against my will: I’m at location A. Where are you?
Location B, he typed, About to go to location C. Who you with?
And drunk-me texted back, a little passive-aggressively: The world.
Which was a joke. Like, I was drunk—just being stupid. There was nothing to get. The whole conversation didn’t have to crumble because my drunk-self sent one text that didn’t make any sense…
What? He asked.
Do you want me to come to location C? I sent back.
Nope. He said.
And with that final ping-sounding rejection, I felt it coming. I was about to explode.
Why even text me? That’s idiotic. I sent.
And with every minute that went by without a response I was thinking: Be cool. Don’t explode. Do not explode. Be cool, be cool, be cool…But no, I violated the number one rule when communicating with unrequited crushes. I double, triple, quadruple, texted:
Why are you so mean to me?
What’s even the point?
*middle finger emoji*
☁︎
2016 started like this: I let forty-five minutes pass without an explanation, and during this time, I contemplated every awkward situation, every weird and confusing position, this guy has put me in. All the times he’s told me to do one thing, and then just as quickly said, Wait no, don’t. Literally. One time he texted me verbatim: Come over, I’m sleeping. Which is practically the equivalent of saying: Come over, I’m not home. Like, I don’t know what you want from me dude. You’re going to have to be a little more explicit. Or. Just. You know. Don’t contact me at all…
I recounted all the times I flat out asked him to just give it to me straight, to say something cut and dry, like: I just don’t like you that way. How he refused to do it, because surely, I was an ego boost that felt really good whenever he was alone—Why give that up if you don’t have to? I count the times I’ve told him, “If you don’t really want anything to do with me, seriously, just leave me alone.” Like, honestly. Don’t contact me. Please. I’m begging you: IGNORE ME HARDER. But he won’t. Instead he continues to ruin my fun, through his fucking cellphone.
How selfish. How calculated. How fucking mean. And I know you can’t control people. I know there’s nothing you can do to change them. But fuck, I thought, so what if he’s emotionally impenetrable, so what if it won’t change anything—It’ll feel so good—for me—to say what I think…
And suddenly, I had one resolution: Explode on this motherfucker.
I put it into action. I typed it all out:
I’m trying to figure out all the ways to tell you to fuck off, but seriously, fuck off. Do not talk to me. At all. For any reason. I don’t like you at all as a person, and you are exactly who I thought you were. So. Just leave me alone. Fuck off.
And the moment I hit send, I smiled like a maniac because: I was so relieved.
Don’t get me wrong; I was still miserable as fuck for the rest of the night. One poor guy almost got caught in the crossfire. He approached me, moments after the big send-off, saying, “You’re too beautiful to be so sad.” Which, lucky for him, my friend noticed my head spinning around like the exorcist and intervened before I got the chance to rip his face off. “No…that’s okay. We’re good,” she said.
Another person said, “Don’t worry, you’ll find someone.” And I know this consolation was supposed to be a nice gesture, but I couldn’t help but totally bristle at it. Because, like, I really couldn’t give a flying fuck whether or not I “find someone”. I just want evasive jerks to leave me alone. Or, you know, for someone to match my sincerity instead of taking advantage of it for a change. *resting bitch face*
I was relieved, but I was also exhausted.
All I wanted was to be alone…
And then I heard that un-holy ping of my phone. Apparently my “fuck off” explosion had provoked a response, the message said: Come to location C. Please.
“Is this a joke?”
I responded: No.
⭐︎
When I finally got home, I looked in the mirror and checked the symmetry of my face to make sure it was still there: Too beautiful to be so sad. I thought in response: Yeah, that’s what they all say: “Too beautiful, too beautiful…” What the fuck is my life? Am I Effy Stonem on a bad trip in the woods? Am I that sick in the head? That desperate? Startling the nearest “nice guy” awake by screaming, “Hit me! I want to feel something!”? Getting reprimanded like: “Too pretty for your own good, that’s why you destroy everything you touch”? Ugh. Fuck off. Quit bringing peoples’ faces into this. It doesn’t matter how beautiful you are, people still treat you like shit. You’re still always going to be enchanted by the one person who refuses to see you…
I crawled into bed, my makeup still on and already irritating my skin—but I didn’t care. My mind was finally shutting up and all I can remember is the last thing I heard, right before drifting off to sleep for the first time in 2016…All I remember hearing is Lana Del Rey’s sad-siren voice, brainwashing me: You’re my cult leader / I love you forever / I love you forever…
☁︎
I feel really out of control when it comes to pretty much everything in my life. Can’t you tell? Isn’t it obvious? Good. I’m over pretending. I’m over smiling and saying, “Have a nice day.” Because it’s not nice at all, it’s actually like this: There is no God. Enjoy your roast beef sandwich.
