Post by Glitter&Debris on Jan 7, 2010 1:01:12 GMT -5
Sometimes I look back on my descriptions of past events and cringe at their eloquent dramatization of my life. The complete truth is that there is no complete truth: my life is just a series of vague instances strung together by metaphor and cheerily colored coca cola cans. At this moment, the narration formed under my fingertips is too thick for me to read without feeling the soggy slumber of nostalgia dampening the noise around me and strangling the life from my throat. I imagine that a fondness for something that will never again occur is very much like drowning, the lump at the back of your throat and the glassy, unblinking eyes searching for the surface. Once again, I've been pulled underwater by the tangling tentacles of circumstance, writhing as air bubbles dance toward the surface like souls of the deceased scrambling for a heaven or a hell. This cycle of repeated revision of events underwater leads me to believe that time is circular, and I'm stuck in the same orbit around the human condition once more. Perhaps the most illogical quality of people is our misconception that "this time it will be different".
This particular arc of time started with a painting. When I sloshed my brush through a swirl of violet and blue, I thought nothing of what I was going to paint, only how I felt. For once, the bristles of my brush obeyed my emotions, curling color into the crescent cuticle of a wavering moon that at the same time was nothing but abstraction. As the composition sprouted from the pooled paint puddling on the rim of my easel, I realized I wasn't thinking about the moon's reflection ascending from the surface, or the rolling emerald green of amazonian leaves cascading into the water, or the way viridian hue, pthalo blue, and violet melt together into an inky indigo bottom of the sea. I was thinking about my best friend, the boy with the frailty of a plastic butter knife and words like a seven inch silver switchblade right through consciousness.
His eyes weren't robin's egg blue, or the color of a swimming pool, or the breaks in a soft november sky. Instead, they were the first melting layer of a glacier as the sun deconstructed it molecule by molecule. His clothes draped black over his frame the way oceans of industry sprout from Norwegian snow: a contrast so deep it pulls the picture into focus. The spark behind his words ignited so forcefully that one thought could tear his ventricles apart, but instead is released through vibrant motions and mannerisms. The thoughts extend through his skull on golden locks, though he frets about their flaxen flow.
The strokes on canvas were a revelation, rapidly turned revolution. Up until that moment, the accumulation of my life's confidence was a puppy's timid whimper as it faced the first step of a towering stairway. I was overtaken by the miraculous connection if mind and paper. By adhering my subconscious thoughts to a tangible form, I made a leap in realization that this particular person meant more to me than any living thing on earth. Our parallel philosophies had always been our rose colored glasses, even when we didn't fully agree. It was always good enough that we could talk all night until rays of light threw themselves over the sky. The spectrum of our biases overlapping felt like tapping into a unity never before reached. It's seldom that one ever finds friends like that.
It soon became apparent that even the best of friends can disappoint. The next day, as sun spilled through breaks in the overhang in the hallway, the bitter taste of being too late engulfed my existence. Overnight, at the same time we had discussed the implications of time and forgiveness, the trouble with self image, he had asked out a girl who defied everything I knew him to stand for. The nuisance of high school relationships had always irked me, though I must admit I've always been somewhat tinged with jealousy. A relationship seemed like a barricade the beautiful put up around themselves, which I had always rejected. Still, after a childhood of being told I was going to marry a prince and live happily ever after, some things clung like barnacles to my brain.
So there we were, the betrayed and the beautiful, just waiting for something to happen. At that moment and still, I wanted to leave. I had started to feel very much like a pair of rickety rusting training wheels that had fulfilled their purpose and were off to the junkyard. The bubbling of her giggles practically inflated his head like a bowl of yeasted dough, and I could barely stand to hear it. The terrible thing about realizing how much you value someone is that you can't take it back, no matter what. So there I was, hoping there was still a part of him left inside.
Things went unsaid. I found myself wishing I hadn't found myself in such a situation, where I fell depraved and desperate for someone to talk to. Our friendship didn't fade, but the meaning of it did. I remember the clouds carrying burdens of warm grey, rolling over the rocky hills as we walked the street, sun setting behind the congregation of condensation. It was that day when he started to complain about her intellectual faults, her rip-off personality, and her blandness. There was a problem there, something distinctly vile that crept through my chest as he said those words. I must admit I fueled the sparks, letting him complain about her to me until he realized she wasn't the one for him. Only, he never did. He said all those things about her, but in the end it didn't mean a thing.
