This one's about to be ridiculously lengthy and spewed out over a hot cup of thé vert and my attempts to gather my thoughts, so brace yaself.
I swear I decide everything I want to write about while I'm in the shower. The ideas and words just come rushing to me as I try to slough off last night's remnant feelings from my limp body and allow them to evaporate with the steam. I attempt not to focus my thoughts on certain things too particularly, as a safety precaution. It's an attempt to guard my disposition, from letting myself grow too dependent on someone else so as to forget entirely what it means to be okay on my own. I'm always worried I might not be as good as my friend, but he's kind of a professional. Or so it seems.
I spent a night of sheer brilliance wandering through a beach and getting drunk and giving head in a girl's bathroom in a setting I usually wouldn't picture myself in: a fraternity one. The pure "no-fuck's-given" attitude of it is what intrigued me as I was thinking about the hazy details while I shampooed a few hours ago. Yesterday, people I never have met before called me "gorgeous" and "beautiful," and I realized yet again that I can never take compliments well. I think I get it from my father: this awkward humbleness. I prefer to keep to myself when people try to say nice things about me; I clam up so much it can make people uncomfortable. Was it the people talking, or was it the drugs?
I wonder if I've shifted my views at all since coming here. Was I always fond of adolescent splendors, or have I been exerting myself? What is dictating my actions here? My head, or my heart? It shouldn't be the latter.
Right?
I ended last night talking to two people, a brother and his date, who were both a year older than me. We stood awkwardly in an empty basement, music booming through the speakers, juxtaposed beside the keg and the spiraling party lights on the ceiling. They were jealous of how I was still eighteen— a freshman who hadn't already completed half of her time of the supposed "best four years of your life." They were honestly the sweetest people I met that night, and the most genuinely amiable. I had to end the night, however, listening to the ramblings of a girl who epitomized everything I really do not like in a person. She was nice up until the alcohol wore off, my shoes were causing my feet to bleed and blister, and my eyes held a permanent glaze of exhaustion. I felt like by that point in the night I was so far done listening to someone's braggy attitude, I spent my entire high school years doing that day after fucking day. She wouldn't stop going on about how nice her life was and everything she had, yet the aura of churlishness she possessed accompanied by her overt pompous demeanor pushed me over the edge. Yet what did I say before? I meet every piece in the puzzle and every chocolate in the box.
Why am I terrible at expressing how I feel to others? I worry I will hurt other people.
It's a stupid woman thing. We don't never wish to tell others what's bothering us because we are always displeased by something. Creatures that are not to be reckoned with or understood. If last night taught me anything at all, it's how to know who to truly trust above anything else. Call it a selfish act, but I would rather be friends with people who I can count on to not utter the words "me," "I," or "mine," in every other sentence they say. A friend is not someone who has to be perpetually proving him or herself to be better than you, it's a person who tries to help you better yourself. To those people who go out of their way and place themselves in my life to do that for me, I try my hardest to reciprocate their favor.
Maybe it's due time that I started drawing some lines in my life. I'm on top of many things that matter most to me— education being first and foremost, yet I need to take it a lot slower in terms of sex. I think I'm fighting to get as much pleasure out of everything that I can, like a leech that sucks the blood from the weak veins of its prey. When will I ever learn to cherish things that I am able to have...before I lose them? We always want too much of something incredibly too fast.
With this amalgamation of my thoughts finally written out and literally expressed, I can say the naval-gazing session can come to an end.
