Call it what you may
I’ve never been very good at story telling. I can never quite figure out the ending. How to complete something still confuses me, that it would be done and never revisited. Even my fullstops come in between sentences. Call them attachment issues — I’ve never fully been able to say goodbye.
So, if I were to tell you my story, I wouldn’t be sure what to say. Maybe I would start from the beginning, childhood, parents, life in general, but even then, my time recollection is horrid, I can never quite remember the years in which things happened, but I do try to be as accurate as possible. When I would get to now, as I am in my current state, I’d have so much to say, but to be honest, I’d like to get to the point where my state would be defined by one word, ‘well’ or ‘fine’ would do. When one would ask how are you, my insides wouldn’t be screaming saying, I am NOT fine, I am NOT well but looking at the person, I don’t think they would want to know, so I would say, I’m good.
Even the phrase ‘I’m good,’ used so often, is grammatically incorrect. Call it a metaphor. I’ve always said that the casual question, how are you, is some form of false courtesy, seeming polite, but only having one correct answer.
See, now I don’t know how we got to this point, but it seems to be proving my mind is racing and cannot come up with a flow, jumping from one place to another, unaware of what consistency really is. Call them commitment issues.
Can you really have both though? Commitment and attachment issues… I didn’t forget that was in the first section, I’m just a walking complication. I’ve always had this feeling that there is something better to talk about than the current topic of conversation. The proverbial grass is always greener on the other side of my mind.
When I’ve had a lot of sugar, especially, my mind is like a bouncing castle, and I never really learned anything apart from how to jump. I feel like sometimes I jump too far and I get lost in my mind for a while and that’s probably why I don’t really pay attention when people say they have an interest in me, or maybe that’s an excuse for me to not have an interest in them. For me to like you, I have to pay attention and half the time I’m dancing around and drowning in the storms of my mind, so I can’t look up and see you. Yes, two seconds ago it was a bouncing castle, the more things change I guess.
I’ve been this way since I was a child, I just didn’t know it much back then, because I thought I could find myself by being around other people, or by getting people to like me. I tried really hard to be the girl everyone liked, but I didn’t know what to do apart from sit and quietly listen, so I did. I never really felt more alone.
Back then, I didn’t really know what friends were. I was used to being the sounding board, that was until I moved to high school where I generally stopped wanting to know who people were. Granted a lot of things had changed at home and I didn’t really know how to react, so I suppressed it and became passive to most things. Yyou could say I retreated into my mind, but I didn’t become more introverted, if anything, the less I cared about what people thought of me, or just of people in general, the more I wanted to be around them. I don’t really know what the power play was on that, but that’s a lesson for another day I guess.
At this point, maybe the person reading this would be wondering, what changed right? Why am I still reading this? I’ll ignore that second question. So what changed, apart from the obvious ageing?
I began to realise that I didn’t exactly have a picture perfect life,. It was at this point that I gave in to circumstance, let it define me, and wallowed in it for a good number of years. I have to say — self pity is an addictive pool to swim in. You hardly notice yourself getting pruned up from all the self hate, and just like every pool exit, it’s kind of hard to drag yourself out of it. That, coupled with fuck off world, makes swimming or drowning the much better option.
I think I did mine in turns, I swam and I drowned. The swimming was when I was telling myself I was getting better — pro-life and such, and the drowning really doesn’t need a qualifier. I frequently use drowning as a metaphor, of sorts, to explain my life. Apparently it takes four minutes for someone to drown, on average. I learned this from a movie where two girls (actually one girl) killed the mum because she was an addict while the other girl just stood and watched and handed her gloves. You need those when you’re drowning your mother in a bath tub. It wasn’t such a good movie. I watched it upon the recommendation of a friend and — I don’t know, something about it felt aged and there were probably a couple of better ways to have a better life than removing the person who brought you into this world from it, but drowning is a good metaphor.