He had me reeling with confusion. The dissection of her incomplexities only made me feel worse about myself. He made it sound like he had just settled for her, like here was no one else in the world. I was not an option. When I asked him why he continued, he would say something about how she still means a lot to him or how her obsession was endearing. I was always wondering if that was truth or justification. In reality, all I cared about was his happiness. If he had acted happy, I would have been happy for him, wouldn't have cared about the fact that I had feelings for him. Underneath it all, we were still best friends. However, every time he shared his hatred for her I felt helplessly inadequate, that he would stay with this girl forever just to disregard my affections.
There's a part of me now that believes that some general occurrences have to do with growing up happen to everyone, no matter how fervently they avoid it. After a certain point I decided that nobody meant what they said and in the end everyone's just going to end up rotting in the same cemetery, regardless of if they were a successful businessman or a lonely bum. They still see the same sky, the same stars. The only difference is that the businessman looks up at it from a yacht with a flute of champagne in his hand and the bum sees it over the edge of a cardboard box clutching his sides in unrelenting hunger. The differences don't change the general sequences of life. Maybe the businessman fell in love once with his high school sweetheart, moved in with her, and announced their engagement at an office Christmas party. Maybe the homeless man fell in love once with a lady at the soup kitchen or a stranger passing by. Then the woman with the ladle fills in her community service hours and leaves, never to think of the bums again. The businessman sees his wife in a window across the street and spends the night sitting at the foot of his big empty bed, crying. Both realities are the same, to some extent.
So when I tried to separate myself as a monk of sorts to art and literature, I shouldn't have been so foolish as to assume it would immunize me from the occurrence of everyday human events. I spent my days lurking the perimeters of rooms like a feminine Holden Caulfield, observing "Everyone in this room, except me..." with the arrogant mantra of "I am an artist". Of all these things that occur at least once in life, love and heartbreak are two of them. And over a year or so I thought my new personality was immune, which in itself was a weakness. And all of a sudden my best friend and I are talking in the light December drizzle, and he's saying how fake his girlfriend is and now conversations with her consist of him shedding his heart out and her laughing unaware that he's serious. Then the wetness of my eyes started to match the weather, and I tilted my head upward to try to disguise the weakness with the rain. He kept talking, and writhing in my chest was the beginning of a new persona, a new life, one that was crying out, "I don't want to be like Holden Caulfield anymore."
"Just stop it, okay?" The rain was starting to come down harder, the drops falling fat and straight down like tears of an infant. He looked at me with the most confounded expression, as if I'd just asked him to go swim in the expanding lakes of gutters. "All I want is for you to be happy, you know that? I don't care who with or when or why, just that you're happy. I don't think you see the damage this is doing to all of us. Don't say nobody cares about you, because I do. And it would be okay for me if you even just pretended you stayed with her because you liked her. Don't you see that? Out of everyone in the word, you're my favorite," Inside my throat I was dodging words like "like" or "love" like meteorites hurtling into the earth around me.
"You know I like you to." he said slowly. The word "like" in the very first sentence, another teenage cliché of my life dancing through my brain tauntingly. "And I don't want to hurt you. She and I like each other too, though. And I know, it kind of plunges you into a state of semi-significance,"
Semi-significant. Though I knew he was talking about my life in relation to him, it felt like it summed up my whole world. Semi-significant. Like how people listen to what I say but don't follow my advice, or how I'm always considered in a decision, but am always excluded. Semi-significant. It didn't sound as negative to me as it should have. When you think about it, why would you want to be significant most of the time? Everything is so convoluted in a pitiful, minute way. I wouldn't exactly be first in like to tie my name to it.
But the rain never stopped pouring and the greater of what we wanted to say went unsaid. The tip of the glacier of our conversation disintegrated into the color of his eyes. My shoes became one with the ground as the rain slipped up through tears in rubber and canvas. There were a lot more words, but I can't quite recall them. They all washed down through the gutters with the rain and the mud, never to be whispered again. Like a smoke bomb, our pitiful agreement on the circumstances obscured every other event from my mind. I could only write in vague abstractions, spilling the sound of color over red notebooks. My hands became the instigators of nonsensical realities, worlds where people were made of canvas skin and blood of paint and eyes of jewels. My words were unreal, but at the same time, the only thing that mattered.
