just be nice

My muse.

I have been the wounded and the one who causes wounds.

All messed up and nowhere to go.

I guess I thought you would at least treat me like a friend? But anyway, actions speak louder than words and yours don’t amount to much.

Every day I wake And tell myself that I am enough. Maybe one day I’ll believe it.

Why do our bodily smells smell good to us but bad to other people? I know it’s not just me because I have asked friends and they say the same thing. Please don’t tell me you don’t smell your dirty socks after you take them off. If you did, I’d know you were lying. Our smells smelling bad to others just promotes distance between human beings. If our sweat, farts, feet, shit, and coffee breath just smelled good to everyone, it would be one less thing to worry about. One less thing to feel insecure about. One less thing to keep us from standing close, embracing, or just saying hello. It would be one less thing to aid in the prejudices people feel about people different than them.

I often find myself comparing my life to a movie. I expect the situations I find myself in to play out like they would on the big screen and when they don’t I am filled with an intense and burning disappointment. I want to get to the part where the movie starts. The rest is just back story. In the movies you don’t see the boring bits. The lonely bits. The long stretches of mundane. You start out where, well, the story begins. But what we forget is that character that you love so much had a life before the cameras started rolling. They spent nights alone watching Netflix. They got sad for no reason. They spent long periods of time not knowing what the fuck they were doing or where the fuck they were going. That’s the problem with comparing your life to a movie, because in a movie even the played-out “hard times” seem more glamorous.  

I can pin point the exact moment when I was last truly happy. It seems so trivial and would undoubtedly give those who made it possible such unwarranted satisfaction. But I can’t deny it. I won’t bore you with the gory details. All I can say is that the summer before my junior year of high school was without a doubt one of the most defining, wild, and reckless parts of my life thus far. I was just learning what it meant to be independent, break rules, and toe the line of sanity. I’m not saying I want that life back, and to be honest I don’t know if I could handle it. But the feeling—letting myself be totally out of control while retaining complete peace of mind. I was a menace to my family (and likely to society) and I willingly put myself in danger, yes. But I was happy. I think that was the last time that I felt that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to do, at exactly the time I was supposed to be doing it.

Growing up and all the way through college I had extremely low self-esteem and a lot of deep rooted insecurities. Somehow though, simultaneously, I always secretly thought I was the best person in the world—an undiscovered genius, a poet, a scholar, a humanitarian, a comedian. This unfounded and disturbing dichotomy of thought left me in this constant cycle of acting in a way that only those who believed their shit didn't stink would act and then--as soon as that action was done—becoming consumed with fear and worry that everyone around me could smell my stinky shit.

Community garden in Berlin. Photo taken by me in 2016.

I have this image in my head that I want to draw or paint or do something with, but I don’t think I’m artistic enough. I haven’t even tried. I’ll explain what it is anyway. I have this image of a girl, or woman, or someone in between. She’s looking in the mirror, or maybe the viewer is the mirror, I haven’t worked out the details yet. Anyway, she’s looking at herself and she doesn’t like what she sees. Not physically, but what she sees behind her skin. I think she actually does find herself to be physically beautiful. Or at least she knows the world sees her that way. But she can’t shake the feeling that what lies underneath is rotten, that somehow her insides have gone bad. She wants to peel her skin off to see for herself. And so she does. She starts at the top of her forehead, at her hairline, directly above her right eye. She digs into herself with her fingernail and begins to pull her skin down. The image would show when she’d just gotten to her eye, or maybe just below. I told you, I haven’t worked out the details. I’m not sure what would be revealed to us under her skin. I guess I haven’t decided whether or not I want the girl to be right. Whether or not she is in fact rotten.