Feeling Poemy

Today when I sat down in my fine arts class, a class that you can bet your ass I'm only taking to fulfill one of my liberal arts requirements, I settled in for what I knew was going to be a long, boring hour and fifteen minutes. I opened my pink binder and flipped through the pages to land on a blank sheet of wide-ruled notebook paper. I started writing down random phrases that popped into my head as my teacher played Orpheus on the projection screen. They were all cutesy little phrases, nothing significant, nothing heart felt. They reminded me of drawing "I heart *****" on my hands when I was in junior high to signify that I liked someone, the number of astericks coinciding with the number of letters in the boy's name. It was a big thing to do at my school. Anyway, I kind of smiled as I remembered doing stupid shit like that and how drawing hearts and shamrocks around my little poems was just as juvenile as the aforementioned hand art, but it still released a certain urge for creative writing that I felt at the moment.

When I got back from classes for the day, I looked through some of the poems and short stories I've written over the years and found one in particular that stuck out to me. I don't remember exactly how long ago I wrote the poem, but I think it was around freshman year when I was in a bout of depression, and although the poem that I wrote during this time didn't reflect anything that I was doing at the time, it did represent how I dealt with my depression in the past. I don't have a title for the poem, as I rarely ever do; I often think that it's harder to title something than it is to write it because you want to peak interest, yet summarize what's going on in the work. There's my introduction for it, though.

I'm staring at a steak knife,

Because I couldn't find my lighter,

I'm going to see blood today,

instead of fire.

I'm feeling alone, once again,

Today I'll ease the pain,

by slicing into my skin.

I'll watch the blood bubble,

then soak it in a towel,

I'll look at the towel and wipe the tears from my eyes,

as I throw my pain away.

I'm going to see blood today so that I don't feel the hurt,

I'm not aiming for the vein, but if I hit it it'll do no harm.

The serrated edges hurt as they pucker into my skin,

As the blood starts to dribble, I'm finally in a position to win.

I dig deeper because I can still feel the lump in my chest,

why couldn't anyone ever look at me like I was the best?


Re-reading the poem now makes me a little sad in a retrospective way because I wish the girl that I was then could see the future in a more optimistic way. There's times now when I feel insecure, but I don't cut anymore and I can usually battle through the depression without having morbid thoughts flood my mind for hours or days on end. The most depressed that I ever was was during the time I was 16 1/2 to 18 years old. I know a lot of it stemmed from dealing with a heart issue and withdrawing from regular high school to do homeschooling, but I also felt that it was more than that. Maybe it was that I had a valid excuse to be depressed that I finally allowed myself to outwardly express it. I've always been a worry-wart as my mom and grandma would say, but the older I got, the more I felt like I was losing control of the careful exterior that I put out. I was happy with being labeled a smart, pretty jock. I wanted that label and I worked hard to maintain it. When it was revoked from me so abruptly, I felt like I lost my identity and I really didn't know how to deal with myself in an introspective way. I'm grateful that being sick allowed me to truly get to know myself and to realize that I genuinely like the person that I am even if I do sometimes feel shitty about life/myself.

I'm not sure what brought all this up, but there's a little piece of me that will always be a little girl who's so unsure of herself and hides behind a confident, almost bitchy exterior. But I feel that more than growing up at this point, I'm growing into myself. Maybe I've had an amazing epiphany, maybe it's something that everyone goes through.




On a more situational rather than reflective note, I was talking to Rocker today and he asked me if my school was off this particular street that is a main street throughout the southwest suburbs of Chicago. Yep, I replied. "Okay...well I have a surprise for you, then." I immediately got flustered, I'm not a huge fan of surprises. I like to know what's going on so I can prepare myself for it. "Tell me what it is," I said. He refused for awhile, saying that it wouldn't be a surprise if I knew about it duhhhhhhh. I told him that I didn't like surprises, so to please fill me in. He told me that he had planned on driving out to my school after he got off of work on Wednesday at like 11:30pm. On Wednesdays, I work until 12am, so I guess he figured it'd be around that time when he got here. I didn't respond right away and I think he was kind of hurt by it. It's not that I don't want to finally meet him, it's just an awkward setting to do it. What the fuck are we going to do at midnight at my school? The only thing I can think of is going to my room and watching a movie, but I know he has work early the next day, and it feels like that would be too intimate to do as a first date thing. I look at him as more than just a potential fuck buddy, and as previous posts have stated, that's the typical ice breaker I use with boys that come over to hook up.

When we got off of the phone, he texted me and said that I sounded really excited about it, obvious sarcasm. I knew that I reacted badly, but I just got nervous all the sudden of awkwardly trying to adjust to seeing/talking to him in person that I couldn't form a good reaction to it. I texted him back and said that it wasn't that I didn't want to see him, I just didn't know what he expected us to do on a Wednesday night at my school. He said that we'll pick a day to go out then and I told him okay, whenever he wanted, but he didn't reply back. I don't know if it was because he had gotten to his guitar lesson, or just because he was pissed at my less than enthusiastic reaction. It feels odd to think we're finally going to meet after we've been talking so much without seeing each other. I'll be the first to tell you that I'm much smoother via Internet or on the phone than I am in person. I'm probably making this into a much bigger deal than he feels about it, but whatever, I can't help it.

It does kind of boggle my mind to think that he's not nervous about it at all and he thinks that just coming over without having a plan of doing anything would go over well. Maybe he's really just that confident that we have a good connection or something, I don't know. Maybe he thinks we won't have to talk because we'll just hook up. I don't know. As far as I can tell, we won't meet for at least another week because I'm on call Friday and working Saturday night and he works on Sundays, so that leads us into another week. I feel like I'm already dating him without the physical benefits, so why am I unnerved by putting a 3D figure to my boy on the phone?