No Time To Think.

I'm wondering which is better; if its better to have been loved and then thrown away, or knowing you were trash the whole time. Never having a relationship, school-wise and even me-wise, seems to be working out just fine. It's just when someone comments on it, like, "Still no boyfriend?", it starts to tear. I feel like a good guy friend should be enough, but now I believe I am expecting too much. Every time I'm on the brink of the words that are so necessary to expel, I choke and hang up the phone. "Bad reception," I'll fake, soon I'll be staticing straight to black.
I wish I could come up with a point for this, but I don't think I have one, they're just the same as before. The constant debate, better off alone? And slowly it comes in to focus, maybe I'm just better off without the people who believe its necessary for me to live with or without another person. Some how that seems alot harder than just finding a damn boyfriend.

Bravery Never Came By Choice.

He told me on our first real date, after I explained that my, "brave, Navy father" was no longer around, "You are so brave." I almost wanted to cry and tell him prove it.
He really cared about me... and my sexual organs, but he did have a point, I had been brave, but never about things like this. I never asked to have a single mother, if anything I wanted a single father. The legal system doesn't work as fast as the cancer, and I had no option than to run the house at fourteen. And as I return from a trip to see once again, his physical exsitance is being cleansed of the home we shared, I wish the people here could say the same thing. "You are so brave, you don't need a male to detail what place you have in society."
It's the same situation as before, I need someone to tell me, "You are so good at what you do."
tobecontinued.

Pretty.

I hate the way that to guys I am only pretty. Yes for much of my high school, okay all of high school, I just wanted to be noticed for a second. Back then, no matter how conceited this is, I had a perfect body. 5'3", 110 pounds, abs, a good butt and yes a-cup breasts, but that's pretty damn good if you ask me. I still have a good body but not as perfect, and I'm okay with that, my future mate is gonna have to accept a lot worse things than that.
As usual, I had the whole boy with a girlfriend story rerun itself and when we got into a fight over how he should stay with his girlfriend because I am just a flat image to him, he proved me right. Never mind that this fight was over text messages during my mid-crit in design, which is when you get demoralized in front of your class or glorified. He asked, "I'm sorry, am I making you upset?" and I rudely responded, "I'm sure god could have meant for this to be a bad day with or with out you." (In truth it would have been a good day, I was glorified in my crit and nothing else really happened that would affect me, except for him.) And his reply still makes me angry now, "Smile, your pretty." "I'M PRETTY?!?! JUST PRETTY?!!? THERE IS NOTHING ELSE GOOD ABOUT ME?!?! So the next time I come over should I just smile and let you stare at me?" Not quite as catchy as, "Smile, your on candid camera!"
It fueled me through practice that day and it fuels me now. Well on that final crit, I did great. My professor requested that I fix some little details on my drawings and such so my project can be turned into the head of interior design. From there, they have a professional photographer take pictures of my project and put it on the School of Architecture website for my school. I've always wanted a guy to say to me, "You are so good at what you do and I am proud of you." And watch the family feminism enter the scene, everyone is looking for the trophy wife and not the sucessful one.

Pause.

I'm waiting for someone the drop their umbrella and jump puddles with me. There has been an amazing amount of opportunities as of late, none of them made good. I'm getting sick of the no longer societal, but a biological need to find a mate. At the same time I feel fine with out a specific connections. Everything I have always wanted, I found, just here and there in every hookup. I love the way he leaves me here, waking me slowly; I love the way he holds my hand without suffocating me. There is no way for me to accelerate this search for the one who holds all these qualities. I just now have the bravery that when some guy says, " well if we do it, I'll see if you I like you then," to respond, "lets see if you like it when I walk away."

In Words Profound or Less.

For a class I have to describe my lifestyle and for one of the few times in my life its very hard to come up with a delicate way to dance around the syllables. It's another one of my flaws, flaws that are seeming to add up to be more than I could ever amount to. I was hoping here I could channel the words to describe the answer I've been grasping for this last week, but it's seeming to be the same dull message that passes between my synapses this week every year. The week including my birthday seems to bring some sort of despair, and even though I am approaching my 19th time, the solution is still just as elusive. I guess I feel as though I'm faced with my own mortality. Still, nothing is perfect, and damnit, I want it to be perfect. With this year in particular, I assumed it would be all different and I changed it back with my nervous pace.
I am a happier, brighter, cuter version of myself, supposedly. I still get angry at the same things, I'm starting to get nervous again, and I still cant fucking get over how people throw away their lives on being superficial and self-centered. But then again I just said I was cute.
Here is the part where I lead into some griping over an event, but in honor of those around me, I will leave this out so their will be one more slice of tree they can comfortably wipe their asses with. I hope its Charmin.

Music, a Muse.

