I’m seeing a musical today, two hours from my hometown. I’m very excited. I actually just woke up and I’m still on my period but I took some painkillers. My throat is sore because I smoked five cigarettes yesterday. For no reason. I went on a walk last night, for about forty minutes. Listened to music and smoked and thought about my life. I’ve been caught up in my fantasies lately — this is something I’ve always struggled with, head in the clouds and whatnot, but these days it’s different. Realer. As in, I think about real people the way I used to think about fictional people. I don’t think this makes sense. I sometimes feel like I use other human beings to make myself feel better, in more than just one sense. Either I think incredibly mean things about them or pretend they’re in love with me, not considering how they would feel about that. I know it’s just my thoughts and I technically can’t even help where my mind wanders off to but it feels invasive almost. I don’t have a lot of sexual fantasies if any, so I’m glad that isn’t adding to my guilt. No, instead I imagine the boy I’m kind of talking to meeting my family for the first time. Confessing my feelings to someone that I’m positive has moved on. Maybe this is incredibly unfair and you’ll never want to speak to me again but I just had to say this. I’ve managed to stick to a better sleep schedule, so that is something positive about my life, I suppose. I take melatonin and eventually just pass out, dipping face-first into my pillow and into wild, anxiety-ridden dreams I rarely remember the second I wake up. Sometimes, my fantasies take over my dreams; people I see once a month haunt my every waking and sleeping hour. What does this say about me? Maybe that I’m normal, maybe this is healthy. Or not healthy. Just — I’m thinking about my post titled normal girl feelings again. Am I a normal girl? I feel perpetually detached from my girlhood and I’m not sure if this is simply a symptom of growing up black in a white country or being the only kind-of-out gay girl in my grade for long while. I’ve never actually considered that a fact. That I was the only one that was out. It wasn’t like a lot of people knew, but technically it’s true. I recently met up with a friend from back then. We hadn’t spoken in a long while, so catching up was nice, and felt therapeutic. Like I can finally move on, something I hadn’t done even after four years. Or was it five already? I don’t know and I’m still too drowsy to actually care. I actually don’t feel like getting into it right now, so maybe I’ll come back to this when my brain requires me to talk about it. Normal girl feelings… I think about this so often. Part of me hopes that this is just what growing up is, that my thoughts are just alternate versions of what my mother thought, the older women in my life, the ones not in my life. Then again, I feel so abnormal. Cruel. What does it say about me if I relate to the narrators of my favorite books? My fourteen-year-old sister recently showed me Fight Club (1999). I don’t even know if I have a lot of things to say about this movie in particular, I liked it a lot and I feel like it altered my brain chemistry in the way only a David Fincher movie or an episode of Sex and the City can, but that isn’t what stuck with me. I kind of don’t know what to do about my sister. As I said, she’s fourteen. She has no business watching movies like this, with all the sex and the blood and the violence. When the narrator beat Angel Face’s face to a pulp, I could only watch and think: Huh. How super helpful, right? She’s seen it before anyway. I watched Skins and American Horror Story when I was even younger than her, so what’s the harm, really? Yeah, man, what is the fucking harm? Enter laugh track. Look at what happened and is still happening to me. I am Jack’s proof our parents were never meant to have children and, as mean as it sounds, I feel like maybe it’s not exactly my responsibility to make fully functioning human beings out of my siblings when I don’t even know what the fuck I’m supposed to do with my life. Maybe I, too, felt like destroying something beautiful. Or watch it be destroyed. I don’t actually know how big my part in all of this is. Moving on — I’m excited about today, even if I have to spend another day alone with my mother and her neverending life lessons. I’ll try to have a nice time. Talk about things that aren’t my dad. I won’t do the first step today, with nobody. If no one texts me, that is something to unpack another day. Today can be good, I think. I can’t wait to be in the city. I feel an immediate attachment to places that aren’t my hometown. Like I can sense the chance of feeling actually happy and fulfilled there. I imagine myself in a tiny apartment, watering the plants on my balcony. Borrowing sugar from my neighbor. Owning an ashtray and my own washing machine that I do my laundry in every Wednesday. Everywhere I travel, tiny life.
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