mt. bonnell

Today my dad and I went up to this point called Mount Bonnell to get some air. I finished off a roll of film I'd been meaning to get off my hands for a while and promptly got it developed this evening (as you can see). The weather was nice (shorts and jacket in February, hollah) and the view was wonderful. I really love this place.

a reminder to myself

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” ― Mary Oliver

This week was hard. I was stressed, I was sad, I was hormonal. I cried yesterday, sobbing all the way home, from the first gas station to Chipotle to the last stop sign before our house. Crying for selfish reasons is the most pure, fulfilling kind of crying. It's really like emptying all your sadness. You fall apart, quiet as possible, in the backseat, and then you spend the rest of the night piecing yourself back together. It isn't all that hard, after you've finished crying. You eat something, take a long hot shower, and listen to something calming. You write if you're not feeling too emotional and then you go to sleep. A new day comes. 

A new day in which to find new ways to fall apart. It'll be okay until lunch when you remember what Alaska Young said: "What you must understand about me is that I'm a deeply unhappy person." For some inexplicable reason, this line lodges itself into your mind and you'll repeat it over and over again until you start to believe it applies to you. Even though it doesn't. And in English class when you're supposed to be working, you'll write a long confessional stream of consciousness which you'll reread later when you get home and realize makes you sound very depressed. Even though you're not.

Yes, this was a week of failed physics tests, a pain in my calf that won't go away, saying things I shouldn't have said and having to deal with the consequences. Of feeling dumb, feeling like a bad person, feeling terribly, terribly alone. It, largely, sucked. But guess what? I've already made a list of all the good things that came out of this week and it's surprisingly long. And even though the good things don't necessarily cancel out the bad things, guess what else? It's Friday. It's over. It doesn't matter anymore.

Things are looking up and I guess I'm pretty happy, or at least happier, but right now I'm just going to go to bed. I survived this week, and now I'm going to sleep for 400 hours to make up for it. Ciao.

***

Sundays I listen to Coldplay and try to fit the right words into my mouth but they keep spitting themselves out cause they don't quite taste right and I'm left thinking it's all my fault for burning my tongue on my Indian leftovers earlier today, for setting the microwave timer for ten extra seconds because I like things better when they're hot even if it makes everything taste a little off for the rest of the day, even if it makes things harder to swallow for the rest of the week.

It's not just food. I think I was supposed to be born in the heart of an underwater volcano, meant to live among the ashes of the only things as self-destructive as humans. I don't get into the shower until I see the steam rise up out of the top, and I wear sunburns and tan lines proudly like they're not ominous heralds of skin cancer forty years down the road. At a time of year when my hands are constantly cold, I am missing the freckles that come with the sun like nothing else. I am missing the light on the balcony in Barcelona, and that time I squeezed myself up and held onto the railing til my heart was beating fast cause it was so high up, and how I would always climb up to the highest floor possible, to prove to myself I could.

I am also thinking of the south of France and of Colorado mountains for the first time, outside an airport's walls, since I was three. I am thinking, almost more fondly than of foreign lands, of navigating my own home from the driver's side and of the green canopies that lead to my friend's house and of jumping into the crystal cool water after running and those first few seconds underwater that take your breath away momentarily. I am thinking of the million infinities before then and how they will be filled and how sometimes you want something to come but just as badly as you want something else not to end before and, well, you can't have both.

I am thinking of today.

Sundays I listen to The Beach Boys and inspect my hair for split ends. I count back five months since I last had a haircut, but when I catch a glance of my reflection in the car door, it doesn't look like it's grown at all. Maybe a centimeter or two. Grow faster, I wish I could tell it, which is funny because I'm so used to telling everything else to slow down.

Sundays I listen to Led Zeppelin and to my sister asking me a question about math, a question whose answer I do not know. I listen to the sound of my own voice -- "ow" -- react to the pain in my joints and muscles and wish it away. There are pains I can shoulder but if I cannot run, so help me God...

Sundays I read back over the words I have taken hours to write, and wonder what representation of my life they offer. I think about all the things I wrote in my journal this past week, two weeks; more stripped down and list-like, are they more accurate? "Today was a good day, all things considered." I've written about late start mornings and vague unspecified (outside of my mind) "you"s I can't stop thinking about and how dysfunctional our statistics class is, but none of it's very eloquent and when I sit down to the computer all that comes out are older memories, anyway, tumbling from my fingers like ice cubes from a pitcher of lemonade on one of those hot summer days I'm talking about. I only miss some of them, and not the ones that are conjured up when I think of lemonade.

Sigh, sigh, sigh.

 Blogging is hard because I rarely know what to say but I do know I'm done with this thing, whatever it may be. I think I'll go watch the Super Bowl now, and eat some guacamole.