tc writes

Imagine this: I’m sitting somewhere off in a corner, and I see my dorm room in front of me. There’s the twin size bed, extra long, covered in greys and blues and yellows. Pictures hang in various ways on my wall. Pushed in with pins on a corkboard, pinned up with hanging strings, blindly taped. The faces in the photographs are unrecognizable, but for some reason I keep them up. Maybe I want to imagine a life I no longer live. I think I’m destined to live in the past. And then there’s a desk, of course. I scattered useless knick knacks on it to make it feel more like a home. A mirror, countless sayings to be happy, an old award I’m not sure holds the same amount of meaning. She says it does, and that she still loves me, and she would be lost without me. Does everyone always mean what they say though? Or is it just some comfort mechanism she uses on me when I’m not sure of myself?

There’s something in my room that nobody else sees but me. There’s a glass wall encompassing my space. Sometimes, I’m inside the glass wall, being showed off like a zoo creature that’s not taken care of well enough. A little hungry - for food or for love, we’ll never quite know. We don’t know what happens behind closed doors, and my doors are closed often.

Other times, I’m sitting outside of the wall, as an observer of my own self. I don’t like sitting outside of the wall. Self-reflection makes people chafe, that’s why it is rarely done. Society, as a whole, should reflect on themselves more often. As a hypocrite, I’m not one to talk. I can only observe the things I do wrong.

In elementary school, we are taught not to use the word things. It’s a silly statement, really, to think that we are always doing something worth discussing. Things is a general statement, capturing difficult emotions or careless actions. Things are not important to the plot. They are the forgotten discussion points that haven’t mattered your entire life. I’m a firm believer in things.

My glass walls are often broken. People love throwing rocks at me, trying to hit me and startle me. It works, more often than not. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to break me down. You wont realize when you have, of course. I keep those emotions, those things, to myself. It’s not right to let others know when I’m suffering, especially when they are having so much fun in their lives. Suffering alone and suffering together is still suffering, when you get down to the nitty gritty of it, so I might as well suffer alone. I can’t hurt as many people if I suffer alone. At this point, breaking down happens so often to me, so there’s no reason to create a spectacle of myself.

I try not to hurt myself too often, because breaking down never goes well for me. When I live in a state like this, it’s inevitably going to happen. So I just embrace it. A creature of the darkness, a creature of the light, are all the same in this state of being. But you, you just think I am a one-dimensional character. You don’t realize that I’m a real human girl, with a full force of emotions and ideas and countless things. On a linear scale, with one end being sadness and the other forgiveness, I am the middle mark.