Exams

I’m trying not to let exams dominate my life. I only have one coming up at this moment, my biochemistry exam. It’s making me freak out about everything in my life, not just the exam. I realized that I really need to calm down and think about what matters the most to me. And that is…doing well on exams!!

Not eating fresh-cut pineapples or killing the ladybug that’s flying around on the ceiling in my bedroom or reading that new book I bought or talking to an oldtime friend/ex-boyfriend or stop writing in my wordpress blog…that’s what matters. That’s what I’ll do…starting…now!

Simplicity

What had merely a discomforting incident been before has now become a world-class disaster.

I don’t know anymore what to do. I know that I have to go to school, attend classes, do my homework, and study for my quizzes and tests, but other than that I don’t know what to do.

I thought I had this passion about chemistry and dentistry, but obviously dentistry was a way for me to earn money to get my life going, and chemistry was just a way to get there.

What’s left for me? Do I have enough passion to graduate and attend art school to get another bachelor’s degree in art? Do I have enough time? Do I have enough money? But most importantly, do I have the patience? It’s not clear to me what I should do. But I know that if I keep on hesitating like this, my train of life will just keep trudging on the safest track. The safest track also seems like the most boring, the most uninspiring way that anyone could live their life. It won’t get me sidetracked, it won’t get me killed, and it won’t lead me to an insecure future—but it’ll have that flat taste of soda left out for too long. If I want the pop and sizzle, I can’t afford to be lazy.

It already appears to me that there is just one solution for all of my problems. If I started to organize my life, and really pursue—not just on the internet, or by telephone, but on foot with my nose poking into things—my interests, I’ll be a train off the rails, perhaps, bound to fall over even at the presence of a small twig in my path, but at least I won’t be doing anything that was already set out for me. Being my dream is going to be hard…

I wish my mind was that simple.

Busy Bus

Noelle got on the bus, and immediately she tripped over a foot carelessly left out in the aisle, but righted herself at the at the moment that made all this the least embarrassing. She managed, in a teeny voice, to quickly say ‘sorry’, but nobody answered her back with anything. She didn’t know how many seconds had passed when she suddenly found herself in a seat and under the scrutiny of several students sitting across from her. Noelle would rather close her eyes than let herself accept those non-blank stares. It was too much for her mind, which was only accustomed to being ignored and made invisible. Finding nothing else to think about in the blankness of her own eyelids, she played a game with her face. 

Noelle’s eyebrows arched down to the inner corners of her eyes, and arched back upwards a full ninety degrees before returning to indifferent horizontal lines. Her eyebrows were like her legs when she was standing up. Wobbly, unbalanced, and funny. They were also like her. Insignificant, unnoticed, and imperceptible. It was a single player game. She tried to imagine inside her head how funny it would be if the girl across from her taking up three seats with the plastic shopping bags encountered a woman who chose to sit on top of the bags instead of standing up. It would be like coming across her mother while she was kissing her boyfriend. Surprised, she would jump up and yell out one word, ‘Mother!’ while she would try to hide her boyfriend, or save the fruits inside the plastic bags, or…Nonsense. That could only happen if the woman was fat. 

Then, Noelle’s imagination flew her elsewhere, into a room full of people that she had seen on the bus. They all came up and said to her, ‘I’m sorry.’ But it drove her crazy whenever people said sorry to her and she didn’t know why. Ill-meant apologies were like tasting salty soup from the dining hall. They made her eyes squint and her lips wrinkle. Her eyes squinted and her lips wrinkled. She peeked out from under her eyelids, and carefully observed each eyeball and measured the crookedness of the corners of each mouth. Nobody stared or laughed. Noelle got back onto her flying imagination and put on a yellow dress. 

While she was up in the air, she flew over to a bee and said, ‘hello’, but the bee barely noticed her from being busy. (He was poking his nose in a flower’s business.) She thought it might be because she didn’t have any stripes, and so she tried to draw some onto her body with some paint…Nonsense. The bee would instantly recognize her, not as a bee, but as an intruder. Noelle felt a sting on her face and was thrown off her flying imagination. 

