obey_the_muse (original) (raw)
Dec. 11th, 2009 01:52 pm Passions of Insanity
NOTE: I wrote this last year, when I was going through a tough-ish time and really needed to just write and focus myself. So it's actually quite grounded in reality, about 90% real, I think. x'D But yeah, it's a while ago, I'm not so crazy anymore. :B Also...yes, I did graduate this summer; I was just sort of writing ahead, a bit, if you will. But anyhow, even though this started out just as a crazy ramble to try to sort out my spinning head, it turned into a long piece of writing that....I actually quite enjoyed. :'D I'm pleased with how it turned out; hopefully you will like it too? x3
I also hope it's okay for me to post this here. O':
~~Tick Tock, tick tock. 4:30 in the morning, pitch black skies, ghosts and fears standing outside her window.
She’s drawing, she’s singing, she’s writing, she’s trembling. She’s sketching another one of her beautiful boys, her dreamy angels, her perfect heroes. She’s fussing over his right eye – it has to be just perfect. It has to be lovely, handsome, filled with emotion and time. His brow – it has to arch perfectly, heavily, in his pained expression. Oh her beautiful boy.
She erases for the hundredth time.
Soundtrack songs are mixed along with modern ones – a selective, random circulation of her favorite songs going on in her earphones. Her dog whimpers and she hears a singer cry. One Republic, Owl City. Lenka, some Club 8 too. And, of course, Howard Shore strums up another perfect orchestra. I still can’t say it after all we’ve been through, Jason Mraz sighs, and she rocks her head back and forth to the beat. Yes, and the feeling inside keeps building.
4:30 in the quiet dark, not quite midnight, not quite morning. The streets are silent, the animals are hidden; the wind blows unobtrusively along its path. Fingers tap at her window. She takes a deep breath.
Tremble, tremble. Shiver, shake. The heart struggles, struggling against something unseen. It quakes, it quails. It quivers, it flails. It needs...something. Anything to relieve it.
But how do you help something when you don’t know what is ailing it? How do you fight off something when you don’t even know what to fight?
Boy bands curse as she throws her pencil in frustration. Forget that stupid eye – she holds the page up, examining it unhappily. It’s a failure. She looks it over, tilts it this way and that. Failure. She spent two hours agonizing over it, she tried so hard, but it’s just a failure in the end. Her boy does not look as beautiful as he should be, her girl is slumped over in an awkward position. The whole picture does not flow, there is too much blood, and it is unnatural. She tosses it aside.
Flow. Nothing flows. Time flows. She stacks her arts away, glancing at the clock. Time sure flows fast. Time is evil, time is cruel. Time has no pity. Time never loved her. Or perhaps she just never got to know him well enough?
It was most likely her fault.
She shivers, spasms passing through her upper body. Spring has not come with warmth, and winter is lounging, lazy to get up and walk away. She’s been sitting in the same unhealthy position for far too long in her chair. Slumped over, she’s surprised she hasn’t developed osteoporosis yet. She sits back up again, her spine trembling weakly, rocking her body. Her feet are sweating strangely as they stay still on her hot computer battery. Imbalance, everywhere.
Beep beep, beep beep. An alarm clock rings. 5 in the morning. The memories don’t give up.
If only she could have their persistence. But it can be learned, right?
Mournful music plays, lamenting the death of a wonderful warrior, a hero, a king. Pipes and strings and other things. A dirge, really. A woman vocalizes in the background, and stirs the keys that lie in her own heart. She hums, caught by the music, unable to resist.
Passions are hard to not follow. Temptations, so tempting; stirring and swaying and arousing. Trilling, harmonizing, she sings along with the goddess who vocalizes her ethereal spell.
A paper fell out when she was cleaning up her art. Graduation forms. Cap and gowns still to order. For what? Her graduation. Graduation from what? From high school. But wait – graduation from what?
Graduation?
For others maybe. For her – she sighs. She smiles. It is satire, really. They make it seem like such a great thing – but it comes with pain too. For some more so than others. Is there such a thing as happiness without sorrow?
Graduation. A rite of passing, of sorts, for everyone. Everyone did it. But what did you do? Why did you do that? Why? Why. Why oh god oh why??
Senior year. A year of what? For her, honestly? A year of pain. Junior year – she fucked up. Senior year – she fucked up again. Failures everywhere. And there was so much more screwing in between.
Everyone would be graduating this year, everyone she went to class with, everyone she talked with, everyone she laughed with. Friends, classmates, old enemies. Everyone would be wearing their caps and gowns and smiling and beaming. Snap the cameras will go, and beams, beams everywhere. Smile! You’re done!
Her friends and classmates will all be wearing their tassels and cords. Their honorary certificates and their rewards for having paid some fees over four years. She paid them too – for her first two years, that is. But they don’t let anyone who fucks up pay the fees. So she lost it all – her honorary membership, her tassel and cord, her four or five bucks. Failure.