Just kidding.
Sort of.
I don’t know.
I’m just so sick of being treated like I’m light and silly.
Like I’m air:
Where’s a real worker?
Do you want to see me?
Nope.
Every single external aspect of me is a conscious effort to not be perceived as light and silly. Armor against my reality: I am naturally inclined to see you before me; one of those girls who says her pain’s a two when it’s actually a ten, because—I don’t want to discredit whatever level yours might be. In a word, I am Vulnerable. Extremely susceptible to the whims and charms of anyone who lacks a moral compass that only comes by being acutely self-aware.
Therefore I wear black to seem more intimidating—boots and high top sneakers to disrupt my obvious femininity. I try to be as thin as my health will allow because bone visibility implies that I am not afraid to go without: Hold me around the middle and comment on how small I am. See? I don’t want anything from you. You make no difference to me. I keep quiet in numbers—around anyone I don’t know intimately. Playing stoic is my go-to defense because the moment I open my mouth, I blush or I stutter. I apologize. I punctuate every statement with, “It’s stupid. I know it’s so stupid.” Everyone will find out that I’m scared shitless of what they think.
Ugh.
Constantly I’m wondering how I can think so much and still have nothing to say…still feel as if I have nothing to offer…
Yes. Parts of me are light and silly: I try not to take myself so seriously. I try to laugh everything off because: It’s okay. If it’s okay for me, then maybe it’ll be okay for you. And when I let go enough to reveal this part of me it means I trust you; it means I’m going to try my hardest to only see the best in you. But what you don’t seem to understand is that, my doing this is not an invitation to take me for granted; to rationalize my existence as being less real than your own. It’s not an invitation to trap me in a box marked “EASY”—to force me into something that is all yours for the taking and leaving…
I’m light and silly, but there’s depth to me too.
Quit trapping me in boxes…never mind, fuck it, I’ll do it to myself.
I have no control over anything.
Box me up.
☁︎
New Years Day: I met a self-described “mystical” gay man who could tell I had a tilted uterus just by looking into my eyes. (This is not a joke. I am not making this up. This happened. Nobody believes me! But this shit happened.) He looked at me and said, “Honey, you have a bad uterus.”
I quickly shielded my pelvis from his third eye, “Excuse me?! What?!” Which is actually a really polite response considering he was a bug-eyed stranger making bold statements about my reproductive system.
“You’re uterus,” he emphasized, keeping a straight face without losing the sass, “Is tilted.”
I glanced around the room to make sure no one was around to watch me take him seriously. “Are you psychic or something?” I asked, inching in closer, “Because—I do, I do have a tilted uterus.” (I know this because my gynecologist can never find it, which is awkward as fuck…)
“Yes,” he said, “I am.”
So matter of fact.
Like dude, you can’t just walk around telling women their uteruses suck! Control yourself! Unless, of course, the woman you’re talking to is me, in which case…
“Tell me more!”
I pulled up a stool and he made me look into his eyes, which, I know—I totally know—he was so fucking with me. He was totally going to speak in absolutes and trick me into believing that he was unraveling my “special” fate and not just some variation of everyone’s shitty reality; a series of verbal placebos…But I couldn’t help myself. I needed to feel as if I had some semblance of a grasp on my future—no matter how phony—and he knew it.
So.
Tell me more.
“The person you’ve been thinking about,” he said, “You don’t want him. You think you do, but you don’t.”
“Oh my god, I fucking hope not,” I said, a little too quickly, right before I consciously shut up. I reigned myself back in. I didn’t want to reveal too much by mistake; I wanted to test how good this guy was at his whole pseudo-psychic-messes-with-a-gullible-girl front. So I collected myself, “Good—I mean—I could have told you that. But good. I know I don’t want him.”
“But you do want him,” he said, rolling his eyes, “At least you think you do.”
