Drunk

There was a thunderstorm inside me today.  The thunder rumbled in my rib-cage.  I felt it bouncing off bones, moving in waves through my intestines, my stomach, that strangely organized mass of organs in my abdomen.  It was all bark, no bite of lightning.  I didn't let it get that far.

I wrote that down in my notebook of observations today, and I told my mom it wouldn't make it to my blog.  I guess I was lying.  I wrote that my hunger was a thunderstorm.

I've written a lot of things in that notebook.

29 June:
At the pool.  Boys that walk like old men.

Half-stumbling, half-careful, his back straight as a boy in a homophobic town in the fifties.  Hands loose, flopping.  Hands like little birds.  I wrote that in a story once.  'He had a face like a bird with an aquiline nose and dark beady eyes.  His hands were like little birds sewn to his wrists.'  Constantly in motion.  Little boy with a cavernous belly, skin stretched taut over the snap-able bones.  A drum.  He's a tan little dude, and I'm jealous of it.  I'm jealous of the concentration on his face as he approaches the diving board, stares at his toes, then bounces once and leaps into the water.  Then he swims to the edge, gets out, and runs past me again.  It's that concentration, the bow-legged trot, the stiff arms, that make him look like a shrunken grandfather.

You know, I have an aquiline nose.  I have a kid sister with fawn legs that I'm jealous of.

When I'm watching nubile girls in bathing suits with jealousy of their ten-year-old, unmarred skin and fawn legs, it's time to get my act together.

I'm trying to offer you this as proof, I think.  Proof that I truly believe that writing is an art, and it's one that I've practiced for a long time.  I feel like I need to prove this to you because, while I'm further than I've ever gotten in my current project, I've reached a point where it feels ridiculous again and I just want to cry.  I want to give up.

I'm panning for attention and gold nuggets of reassurance.  I'm a part of the California gold rush.  I want you to tell me how great I am and how I will go far, because I can't believe it myself.  So I'm trying to impress you, flush you out.  Panning for gold flecks in the river.

I try to never do this, because it's pretentious and ridiculous and I'll regret posting this when I wake up tomorrow.  Still I feel like there's got to be some artistic vent for my frustration and I have to share because I am a needy child.  I try not to show you my 'writing mode', because on it's first draft it's entirely emotional, and most of the times my unchecked emotions aren't people-friendly.  Our thoughts are never people-friendly, are they?  We think things that we would never admit to thinking or would never in a million years say out loud.  We think wow she's fat and only feel bad when we see her walking with a cane.

Right now it's a bad thing that I never proofread when I write blogs, because this will be disjointed and tactlessly honest and naive and childish and everything that I hate about myself.

I hate that comment that I just made about myself.

I hate for you to see me like this.  I try to be so positive for you.  So real and reachable and fun.  I hope I've been able to achieve that, even just a little.  I am that person, but I'm this person too, the one that thinks in metaphors and generalizations and writes sentences in her head for fun and doesn't like herself as much as she should, and second-guesses herself too much.  This is me when I'm alone with me.

I'll write an apology for this tomorrow.  Just pretend I'm drunk, because that would at least be an excuse for all of this rubbish.

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
Sigmund Freud