a collection of works

live more

[larpingasapoet]

I think a lot of people live their lives thinking that they are the exception to humanity. I reject this. I am the epitome of the human race. I am the way I am because of all of the people before me, and all of the people around me. I am everyone and anyone I will ever see or meet, bits and pieces that make up the me that I am. I am only what others have given me.

[larpingasapoet]

I am less concerned about who I am and far more concerned with what I am.

[larpingasapoet]

When I die

Bury me straight in the ground,

Roll me over and cover me in dirt.

Let the animals dig me up,

Tear my flesh and my meat,

Use it to grow their young.

And in this I will never die.

Let my carbon become their carbon,

My water become their water.

Let my calcium build their bones,

And in this I will continue to run,

Even after death.

[larpingasapoet]

how to make friends

[larpingasapoet]

It's 10:30pm on a Friday night. I am alone in the apartment, clothes that do not belong to me scattered around. A warm bowl of pasta sits on my legs, green specs of pesto and oil glimmering in the soft light. I am trying to work on this assignment, but I feel like the life has been sucked out of me. I feel soulless, like an empty shell of tarantula skin long after a molt, just dries legs and arms and hair everywhere. The worst part about chronic mental illness is the bit that's chronic. It never quite goes away, lingering under the surface for a quiet night when no one is able to pick up the phone. I used to cut myself. Some others do it for the pain, to feel punishment, as a form of hate for the self, the soul and the body. I am not like them. Even in this, I feel othered. For a while, it helped get rid of the pain, when it was a sharp ball of heat in my chest that I could never quite claw away with my fingers. I feel fundamentally misunderstood by the world and all the people in it, a circle in a square peg, an apple in a bowl of oranges. I am alien in my own skin and though I try to find familiarity in the scars I have made myself I find none.

[larpingasapoet]

Sonder

I consider myself to be a detached person. I think this surprises a lot of people. I am someone who wears my life on my sleeve. Everyone always knows every detail of my love life, my friendship drama, my trials and tribulations, which class I'm failing the hardest. My biggest deepest darkest secret is that I don't really care.

I don't really care about any of it. The drama, the boys, the C+ on my calc exam. It literally makes no difference in whether I wake up tomorrow or not. Make no mistake, I have a special zest for life. I approach many things with passion, and I'm often overexpressive for small situations. That is my little trick in making people think I care.

Don't get me wrong, I love my friends and the people I have chosen to surround myself by. For the most part, however, I have stopped feeling a large sense of attachment. If someone chooses to leave, so be it. I will wake up tomorrow morning regardless. A few years ago I discovered the art of cutting people off. For many, one wrong move and I will never speak to you again. For a rare few, I simply decide this person no longer serves a purpose in my life and the become one of the many unknown numbers texting me to ask why my instagram disappeared.

I don't hate these people. I actually wish them all the love and happiness and success in the world, I just have no desire to be a part of that. For most of my friends now, I think many of them will fade into faces of the past, and that's okay. I live on the mindset that I will wake up tomorrow regardless, and the further I fall into that mindset the further I fall away from reality.

I've always lived my life slightly detached. I'm always at least a little bit up in my own head. I live in a running film reel, with settings and characters, never people or places. One of the interesting things about living my life this way, slightly detached from reality and the people around me, is I forget that other people perceive me just as much as I perceive them.

In all honesty, I sometimes forget that other people are as real and complex as I am.

And in the same way, I forget that others see me as a real person.

While I'm the main character in my own film, in my mind I'm invisible to others. I often have the urge to disappear, and I take steps in my real life to disappear at least a little, and never have to feign shock when people actually want to know where I went.

I recently was talking to an acquaintance of mine- a friend? there's always a level of reciprocation from being a friend that I'm never sure the other person feels- who told me they had a dream about me, maybe a few. This surprised me. Not just surprised, really, but kinda blew me out of the water. I had never assumed I would be significant enough to dream about. And I said this, of course, because I wear my life and my thoughts on my sleeve, but I guess they took it as a "I don't really fw you enough to be having dreams about me." Which is not the case at all. While I don't necessarily see a future best friend relationship with this person, that mostly comes from my own views of not really being perceived by them whatsoever.

I think this person is one of the coolest people I know. I aspire to be this person. Or at least my perception of this person, because you can never truly know someone. I am just so detached from the concept of connection and knowing people that it didn't even occur to me.

I think. I think I think I think. I do a lot of thinking, but I don't do a whole lot of really feeling. In my journey to become a more positive person, I have almost entirely detached myself from the idea of sad or mad or bad. These are temporary fleeting emotions to me. But this means I have lost the ability to grieve. I no longer connect. I no longer care. Is detachment really what we want? Or are we looking for a careful balance of feeling a little too much of everything and mistaking it for feeling a little too little.

[larpingasapoet]

The day you died was one of those days that you describe to your coworkers as "the worst day of my life" while clocking in, and promptly forgetting all about it the moment you put your apron on.

