I remember the day that we walked forever… There are photos of us between the massive western trees, and the green vines on the stairs, and of our shoes sinking into the always soft pacific soil. My favorite one is the one his mother took when we weren’t looking. All those moments, they looked so different while they played out.

I remember we were both so tired. He was in between auditions, and we were weary from the plane, both between sickness that progressively got worse. Little did I know I would take mononucleosis home from that sleepy state. The two of us wandered alone in a place that I did not know, I trusted my indifference to give me some appreciation for the little things as well as the person beside me.

I have never known such beauty. In surroundings, and in scents and feelings, it put the fear of god into me, walking down the sidewalk when no one looks at you…

We walked through the city. The streets reflected headlights back at me, the light was bent and smeared across the pavement by famous February rain.

We held hands, but we didn’t say anything. There was too much to say. Always too much on our minds and too much in our hearts, we communicated better through silence. It was too delicate otherwise. The bottoms of our jeans were wet, and it was getting dark, and the city was cold, our feet were cold, and our together-hands were cold, but we couldn’t care about the temperature of anything.

Looking at a butterfly and trying to recognize it as a separate being… but it’s never really felt that way. I have to concentrate. Is anything really separate at all?

Today I watched Into the Wild and it really made me think. It’s an illusion, the idea of money and power and status. It’s all a lie that we are manufactured to believe in and I know this. Aside from all this obvious noise it makes me wonder what I, personally, am going to do. The best stories don’t come from carrying out the lives that have been planned for us. They come from a lust for new experience and indulging in our most basic human qualities and desires. And that is the kind of story I want to have. Special, and philosophically sound, and above all, human.

I feel like the opportunities that once existed allowing people to safely stray from normal life are vanishing. Do I want to succumb to the pattern? I feel most of the time like I don’t have a choice. I’m so driven by this backwards rebellion against my family’s indifference, but I can’t help but be disturbed by all of it. Everything has a price. That is what I thought when Alex dies alone in Alaska with next to holy knowledge but no one to share it with. It’s what I think about when I watch people squirm in their regret for not taking bigger risks, bolder paths… I’m going to choose my life too, but at what cost?

I have been using paper in scattered places but I’ve still been writing. I wish I could keep it all in one place. Lots going on! Calvin and I hooked up for the first time a few days ago. I suppose that is worth writing down. Been feeling pretty good. I feel very calm and clear, also like I have done a lot of growing up. Slightly less sensitive, the world is not going to soften itself to me if I sit around and mope and I realize that. Seattle was incredible, it was like a dream and I’m considering going to college there. We spent a lot of time just walking around the city and experiencing it and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I recently went to San Diego with my choir and I loved California. I feel an intense pull to the West Coast. I’m applying to several places and ideally will move there in just over a year!!! I’m so ready for the future to punch me in the face!!! I’m going to maybe copy down some things into this notebook from another, just because I want them here.

Nothing causes me as much unrest as locked doors

In my life that have no keys.

My love has become a silhouette.

I wish I could feel/have felt the shape of the dark things that swim in your head that build and escape as cruelty.

I wish I could sew/have sewn my shadow to yours and fill/have filled you with light

And break/have broken the walls that seem so impervious to love.

I’m sorry for my vacancy.

I’m sorry for the disappointment that swept over your life when your infatuation with me burnt out as quickly as it sparked. I’m sorry

That I could not be less volatile. I’m sorry but I don’t know why.

Last night I was killed by my curiosity. It had been following me for quite some time. It had been raising the hair on the back of my neck when I was left alone, it stirred and burned and twisted me up, it ignited me and filled me with a lust for knowing. My curiosity lured me in and I couldn’t resist it, I couldn’t turn away, so regrettably desired, some consolation for my doubt. God only knows why I wanted to find it, but I gave in.  

Sometimes I feel like my heart breaks every night. When I am alone I can hear the sound. I always try too fucking hard. Everything that comes out of me is a product of some bloody fight. How humiliating it is to need someone who doesn’t need you. I have never been helpless. I have never felt weak and stripped of dignity until I’ve felt this. And of course in the midst of love bordering on sacrifice, I am still trying to repair my pride. I am still committed to preservation. Or maybe not. Maybe I am as selfless, as without self,  as I feel in the thick of pain, when he tells me that it has gone away, and when he says that he’s bored of me, like I am some toy after all. It is possible that the spot in my core that feels hollow where it once felt whole, in the days of barefoot childhood, is where my ‘self’ once lived. But now it’s died.

How can a heart break if it isn’t there? Sometimes I feel the ghost of it flutter when an old friend brings chai tea to me on a night when the paint is peeling off the walls in my chest, but did I ever feel anything at all if it is gone a moment later?

Everything that I know about myself ends with a question mark. It makes me want to fall to the ground and with two fists full of earth and two lungs full of air I want to shout LET ME BE ENOUGH, let me be enough, for him, for me, for the moments at the end of my life– but it would be wasted breath, a waste of earth and energy. I have so much growing up to do, and yet my youth died a long time ago.

It’s embarrassing to me the way that I pour everything into love. It is the beginning and the end for me, and each thing in between. It’s the only thing I have let consume me entirely. I let it consume me unconditionally. Love fills up my notebooks. It’s all the rage, the only thing I can ever seem to write about. It is a perfect investment. It is a perfect sacrifice. And yet there is so much dark in me and I’m not sure that I believe in love at all. Everything can be explained by self interest, and I can never truly trust myself, and I will never truly trust anyone else.

It’s April but the snow keeps falling. I’m sure you’ve noticed

how late spring is, you’re always noticing when things are too late,

even when spring never comes before May, even when

it’s the absolute perfect time, I am perfectly ripe

my heart is soft and I am sweet, just for you.

I remember the fall, too. I know that things have changed,

but things can never stay the same, so please don’t sit inside

while the sun is shining, you are always waiting for rain.

Everyone is trying to hurt me

or maybe I’m just sensitive.

Life is an open wound and I’m a bruise that the other kids at school are curious about.

Everyone that I have ever let into me has turned quickly into salt

but I was just reminded that nothing is important

and sometimes I can hear my dog barking even though she died when I was fifteen.

Depending on the weather or what I wear that day, I feel sort of different like there’s new skin where the old skin was, and I don’t care about the same things, and sometimes I’m crying, and sometimes I’m laughing. Mostly I feel despondent. Or maybe I just feel despondent right now, and just can’t remember ever feeling different. I can’t remember ever feeling different.

I’ve been listening to Conor Oberst’s older music and I listen to the stuff he wrote when he was not much older than me and it makes me feel so many different things. It makes me sad, because of his sad words, and it makes me feel happy and calm and justified because someone great feels the same way that I do, and it makes me feel so jealous and inadequate, because I can’t articulate the way that I feel, and even if I could get it out somehow, it would never be beautiful or even make sense at all. And since I can’t be Conor Oberst, or anyone with some originality or merit, I don’t know what else to do with myself but to wither here in the seasons that keep going, or to simply go to sleep…

Knowing all the things I’ll never be is the only certainty I have. The rest is uncertain, what I will be and it’s so hard to bear sometimes and I just want to be special sometimes.

But I guess that’s probably my problem, everything that I do is for self-reflection. I should stop thinking about myself so much. Even the person that I love thinks so and that’s where I should be selfless. He always has to do it right and sometimes I wonder why because I don’t think he could do it wrong even if he tried. I guess that must be what love is. He can take it with him from now on, no matter where he goes.