Somehow I wish I had some magically reflective way to write about the way I love music, but I have no way to convey it as I have previous events. When I listen to the songs I love, it is like my lifelong search for perfection has been completed, yet the quest for the ultimate will continue. Because with anything, perfection is never enough. And I love coming back from classes I love and seeing the people I rather spend my time with, and then I just have this time to listen to music and draw and paint or whatever I want.
Over time this great circle has been created, that I find amazing to this day. From the words of the music, to the words of these pages, to the words in art, back to the art in music, the art bound in this volume and the art bound in my sketch book. I never thought the things I love could be simplified to this level, but they are all visual and audible and bound in books and put on walls and in the end, just art and words.
Separately, I wonder if I could ever get my own words tattooed on my back, and I guess there is a yes in it, but overall I think not. I have dreamed of permanence reveling in songs, but there is only one thought I have dreamt to be inked. "True Family Stays True." On first thought, it seems like a general statement of love for family, yet it reads to this story. I have plenty of blood relatives that I would never consider family, and friends that have become family. Both for the simple reason, "True Family Stays True."
I still believe in the possibility the art of the tattoo stating the fact might stand for more that the fact.

Redeemed

As I return, I wonder if the sickness will return too. I have tryed and tryed to push it out of my ears as those days almost a year ago. Two years ago I was dying to be sick and now I'm living to be sane. Soon there will be a timestamp and hopefully a lock on those days. A tattoo on my back will read "Coming Home." I feel I need this symbolism to prove to myself and yes others, that I have changed and now I can come home to myself. And ironically it also means that I can be myself despite others, even though I am providing an image to prove that very fact to others. I've wanted it and like the rest of my current life, I'm going to get it.
I know that I am not the only one that hates it when someone they cannot reconize acknoledges them in a hall, but I would still like to bet that there are less than fifty percent who feel that pure dread when they eventually put a name to a face. And that is how I saw Steven Spann today.
He looked awfully different with a full nights sleep behind him. I think this was the first time I've seen him at an appropriate hour, with out him having to repremand me. Lately, I think I have been indeed happy, refelctive maybe, but happily so. However, I still faked a smile. There is no way I would give him the impression that I was some how going to get in trouble again. I'm back, and I'm gonna stay for good.

If you don't look for it, it will find you.

I looked for love for so long and gave up. Then, everywhere I turned there was always a chance that even some sort of relationship could bloom. As I made these chances feasible, they slowly faded away. I don't think I can give up on love again. As I watched the one I loved so dearly, complain of the world I ridded him of, I knew it was useless to keep going with love or to give up.
I have never ever had someone I loved stick with me forever, never. I don't know if that's my curse or theirs. I was raised by a society that failed me. And even though the love was never consistent, I was loved for my lifetime, not by anyone person, but by the society as a whole.
Wow. Now is it worth it to leave? Just like love, when I didn't look for a new home, it sprang upon me, and now that I've planned for it, it just doesn't seem right.
This will be the first time I will ever use a verse in this type of writing, and it may well be the last.
And I'm driving around looking for a sunrise.
Wanting my heart to rise.
Right out of my chest.
Right into the sky.
I guess it's all we really want.

Suffocation

What if we rename suffocation as not a cause of death, but a cause of life. It is very possible that we have all encountered it in this kind, and passed it off as something else. We recognize that are feelings are strong and we pass it off as just that. Sometimes we do something about it.
A week ago the cause of life suffocation ran into the cause of death suffocation. I think I slept for fifteen minutes that night. Father's day had just ended and my good friend drunkenly asked me for permission to do whatever with someone who had been an interest of mine, and who I also thought was interested in me. I was wrong and I had to run. But I waited till they woke up with each other, and I told them I was leaving. And I ran away, I don't want to say from the place I was so confident in, but I ran around it. I ended up in a Jewish Cemetery, and I sobbed until I figured they would start looking for me. I found it ironic that when dropped in a place I had never been before, I still found a cemetery on a hill, the closest to heaven I could get. I still wonder if I like these places because they are close to heaven and to the people and god I love, or because I rather be there than here. But maybe this strange location device planted in my brain, or more likely, my heart, makes me just that much more confident in Philadelphia.
The scary part of Philadelphia could have been the nervousness I held that I would feel guilty for being sad there and for tainting their skyline with my clouds. But we all have our clouds, they pass and intermingle above the skies we live beneath. Once we know that everyone else has their issues, it makes it a hell of a lot easier to live above the ground. I'd like to think that I just prefer to mingle in the Philadelphia skyline, rather than face the fear of trying to float above the Chesapeake Bay. I can jump puddles, but I can't swim in them.