‘I’m sorry!’, cried a voice from the jumbled crowd standing before her, taking up every square inch of the aisle of the bus. Noelle looked up and saw someone frantically trying to turn around but failing to do so because of his foot-thick backpack, which had been the source of the sting. While the tall boy was pushed off the bus through the insistence of the crowd, Noelle finally recognized her surroundings and realized that this was her stop. She scrambled with her bag and took her steps purposefully, but was again able to trip over a plastic bag of the girl sitting across her that had been laid on the floor. Outside on the sidewalk, she cradled her red face with her fingers and started to walk to class.

Rejection

Professor Thomas says, “Was it the daughter who was rejecting the father? No, I think it was actually the father who was rejecting her.”

They weren’t rejecting me,

I’d been rejecting them.

First Person Singular

Can’t write in that anymore. If it’s implied, maybe. Like this is right now. But, for writing purposes…third person is easier.

She doesn’t have to think about anything. It’s not even her, really. She can say something and you’d never know if she’s talking about “I” or some other person who is also a female. She can lie, and it wouldn’t matter. Would it?

She thought that it would have been nice for her to have been born autistic. People might think of her in a disapproving way for thinking this. Well, they wouldn’t know anyway, if it was just a thought. But she thought this because then she would have an excuse for everything she did. An excuse for not being so bright and sharp. If everybody thought she was normal, then she didn’t have any excuses. She had to be normal and act normal or else they would think she was weird. She didn’t want to be weird. Was it weird to be autistic? No. It was just sad. There was some problem with you…some problem that you couldn’t be blamed for having. It was a chance happening that it had to be you. Then she could have said truthfully,

 It’s not my fault I can’t focus on that. It’s not my fault I’m not good at talking to people. It’s not my fault I can’t multitask.

She was weak. Weak for wanting to have an excuse for being weak. Weak for making up excuses and blaming things for her faults. When would she learn to speak up for herself? She could hear her mother in her head say, ‘Mouths were made for doing something. What are you gonna do with your mouth if not talk?’ She could never give her mother an answer to this rhetorical question, because she could never think fast enough to think of one. But written down…! She knew the answer to this question. There were a lot of other things you could do with your mouth besides talking. You could whistle (which she could not do), you could sing (which she could do), you could kiss (that she could do) and kiss and kiss and kiss…You could tell she was fond of kissing. (Well, that was a half-truth, because she did not like to kiss anyone on the mouth, especially if that person was kissing her back.)

Yet again

It wasn’t much comfort to her to believe that she wouldn’t ever get married, but it gave her some relief from the situation she was in at this moment. No, it was actually a great relief. She couldn’t do much about it but organize her thoughts. They wouldn’t listen to her. He wouldn’t change the way he was even if she said anything. She considered praying to God Almighty to let him in on her problem, then closed that thought away because she knew it wouldn’t make a difference unless she had the perserverence to pray and fast for a few years, which she didn’t have just yet. So it was more of a relief to believe that she wouldn’t pass his seed on by getting married. She wouldn’t risk ever creating another human being like him. She was like him. And that was enough. Wait… even if her brother wasn’t like him, would he have some kind of recessive gene that would create the chance that one of her brother’s children would still yet be like him? Was that possible? Maybe, maybe not. She wasn’t ready to complicate her thoughts that much.

