Evaline

I can't keep up this "no sleeping" thing. It's driving me insane. I keep waking up in the middle of the night thinking that I want to run a marathon or become an astronaut or meet Shakespeare and tell him he's kind of a prick. But then it's two in the afternoon and my brain only says one thing: "Sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep." Or I'm in the middle of physics and I can't help thinking, "Jesus. I really just don't care."

***

I finally got around to describing the difference between a person and the idea of a person. It sort of made my brain hurt. I think I'm made of really mushy spaghetti. (?????)

The idea is a cardboard box. The person is a child who sees the box as a spaceship or a race car or a new hairdo or a drum kit or an ice cream stand or a podium or a hat or anything imaginable. The idea is the box. The idea is that you are whole and complete and the space between you and the walls of the box are nonexistent. You are a rock. You do not waiver or change; that is how you are. Your actions and opinions are, simply, always predictable.

The idea of a person is that they are not only completely stereotypable, easily packed away into a neat little box, but also that this thing they are now does not change. Their reactions to situations are predictable and absolute. They cannot surprise you because they do not have the depth to be anything other than what you see them to be, what you expect them to be.

Ideas are whole, a complete sphere. People themselves aren’t like that. A person, when understood, reveals the ways their sphere is shaved down in some places, they have chunks missing here or there. Some are flat on the bottom so as not to roll away. People vary wildly and by perpetuating the idea that those you do not understand are a full sphere, it becomes difficult to understand and accept a person when they do eventually reveal faults or quirks. When you’re walking down the street, it is difficult to imagine that everyone around you has a family and someone they care about and a crippling fear and a hundred childhood memories and someone they miss and some aspect of their life that they’re working on. It’s difficult to do when your view of the world is small; the people who live within the world have to be small and uncomplicated. If they are not, you cannot understand them. It’s almost as if there isn’t enough space inside of your brain to store and accept the many different moving pieces that create a human being. People have so many more layers than you can imagine and even without knowing what lies beneath each layer, we can still imagine that there is much more to them than can be gleaned from a cursory glance. If we don’t imagine people complexly, we reinforce the idea that having depth makes one strange, that complexity is something shameful when really it exists inside of every human being.

***

I mean, things have been pretty okay. I say this hesitantly because of a fear that I will suddenly fail all of my classes or spiral for no apparent reason or that every song I've ever listened to will turn terrible. But ya know, things are tentatively okay. Except for the not sleeping and the fact that my brain is in overdrive and that I keep wanting to pace but can't because of Christine and I's outrageously small room.

Anyway, do you ever feel like there are certain songs that you can't give out, that you can't share with anyone for fear of revealing too much about yourself? Are there songs that present your soul too plainly for you to share with anyone? Nope? Just me? Fine. Fine. Okay. 

Do you ever sleep with your feet where your head usually goes and then wondering if you're sleeping on the ghosts of all the feet that have slept there? Or the phantoms of however many socks have been kicked off there?

I believe I've begun the slow descent into insanity. I think it will start out slowly and then at some point the slide will become extremely slippery and I'll be incapable of controlling my fall... And now the weather!

"Pull me closer, hold me tighter
Take me down, take me down, take me down

Won't you cover my skin with your sunkissed light
There's a bonfire burning tonight
We could be all right
Evaline, Evaline, Evaline, Evaline"

I'd rather have a cookie, but a medal's fine too.