“Well, I figured I’d just wait it out. So—so what? You can want something but also know you don’t really want it. I’m just waiting it out. Does it really matter if I ‘think’ I want him?”
“Yes because you think you can handle any man—you’re very tame in the sense that, when you’re done, you’re done…but him, you can’t handle. Trust me. You’re not going to see it coming…”
Um is it just me, or did shit just get dark?
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“You think you can tell what a lot of people are going to do before they do it, and most of the time you can. So you put your intuition on hold in favor of experiencing new things and understanding people who aren’t like you, but…you can’t do that with him. Trust your gut; everything you’ve been wondering about him is correct. If you want proof, you’re not dumb, do your research.”
When he said “do your research” he did that sassy dismissive thing, like snapping your fingers in someone’s face without actually making them snap. Then he took a very satisfied sip from his drink as if life were a meme and he was Kermit, drinking Truth Tea: That guy you crushin’ on is Satan…it’s none of my business though…
“You’re going to have to be more specific,” I said, “Like…what is it that I’ve been wondering about him that’s true?”
“That…” He took a minute to gaze into my “soul” before he continued, “He has a lot of rage, and…” he trailed off as if he were trying to think of the right word, but then he just kind of settled. With the energy of a deflating balloon he finished his thought, “Sadness.”
Vague. But. Okay.
“Yeah, well, everyone has their shit,” I said, trying not to make eye contact.
“But you don’t!” He said, “You see and appreciate more than a lot of people; you have depth but you’re not angry about it…he’s not what you want. It makes sense that you’d want to lose yourself in an opposite, but, at the same time, you’re good and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
My eyes averted like: Who is this strange man sipping Grey Goose and spewing deep truths in downtown Jamestown? Like: No. Go home. You are fucking with me. Why does this always happen? Why am I so receptive and gullible? Now I’m going to analyze this conversation for days. I’m going to wonder, on and on; all because some guy took a chance and used a statistic he found on Google—Fun fact: 30% of women have tilted uteruses—to his advantage. I’m going to keep asking myself over and over: Why do my feelings never match up with what I think or what I want?
My eyes moved to the floor, I didn’t want to give away my obvious state of confliction, that I’d heard some truth in what he’d said. I was about to say: Thank you for confirming that I’m as out of control of my own life as I think I am—Happy New Year.
But before I could, he changed the whole game. He quickly added, “It’s your choice though. Everything’s your choice.”
☁︎
After that whole weird exchange, I kept contemplating clichés about lightness and darkness: You can put the light in the dark but you can’t put the dark in the light. I typed out melodramatic prose with the notepad on my iPhone: “Being with you is like being trapped in a dark box; I don’t know whether left is right or right is left. I can’t climb my way out; there are four walls and nothing to grab onto; there’s nothing to look at and there’s no easy way out. All I can do is keep clawing at the first wall I make contact with, keep clawing until shit gets so worn out that something’s either got to give or…”
I gave up typing.
I didn’t know who or what I was writing about and that’s the whole problem. It’s the inverse of “like a moth to a flame”—How do I describe it? Does that image exist? It’s not the light—some concrete thing—that I’m being drawn to. It’s the dark-nothing I’m being forced into. The best image I can come up with is a black hole, or a sinkhole. Just, everything suddenly caving in beneath my feet; slipping into dark other-worlds and cutting real-life like cutting college classes; some real soul-sucking loopholes: Alcohol? The evasive jerk of the week? The four collaged walls of my childhood bedroom?
I don’t know what I want.
This is always when the trouble starts.
When I don’t know what I want, I start setting my mind’s phasers to: SELF-DESTRUCT. When there’s nothing to want, nothing real to be drawn to, I allow myself to get all sucked up in the exact opposite of what I need. I make prisons out of people and places and things. Like, I must be wildly unhappy with myself. Otherwise I wouldn’t be so complacent with being forced into this thing that’s not even a thing. But, god, it’s so G.D. comfortable at the bottom of a sinkhole where there’s nothing to lose; where everything’s always going deeper and deeper, and getting darker and darker, and you can pretend the whole world’s in your orbit. Where dreams can circle round your head and you don’t have to sacrifice any of them because—they’re not tangible. You haven’t even tried traveling to them yet. You can put the light in the dark but you can’t put the dark in the light: Fuck, I love the dark so much. I could quietly burn away in it forever, until natural causes snuffed me out…
But.