I haven't sleep for two days, and at this moment I find myself tilting to one side as if slumber is dragging me downward with it. I feel I've spent myself on the abstracticism and crypticism that people have come to identify me with. I used to say that the problem was that I lived in the future, he lived in the past, and we were both stuck in the present. Now that I try to imagine the future, I realize how idealized it has become for me. I can imagine us walking the streets of Seattle where the air is crisp with cold, fused with the sting of pine and the warm familiarity of coffee. I don't see it happening though, walks and conversations through the night, because I've come to realize that he'd rather have a light bulb in his pocket than a lit match on his fingertips.
This particular arc of time started with a painting. When I sloshed my brush through a swirl of violet and blue, I thought nothing of what I was going to paint, only how I felt. For once, the bristles of my brush obeyed my emotions, curling color into the crescent cuticle of a wavering moon that at the same time was nothing but abstraction. As the composition sprouted from the pooled paint puddling on the rim of my easel, I realized I wasn't thinking about the moon's reflection ascending from the surface, or the rolling emerald green of amazonian leaves cascading into the water, or the way viridian hue, pthalo blue, and violet melt together into an inky indigo bottom of the sea. I was thinking about my best friend, the boy with the frailty of a plastic butter knife and words like a seven inch silver switchblade right through consciousness.
His eyes weren't robin's egg blue, or the color of a swimming pool, or the breaks in a soft november sky. Instead, they were the first melting layer of a glacier as the sun deconstructed it molecule by molecule. His clothes draped black over his frame the way oceans of industry sprout from Norwegian snow: a contrast so deep it pulls the picture into focus. The spark behind his words ignited so forcefully that one thought could tear his ventricles apart, but instead is released through vibrant motions and mannerisms. The thoughts extend through his skull on golden locks, though he frets about their flaxen flow.
The strokes on canvas were a revelation, rapidly turned revolution. Up until that moment, the accumulation of my life's confidence was a puppy's timid whimper as it faced the first step of a towering stairway. I was overtaken by the miraculous connection if mind and paper. By adhering my subconscious thoughts to a tangible form, I made a leap in realization that this particular person meant more to me than any living thing on earth. Our parallel philosophies had always been our rose colored glasses, even when we didn't fully agree. It was always good enough that we could talk all night until rays of light threw themselves over the sky. The spectrum of our biases overlapping felt like tapping into a unity never before reached. It's seldom that one ever finds friends like that.
It soon became apparent that even the best of friends can disappoint. The next day, as sun spilled through breaks in the overhang in the hallway, the bitter taste of being too late engulfed my existence. Overnight, at the same time we had discussed the implications of time and forgiveness, the trouble with self image, he had asked out a girl who defied everything I knew him to stand for. The nuisance of high school relationships had always irked me, though I must admit I've always been somewhat tinged with jealousy. A relationship seemed like a barricade the beautiful put up around themselves, which I had always rejected. Still, after a childhood of being told I was going to marry a prince and live happily ever after, some things clung like barnacles to my brain.
So there we were, the betrayed and the beautiful, just waiting for something to happen. At that moment and still, I wanted to leave. I had started to feel very much like a pair of rickety rusting training wheels that had fulfilled their purpose and were off to the junkyard. The bubbling of her giggles practically inflated his head like a bowl of yeasted dough, and I could barely stand to hear it. The terrible thing about realizing how much you value someone is that you can't take it back, no matter what. So there I was, hoping there was still a part of him left inside.
Things went unsaid. I found myself wishing I hadn't found myself in such a situation, where I fell depraved and desperate for someone to talk to. Our friendship didn't fade, but the meaning of it did. I remember the clouds carrying burdens of warm grey, rolling over the rocky hills as we walked the street, sun setting behind the congregation of condensation. It was that day when he started to complain about her intellectual faults, her rip-off personality, and her blandness. There was a problem there, something distinctly vile that crept through my chest as he said those words. I must admit I fueled the sparks, letting him complain about her to me until he realized she wasn't the one for him. Only, he never did. He said all those things about her, but in the end it didn't mean a thing.
He had me reeling with confusion. The dissection of her incomplexities only made me feel worse about myself. He made it sound like he had just settled for her, like here was no one else in the world. I was not an option. When I asked him why he continued, he would say something about how she still means a lot to him or how her obsession was endearing. I was always wondering if that was truth or justification. In reality, all I cared about was his happiness. If he had acted happy, I would have been happy for him, wouldn't have cared about the fact that I had feelings for him. Underneath it all, we were still best friends. However, every time he shared his hatred for her I felt helplessly inadequate, that he would stay with this girl forever just to disregard my affections.