It was of those days that was just cold enough to be uncomfortable, bur warm enough that a sweater would feel stifling. You stumbled in late, a little hungover from your night out and tripping on the shoelace you forgot to tie. You can still taste the beer on that guy's tongue. What was his name? Brandon? Brad? You couldn't quite remember, but it didn't matter. His number remained in the unsaved pile of other numbers in your phone.

Your shift was a mundane nightmare shift. A woman bumped into you, spilling her coffee all over the shirt you hadn't washed in two days anyways but the manager still made you change because you were dripping on the floor. The phone order app started updating and your mobile orders got backed up. Your coworker asked you to cover her during your break because she had an emergency, but you knew she was actually going to go smoke weed and have sex with her boyfriend in the parking lot.

After your shift you rolled a joint in the alley, fingers clumsily running over the paper. You savored the smoke as you inhaled it, head misting up as the drug filled your lungs. The bus was late. A slight sprinkle had started, but you didn't have your sweatshirt because it really hadn't been that cold. The cool drops raise goosebumps on your skin.

You cross the street. On the sidewalk, a dog barks. A shi-tzu, a few weeks old, wrapped in a pink blanket in an even pinker stroller. The scene was so ludicrous, you begin to laugh for one glittering, glimmering moment, and you forget about the shoelace and the phone orders and your manager and the coffee that dried sticky on your pant leg-

They didn't see the red light.

[larpingasapoet]

Anything can be an essay

an essay documenting my evolution of thinking

I think anything can be an essay if you really tried. An essay, in my humble opinion, is a writing dedicated to some topic, long enough to make a point or answer a meaningful question. An essay is a documentation of the process of thinking, and the reader evolves with the essay. Often when writing an essay we come in with one or a few thoughts, and need to put them together. Rarely does one ever have a full essay ready as they sit down to write. The essay evolves as the writer evolves. In every step of an essay, you are discovering your thoughts and feelings and opinions about this topic. Do you like this topic? Do you hate it? And then you discover the why, or the how. A documentation of thinking. For many, the inner monologue is a difficult thing to describe to others, and the essay is a way to put an inner monologue into writing. And then you ask others, hello! Read this essay that documents my thoughts! It is a form of human connection.

I think that formatted essays in school perhaps made the idea of essays not fun or engaging. The pressure of doing things for a grade makes it hard to associate it with joy or pleasure. For me at least, one of the things that took pleasure out of an essay was not being able to say "I think" or "I feel." I cannot quote myself. I cannot write an essay about myself. The first time I had to write an essay about myself since perhaps elementary school was in my examination to determine if I should skip my junior year of high school and graduate early. It took me by surprise, as I had been writing mla format argumentative essays since maybe sixth grade. I struggled a lot, because I wasn't used to ever having to write about myself without a source point. Since then, I have had to encounter the college and internship and scholarship essay nightmare: the personal statement.

I am definitely a person who loves to talk about myself. I definitely have a lot of I,I,I,me,me,me talking points, but I feel that I often don't actually reflect on my substance. Why do I do the things that I do? What challenges have I faced and how did I overcome them? How have those things affected how I think and act? I think these are all important questions that we often do not ask ourselves. Because we don't think about them, we often don't know the answer. Who are you? The personal statement forces you to answer these things, but under a time crunch and the pressure of someone judging whether your story is good enough or not. You can make personal statements in your own time. Answer these important questions for yourself, and often people do, usually those suburban moms who buy self-help journal prompts from Marshall's. I would argue that many of those journals are essays. Find the main point and slap a cohesive title on it and you've got a solid personal statement.

If I really wanted to make this a good essay, I would add some quotes. Maybe I'll come back in the future and rewrite this, with quotes and good research. I think we should all start rewriting our old essay prompts, and comparing how much our thinking has evolved. I need to start writing more essays. Start documenting your thoughts more.

If I was a really good writer I would have a good ending, but I'm not really there yet. I have never known how to end personal statements.

Bye I love you

[larpingasapoet]

There are no cigarettes

You taste like cigarettes sometimes. Except I guess it's not really cigarettes, it might be shitty rolling paper like the one I buy, because I know you smoke weed and not really cigarettes very often, and when I kissed you I said you tasted like cigarettes and you looked confused. I think run on sentences are elegant sometimes. When I think about you the memories of us are a run on sentence, so they're only right to be written.

Does that make any sense?

I feel like you were the only one who when I said does that make any sense? you were the only one who really understood.

I don't know how to write poetry.

I would fill a canvas with your essence if I could paint, but I don't know how to do that either, so I guess I'll just dump my thoughts here for a while. I didn't know a shitty joint could taste like the smell of a cigarette and the taste of one on you, but I guess it can. I wasn't a smoker then, so I didn't know anyways.

I always wanted to be a little more like you. You were so alive to me, and I could breathe again. I guess I'm more like you now, so wrapped in my addiction and wrapped around the way the smoke curls around the paper that I can't tell what's awake and what's asleep. Filling my mouth and my lungs and my head, and I can breathe again. Sometimes I wonder if someone kissed me I would taste like cigarettes too.