She lost more. She lost her college. Everyone jumping around and beaming some more – I got into Stanford! Berkeley! Oxford and Yale and Harvard and the entire Ivy League! I’m going to UC this, UC that. She could have been one of them too. She wanted to be one of them. She was on the right track – for the first two years. But then she let herself fuck up. Failure.
She wasn’t dumb, she wasn’t sick. But she was seriously, seriously, messed up. She could have been great, she could have done well – she had even wanted to be valedictorian freshman year. Back in middle school, coming from a private, she didn’t know there was such a thing as a valedictorian. But after she watched her friend become the glamorous speechmaker in eighth grade, she told herself she’d do that in high school. It wasn’t impossible. All she had to do was work for it, and she could get it. All you had to do to get anything was work for it.
Well, yeah, everything pretty much went out the door. Perhaps four years is too long a time to keep track and hold onto all your wishes, perhaps she’s just making excuses.
5:30 in the morning and she cries. She cries, and no tears fall, but she cries in her heart. It’s still struggling, bashing her, punishing her. Regret is like time. Regret is cruel too. Loss is unbearable.
Her favorite hero fights and falls against the background of a frantic, dramatic, screaming instrumental. It picks at her own desperate heart, bringing it up another notch in sadness.
Everybody falls, but two years is a long time to have kept on making mistakes. And nobody has that much patience. She was sure everybody was probably as fed up with her as she was. Nobody normal has the heart of a martyr, the patience of a saint. She should have learned from her first mistakes, and not repeated them all over again. In the end, it was all her own fault, her own doing. Now she had two more years to fix it all, to try to patch up her gaps. Perhaps she could get back on track this time, she has one more chance. Perhaps she could at last learn, and do it right this time.
But don’t let the patches be threadbare strips this time. Don’t let the glue be useless. Don’t stick it all together with empty words – and then pull it all apart.
She’ll work this time. Loss is bad enough once. Failure is not pleasant.
She’ll feel it this year, when that time comes. When the music plays and the parents cheer and the kids scream, she’ll feel it. She’ll cheer too, but will it be heartfelt for her? Perhaps she’ll feel left out. She’s graduated, but doing what? Fucking up. She didn’t work like everyone else did, she didn’t persist like she should have, she didn’t accomplish anything she had wanted to accomplish and she didn’t achieve any of her goals. She didn’t get any of anything that was within her potential, because she didn’t have the strength enough to chase it. That by itself was enough to put her to shame. Perhaps her counselor could tell her pretty words and try to smooth all the blame away, but she couldn’t listen. She couldn’t just make herself guiltless and tell herself everything was all right. She wasn’t trying to be pigheaded, it was just what her gut said was right.
Persistence.
And everyone would know she had fucked up on that day too. Perhaps she’d be the only one in her classes who didn’t receive the tassel and cord. Perhaps that would mark her out as vividly as her fateful eleventh grade scarlet letter. Perhaps she’d be the only one with no grand college to go to. Perhaps she’d be a lot of things, that’s for sure.
The kids scream, the parents scream, the crowd keeps screaming and screaming. The Dark King screams as the hero stabs his black heart, and her body screams as well. Time is still passing cruelly, regret is still clinging coldly. Early in the morning and pain still keeps looking in her window.
And all her friends. She opens up her computer documents, her journals, her thoughts, her rambles, her favorite quotes and her friend’s stories. She reads through them randomly, selecting things here and there to satiate her searching mind. It’s seeking something, it wants something, it wants to help the heart stop struggling.
Passion is wonderful. It’s frightening, it’s strange, it’s beautiful, it’s powerful. It sweeps you like a tidal wave and it comes in so many forms. It shakes and rocks and drives your soul insane. It makes you do funny things, and it makes you want to sing and laugh and cry and die at the same time. It’s passionate to draw, passionate to write, it’s luscious and ripe like the sweetest note in a haunting song. Passion is something she wants and doesn’t want at the same time, something she loves and admires and shuns at the same time.
Some way or the other, her readings melt and her thoughts pool down to one other. Another persistence of memory.
He’s going away to college. He’s got no screw ups like she has. He kept himself on track, focused on his goal; he knew what he wanted. He’s everything she admires.
He’s a voice, a thought, a face that refuses to fade. He lingers in her days and on her earphones at night. His songs are lovely, perfect. The kind a hero would play.
She thought she had gotten over him for a while. But it was another lie. Nothing that cuts into your memories ever heals. Time is not kind enough to help you fully recover. She could run for a while, but soon enough he would catch up to her. And now she knows she would still fall for him all over again.
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Current Mood: 
cold
Current Music: So Long, Lonesome - Explosions in the Sky