There's a part of me now that believes that some general occurrences have to do with growing up happen to everyone, no matter how fervently they avoid it. After a certain point I decided that nobody meant what they said and in the end everyone's just going to end up rotting in the same cemetery, regardless of if they were a successful businessman or a lonely bum. They still see the same sky, the same stars. The only difference is that the businessman looks up at it from a yacht with a flute of champagne in his hand and the bum sees it over the edge of a cardboard box clutching his sides in unrelenting hunger. The differences don't change the general sequences of life. Maybe the businessman fell in love once with his high school sweetheart, moved in with her, and announced their engagement at an office Christmas party. Maybe the homeless man fell in love once with a lady at the soup kitchen or a stranger passing by. Then the woman with the ladle fills in her community service hours and leaves, never to think of the bums again. The businessman sees his wife in a window across the street and spends the night sitting at the foot of his big empty bed, crying. Both realities are the same, to some extent.
So when I tried to separate myself as a monk of sorts to art and literature, I shouldn't have been so foolish as to assume it would immunize me from the occurrence of everyday human events. I spent my days lurking the perimeters of rooms like a feminine Holden Caulfield, observing "Everyone in this room, except me..." with the arrogant mantra of "I am an artist". Of all these things that occur at least once in life, love and heartbreak are two of them. And over a year or so I thought my new personality was immune, which in itself was a weakness. And all of a sudden my best friend and I are talking in the light December drizzle, and he's saying how fake his girlfriend is and now conversations with her consist of him shedding his heart out and her laughing unaware that he's serious. Then the wetness of my eyes started to match the weather, and I tilted my head upward to try to disguise the weakness with the rain. He kept talking, and writhing in my chest was the beginning of a new persona, a new life, one that was crying out, "I don't want to be like Holden Caulfield anymore."
"Just stop it, okay?" The rain was starting to come down harder, the drops falling fat and straight down like tears of an infant. He looked at me with the most confounded expression, as if I'd just asked him to go swim in the expanding lakes of gutters. "All I want is for you to be happy, you know that? I don't care who with or when or why, just that you're happy. I don't think you see the damage this is doing to all of us. Don't say nobody cares about you, because I do. And it would be okay for me if you even just pretended you stayed with her because you liked her. Don't you see that? Out of everyone in the word, you're my favorite," Inside my throat I was dodging words like "like" or "love" like meteorites hurtling into the earth around me.
"You know I like you to." he said slowly. The word "like" in the very first sentence, another teenage cliché of my life dancing through my brain tauntingly. "And I don't want to hurt you. She and I like each other too, though. And I know, it kind of plunges you into a state of semi-significance,"
Semi-significant. Though I knew he was talking about my life in relation to him, it felt like it summed up my whole world. Semi-significant. Like how people listen to what I say but don't follow my advice, or how I'm always considered in a decision, but am always excluded. Semi-significant. It didn't sound as negative to me as it should have. When you think about it, why would you want to be significant most of the time? Everything is so convoluted in a pitiful, minute way. I wouldn't exactly be first in like to tie my name to it.
But the rain never stopped pouring and the greater of what we wanted to say went unsaid. The tip of the glacier of our conversation disintegrated into the color of his eyes. My shoes became one with the ground as the rain slipped up through tears in rubber and canvas. There were a lot more words, but I can't quite recall them. They all washed down through the gutters with the rain and the mud, never to be whispered again. Like a smoke bomb, our pitiful agreement on the circumstances obscured every other event from my mind. I could only write in vague abstractions, spilling the sound of color over red notebooks. My hands became the instigators of nonsensical realities, worlds where people were made of canvas skin and blood of paint and eyes of jewels. My words were unreal, but at the same time, the only thing that mattered.
I haven't sleep for two days, and at this moment I find myself tilting to one side as if slumber is dragging me downward with it. I feel I've spent myself on the abstracticism and crypticism that people have come to identify me with. I used to say that the problem was that I lived in the future, he lived in the past, and we were both stuck in the present. Now that I try to imagine the future, I realize how idealized it has become for me. I can imagine us walking the streets of Seattle where the air is crisp with cold, fused with the sting of pine and the warm familiarity of coffee. I don't see it happening though, walks and conversations through the night, because I've come to realize that he'd rather have a light bulb in his pocket than a lit match on his fingertips.