She thought back upon the years that had passed by and decided that even though some things had changed, the biggest problems hadn’t. She was still a baby. She couldn’t and wouldn’t do anything about his behavior. He was still a baby. He drived everybody crazy trying to get his way. If he would just stop and think for a while, he would realize he was being unreasonable with everyone else. He wasn’t unreasonable when it came to himself. No, he wasn’t. Everything had to be so that it would be done his way. So that everything would match him. He couldn’t change his behavior to help other people, but others had to change what they did so that he could get his way. He yelled and shouted and broke plates and dishes and banged his hand on the table and yelled again. If he still didn’t get his way, he repeated everything all over again. Then, muttering some of the things he had yelled, he walked up the stairs to his room and lay down on his bed, reading his favorite book all the while having no need to convince himself that he had done anything out of line. His line was law. His words were law. The law was him, and he was law. No need to look anything up in the bible and maybe discover that “patience is a virtue” and “love forgives.” He knew that the bible was wrong. It was wrong because it was against him and thus, the law. No wonder those two clashed so much.

 She had once wondered why her mother never tried to get a divorce. She thought it would be enough to get a divorce, and like in the movies, her mother could probably even get the two children. With his disposition, nobody would ever trust anything in his hands. Not with what she had to say against him. She had lots of stories to tell, and to cry about. She thought, if she could only get these out to the public, nobody would ever think to trust him again. They would say, “he  messed up his life” and “he doesn’t deserve to have a family.” Even, “he’s a criminal and he’s messed up in his upper story.” Her mother wouldn’t fail at court. So she never knew why her mother didn’t even try. Why her mother didn’t even bring the word out of her mouth even once. But now she knew. Extraordinary, she thought. It was Him Almighty again. How amazing it was that the only thing holding her back could be…her religion. Have you ever thought about that? Did you ever realize that the only thing holding her back is something that you never care about? Something that you failed to believe? If you thought rationally, she was stupid. That much abuse and the only reason you can find not to leave him is the bible, His word? Does that even make sense? And yet, her mother knew. It was holding her up against her. The rational side of her brain was all gone. Eaten away by the bible.

I can’t do anything about it. I’m too small, I’m too weak, I’m too much of a coward. She can’t do anything about it either. But he can. He can torture her, he can abuse her, he can yell shout and scream at her. I can’t do anything, though. I’ve already given up. Can’t do anything. Thought about every possible solution. Can I call the police on him? Can I tell my Mom to divorce him and get it over with? I could have said I’d support her in anything. I could yell  at him. I could yell shout and scream at him but then what would I become. Just him again. Patience is a virtue. And love does forgive. I’ve been patient, and I forgave him. Well, maybe not just yet but I’d like to think I have.

A New Year’s Resolution

She came down to write about it, because there was no other way to let it out. She had thought she loved him, but why then had there been no pain? Why had she only cried once, and only for a few minutes? Was she really a cold-hearted bitch as he probably thought she was by now? She chided herself for using profanity, and started all over again. Why… She didn’t understand. Wouldn’t love leave some kind of wound, some kind of scar upon her heart that would never be fixed again? Wasn’t that how it was in love stories? Oh, but she had read about so many love stories in which the heroines always fell in love again. They had to. And she was counting on that. Oh yes, she was counting fiercely on that to happen; it must happen, or else she would have failed in life or something like that. Well, nowadays it wasn’t that much of a big deal, more people than ever before never got married and stayed single for the rest of their lives. It wasn’t accepted much, but it was done. But the problem was she didn’t want to live alone! She wasn’t one of those women who stayed single for the rest of their lives and liked it! She wanted to get married, and have children, and have a life like her mother’s on the surface if not alike in every detail. Oh, so why was it that she was thinking about him all over again, and making a big deal out of it? That was dangerous. To make a big deal out of something meant that it did mean a great big deal to her. To make a big deal out of something made it that way; it turned something false into something true. And here she was struggling to understand why her mind wouldn’t put him out for good if she never loved him and if she never had loved him why had she had sex with him and if she had never loved him why had she laughed in the shower with him and hugged him and kissed him and ate with him and bought that plane ticket… In the worldly way she wanted to think, no, correction, in the fictional world, in the books she had read about(although maybe other people did live that way for real) and thought about people did those things without ever loving someone. Just liking someone may have been enough for some women to do those things with a man. But with her? She wasn’t one of those people. Alas, she kept on writing lies! What was she thinking, trying to tell herself that she had never thought like one of those women? She had! In fact, she probably had wanted to become one except for the fact that she was religious and believed in God and thought that women shouldn’t have sex before they got married and even the characters in that one book she read were against the thought of having sex with someone before marriage, even if they couldn’t show it in their actions. Well, she was different. She had already begun changing herself. Change, that was the important thing. What she really wanted was change. She had held onto God and her religion as a way to get herself to change. Reading the bible everyday, praying everyday, trying to push lustful thoughts out of her head. (She couldn’t help but think of that cardboard placard that had the word ‘lust’ painted on it with harsh black paint, held by a boy wearing a costume pretending to be a devil, and the placard a ‘sin’ placed along with other lettered cardboards held up by students.) It was apparently wrong to be lustful…and here she was, getting up to write about lust because she couldn’t stop thinking about lust. Quite a predicament.