The City of Brothery Love

I'm going home. Today I will enter my car a complete adult, because only adults drive three hours in cars to a place they anticipate being home. I am yes, excited. but as well, very nervous. Even though it is a mild weathered visit, what if I am wrong about choosing my home. I am a young adult and in that point of our lives we are merited with all sorts of bad decisions, and I'm up there with the best of them. But usually these bad decisions are indeed risks, but while in the process and premeditation of our deviation, we know we are doing wrong. There, however, is still this risk of having no fucking clue, in some cases little guidance and just like falling in love with a person, we must jump to fall in love with a place.
We all have a home, or as some of us call it "home home," technically your birthplace or the place of your childhood, or in some instances, where your parents reside with or without you. Now that I have broken away from what can be technically considered part of my home before, a hole in the ground with a rock it in contain the remains, of what in the eve of father's day, seems unspeakable. And it wants to make not just leave the thought, but leave this place.
In Breakfast at Tiffany's, Audrey Hepburn's character, Holly Golightly proclaims to a man she just met, "If I could find a real life place that made me feel like Tiffany's, well, I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name." I have no furniture and no longer keep a cat, I guess I'm in her position. And it is a scary one, as we see so many people relate to Holly's character, leaving her 'home home' in an attempt to find love from not just people, but a place.
Even though it is very scary to make a decision, I do believe that my heart has taken this battle over from my brain, 'cause I have never felt my heart flutter so sweetly as when the Philadelphia skyline comes into view.

A Journey or a Path

The way, oh the way. The way we use this phrase to start off not the detailing of our journey, but more of the 'tics' the journey has given us. The way we wake up next to someone new. The way we talk while we are chewing. The way we waste our money. And the way we live. It's not a way of describing a part of us, its giving our personalities a form of words to provide understanding of ourselves and others to the community that is our universe. For all we know, the aliens are detailing each and every hook-up into a warp-speed soap opera. With the general public today they'd need that extra swift quality they might just have to keep up with our over-caffeinated versions.
Sometimes we move on, to what seems to be a town without coffee, even though I had a great cup in the next town over the other day. The life we thought we were living, and the life we thought we would bring back with such enthusiasm to our home state, has slowed to and almost heart breaking rate. Our Northern socialite selves have been turned into, well, elves. We are deemed undesirable and our tongues grow brittle from the lack of alcohol. The drink we drank so greatly, that truly wet our whistle and let us slip every word we had always wanted to say. The sauce that gave us access to a world of new possibilities, more than we ever thought school would.
So much, I am required to speak of myself, even though I'd like to generalize myself within a population. I met so many people those nights I painted the town, even if it was the nice color of vomit. I lived those nights, and the awkward mornings, as a famous t-shirt states, were better than any of my boring nights. I wish there was some way I could get back there now.

Negativity

I don't go to California. I don't go to other countries. And when I'm here I don't feel any glamor with the things I waste my money on. But there, oh, there. So silly of a sentence is the only way to express it, the place farthest from home, feels the most like home. Well there, I am glamor, I am fame. North of my hometown I am beautiful and every dime spent, shines my stride. There I walk with confidence even when questioned. In this glorious Philadelphia, I, even the biggest fuck-up, is the most perfect thing accessorising its streets.
Even love fails me here or maybe I just came home with the suggestion that if I walked the same way I thought I did on Philadelphia's sidewalks, I would gain the same attention as I did in Philadelphia. I still meet my macking goals if you will. My first night hanging out with my best friend, who stayed, and her new group of friends, I saw someone and I said to myself, "by the end of the night I will be sitting next to him." He didn't notice me at first, or second glance. It took over and hour to start the conversation, but by no means was I going to act desperate. I got him with the music, even though the former "model," as they're called for Abercrombie and Fitch, did not look like he could listen to even pop punk. Later, I've found through my internet stalking (actually he friended me on facebook), that he has one of those perfect girlfriends, crazy I know. But even though it sucks, I still reached my goal. At least I am sucessful in my loss.

The Begining.

Yes I have moved on, but these days I am back where I started. A scary fucking place. I left here in August and I secretly hoped something would keep me away, but unfortunately I did not run in to any crime to keep me in Philadelphia. So I came back, and it was a bad feeling, just as all the times I had visited in the last months. It was the feeling of the weight of this whole town sitting on my chest, pushing out all the air from me, activating my asthma. Every little thought of changing my residency to one of a Philadelphian was pushed out by the fact I am young, and I don't even know if I'm right about this one, but I am pretty sure. I will have to sacrifice for the family I feel some moral obligation to, even if they feel little to treat me as if I exist. So I come back every holiday and share them in the most miserable ways. I lay on the couch bought with broken promises, ripped by my own aggression. With no common means of being a member of society here, no job, no car, and a meager 9 dollars in cash and 5.71 in my bank account, I wait for my future to come.