I don’t want to live a life like that!
Not really!
I don’t want to be boxed away forever!
I’ve got to claw my way out. But knowing this doesn’t change the fact that getting out is going to be painful as hell. It doesn’t change the fact that whatever’s on the other side might not be any better than all the nothing I’m leaving behind…
“It’s your choice…everything’s your choice.”
Goddam you, Psychic!!! I was so happy being indifferent and engaging in 0 self-reflection before you guessed the correct position of my uterus.
See, I forget all the time that we can change—that we have some control over our futures. I forget that it’s easy to point at some trite list of misfortunes and say, This is why I can’t do A, B, C, D… It’s easy to do that, and it’s hard to actually bite the bullet, to wake up and do things that might actually make a difference.
All the time I hear myself saying: I can’t leave this place that I hate, filled with people I don’t respect, where I don’t fit in, because I’m over my head in student debt and I’m poor. I say: I’ll never get paid to write what I want because I’m not affluent, so, who would want me? What grad school, what publisher, what credible platform with any real literary pull, would ever want borderline anonymous Catherine Olson from Jamestown, New York? Sounds like a liability. I’d rather drive in circles. I’d rather keep singing along: “It’s so easy in this blue where everything is good…”
I know the resolution’s simple.
We can change.
It’s our choice.
But…
But what?!
What do I want?
☁︎
01/07/2016: I really suck at writing endings lately because the first ending I wrote for this post read like a fucking sitcom—which just isn’t me. See, I don’t believe in fate, but I’d like to say, “everything happens for a reason”, and “I feel so lucky to have a heart that can be broken”, and “my resolution is to finally start wanting what’s good for me” but—that would just be one long string of bullshit, and I wouldn’t feel good writing any of it.
Some stuff happens and it’s just shitty for no reason. Actually, all bad things that happen are absolutely pointless and accidental; a sick joke. Or, in another sick twisted way, they’re not accidental at all. Sometimes you stick your toe in a sinkhole that you totally saw coming and say, “Whoopsi!” as you fall. Like you weren’t totally planning to make a cozy prison out of the bottom, like you weren’t totally waiting for some opportune trauma to come along and distract you from figuring out what’s actually hurting you and holding you back in the first place.
And what’s holding me back?
The fact that I love this rundown place that is my home: I love these roads where the houses don’t change. I love how the other night I was at a college-kid apartment with a drawer full of plastic forks. How we ate Kraft mac ‘n cheese mixed with pepper jack and drank peach whiskey straight from the bottle as my could-have-been high school sweetheart swatted at an overhanging wire like a giant kitten. How water-damaged joker cards littered the coffee table like an ill-fated tarot reading. How all the guys here have dirt or oil beneath their fingernails, how they’re all masculine to the point of toxicity; callous rage-filled types who drive big trucks and think I’m pretty but will never be well-read enough to love me back. How easy it is to be detached here, how easy it is because real life is always happening elsewhere, how this makes us all act frozen and manifests a kind of grittiness that we can’t seem to wash off no matter where we go. How it makes me feel like I’m trapped in a frayed box that was used and kicked to the curb by the real world one too many times…
My cozy dark prison is my home and I know it’s never going to love me back. All the potholes—the dead hard ground—the kitchen floors boasting detritus…none of it’s ever going to love me back, because, it’s fucking detritus—it can’t feel for shit. But god, these ordinary things break my heart in a way that leaves me nuzzling them at all of the rough spots. This place is mental illness and I’m nothing but a lovesick bitch for it, consciously avoiding it and telling it to fuck off a thousand times over. Always running right back to it the moment it starts calling at three in the morning…
Come over, I’m dreaming.
I guess my resolution is to never stop taking the ugly—painfully ordinary—things that happen to me and turning them into something meaningful, to never stop rearranging them in a way that looks beautiful and worthwhile. To never stop making sense of this life that I believe is utterly senseless; a big dumb joke in which I just roll with the punches and mock everything in a way that only a poet can…
As for what I want? I’d like to say that I want to start wanting what’s good for me. But. What’s good for me? I can’t tell. I just know I want 2016 to be a year of actually doing something—no more dreaming! I want 2016 to be a year of saying, “fuck off” to this place for the last time, and then, maybe, finally, actually, clawing my way out…
WAYWARD PIGGY 