Oh, what was she going to do? Would she ever forget about him? Would she ever forget the way he made love to her; the stupid way he could never come and her always cutting him off at the most important moment without even knowing that she had. It was a little frustrating, she thought, but overall, she concluded, it was cute. The way she had thought everything else (well, most of everything else) was cute about him. She had thought she couldn’t forget about him because she loved him, but well, all the evidence was telling her that she hadn’t loved him. Why was that, she asked? They had got together in a common way on the bare bones of it; she was pained by a rejection from another man, and he had comforted her. On the whole of it, it wasn’t very common, though. Internet love? She had heard of such things but never thought she would be one to fall for it. Maybe that was why it hadn’t worked out. There were so many aspects of him that she hadn’t seen while she was talking to him online; aspects of him that bothered her and made her annoyed. First of all, he was a lot less stronger than he had seemed. She understood that a little, because she was, too. But what she hadn’t counted on was his tendency to act the baby. She wasn’t a mother, thank God for that. (She really did.) But every time he tried to act cute with her and pull on his baby face, she couldn’t stand it. She just wanted to push him away and take on a stronger man. Someone who would throw her on the bed and start kissing her all over, literally, all over. He obviously hadn’t been crazy in love enough to kiss her all over her body. He had never done it. He had only maybe kissed some choiciest places in order to get her crazy for him. Not anywhere that proved that he was a tender, but strong, man. And that she was a tender, fragile, woman. She wanted to be treated that way; not like she was jade but like she was porcelain. Every strong woman has a weakness inside her and she wanted him to find out her weakness. But all the while she had been with him she felt like she was mothering him. She was the one who made the choices. He couldn’t even choose anything. It just smothered her breath out of her. Yes, she was strong. Yes, she was more hard-headed possibly than any other average woman, but she was also weak. He didn’t understand that in her. Didn’t try to support her. No wonder she couldn’t think about marriage with him. No matter the other problems that she had always told him prevented them from ever being able to marry; that was probably the biggest problem. She didn’t feel secure. Didn’t feel like she was being protected. Would he ever sing a song for her in the possessive way not of a pet of an owner but of a husband of a wife? No. The truth…sad, but the truth…

She couldn’t go on lusting after memories she had of times with him. She couldn’t keep on thinking about those times. First of all, it was a sin. But more importantly to her, she was finished with him. She knew behind those happy wonderful memories were the sad ones, ones where she cried every night not understanding him and cursed herself knowing that she was in a relationship that would see a tragic grand finale, and soon. She couldn’t go back to him! No matter what. So what if she had loved him, it didn’t matter anymore. So what if she still loved him, that didn’t matter anymore either. She knew she was better off living with someone she didn’t love, if only that man loved her like she was his life. With this last thought in mind, she got ready to go back to sleep. The muscle pains in her side cramped and she was reminded that there were other things in this world to worry about besides love. Those other things would keep her occupied until, again, it was time to deal with the big thing. So long.