Lemonade And Skin Peels

Right, time to do another one of those neat little rants I usually do so well. Redecorating my room in order to redecorate my head, as usual; keeping myself busy to keep myself off track. Nothing new in this, nothing new at all, like in the way I will peel off the skin from my lips whenever my mind and heart tells me it can't make it anymore. I drove, and drove, tired of driving, tired of having to be alert, tired of missing turns and running out of gas; drove while my lips bled, and colored my teeth red. This time there was just a bigger wave than usual with the tide, a worse than usual visit to the city I called home for four years, the place I used to think was big and exciting when I was young and the city I used to associate with my grandmother and lemonade and cookies on the porch. I got older, the world moved on, and the associations got replaced with other visions and other memories that cut me through and feel more real. The memory of a lover who left, the memory of an almost-suicide, the memory of sleeplessness and therapy and depression, the memory of friends failing your trust, the memory of an almost-rape and violent thrust. Old, old, old. I'll rather have the lemonade, rather have the cookies, rather run around on the lawn while my grandfather sprays us with water and we laugh; rather have all the warmth and all the bike rides in the summer and that we used to take sticks and pierce through leaves while pretending we were printing ink in books. Instead I have the times I drank, the times we got high, the times you left me, the times you killed me, killed me, killed me.
It would be so much better if I had ceased to feel, ceased to care, if all the voices in my head had shut up, if it had all had at least made me into a convenient vegetable, then I could understand the point of all this madness that came by randomly but felt as if it was the universe's dark side directed against me personally. I wish it would have taught me not to fall in love with hopeless cases, taught me not to be a hopeless case, taught me not to drink so much, taught me not to care, not to think, not to thoughtlessly hook up, not to thoughtlessly fucking bother. No matter how many times you change the place you live the rest'll be there, luring in the background until it can stab you in the back. Even in a new place, full of new faces, there'll be the same drama, the same tension, the same human fucking disaster that's infected everything and everywhere. The difference is what you choose to do with it in the aspects that you still might have any chance to choose, any chance to affect. In Chasing Ella, Jake says to himself, 'I have to believe I am still in control, I have to believe I can still affect things' with the desire to be in control of what is going to happen and what he is going to do but even as conscious as he is about this he fails. We'll all fail. Even if there's no great destiny out there for us, even if you as Maddy describes in the same book only 'could be something', we still can't pick what's going to happen. We can plan perfectly where to live, what to study, where to work, but we can't choose what we're going to feel, and in my eyes that's what we're all down to in the end. Towards the end all you'll ever really be able to know is what YOU know, what YOU saw, what YOU felt. It makes no sense to dwell on what other people think or see or feel, or try to interpret what they mean by things, when you'll still never be able to quite fully figure them out; and still it's what we do, over and over again, in our meetings with others. We analyze and analyze and analyze and never get them figured out and we never get ourselves figured out and so we pay expensive money for some therapist to try and figure us out and do all the hard work for us. But what can they tell you that you don't already know? You can only know what you know. Experience points, my lad, is what it all comes down to in the end.
POET IN THE PONDERING ANARCHY ONLINE-ISH JAR