Cast Your Demons Aside

the Last thing I will Ever write about her

I painted our gilded past on yellowing parchment stained with saline and worthless words. The pen stuttered against the grain leaving the letters to lay in calamity. Sinking fast, bearing the weight of this heavy heart, I clung to the dreams we shared. Staggering, struggling, and holding my breath, I tried to equal her seductive silence. But it’s too late for redemption. My cavitied cadence faded quietly while I embraced the thick, sticky night. And as tremorous inhalations swallowed my heart, I whispered to that outstretched glimmer above, towards the Conscience who could no longer save me, “My heart—my heart will never love again.”   

Finding strength in music right now. Yeah, I’m avoiding writing right now, but dammit I’m having fun discovering all of these great, young, new bands from all over the world. My list of bands to feature on the podcast has grown beyond my control. At this rate, I’ll have a band to feature for every week of this year and into the next. Oops.

In other news, I’ve created a time management table in which I measure how much time I spend doing other things besides writing. So far, I’ve discovered that I don’t have very many hours in the day to write and I tend to waste what little hours I have by doing things that don’t necessarily need to be done. Tonight, for example, I just spent three-plus hours listening to new bands. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I avoided writing all the same. It just means that I have a lot of work to do this weekend.

Speaking of more work, I came up with another story idea today. Man, I wish I could slow my brain down enough to focus on just one idea at a time. I have a notebook full of ideas and intros to stories and only one of them is finished. This is my evil. Twelve years later and I still can’t figure myself out. Boo. 

I tend to not think before I say things aloud. I used to be self-conscious about that, but I’ve realized that I do it because I also tend to think about the words that I use to say those things. Doing so tells me a lot about my subconscious. And yours.

Too Tired to Go to Sleep. Too Weak to Follow Dreams.

I know I may have over thought the situation. I know that I most likely didn’t need to do it. But it was something that was bothering me over the last few days. You see, as I continue to try and make sense of my life, I tend to get too into my own head. And then I start to feel guilty for things that I probably shouldn’t feel guilty for. Confused? Yeah, sorry about that. I should have said that I sent Her and our friend an apology message for my actions in this post. I felt guilty for avoiding Her. I felt guilty for avoiding our friends because they were sitting with Her. And I couldn’t sleep last night because the guilt was overwhelming, so I sent apology messages to Her and our friend. 

And the worst part? Now I just feel stupid. But what can I do? Those messages exist now. I haven’t received an answer from either of them, and now I don’t really expect an answer from either of them. Especially from Her. I hate how much of me she still has. I hate that I know all of these things about myself and that I continue to make senseless mistakes. I hate that I’m too afraid to talk to people about these feeling welling up inside of me because I fear they are all starting to get sick of me being hung up on Her. And I hate that that fear always leads to me doing something stupid or unnecessary. And I hate that I can’t get to bed at a decent hour because my mind is so full of lists of things I need to do wrapped around my worries about Her and worries about my sister and all of her ridiculous teenage rebelliousness. I hate that spending more time with her over the last couple of months only culminated in a family intervention that ended after she told me to “Fuck off and die.” And what I hate the most is how selfish I am. I hate that I don’t care that she’s on a fast track to fucking up her life. I’m so wrapped up in my own shit that I don’t even know what to do anymore to help my parents. I tried talking to her. I tried listening to her. I tried offering advice. And I tried to simply be her big brother. Nothing’s worked and it’s made me feel like a failure. It makes me feel like I’ll be a terrible parent one day. And my sister, well, she is proof that there is some sort of magic that exists in the world, and she has always been my reminder of all of the things I believed about the world when I was nine years-old.

Back when I was seven or eight (I actually don’t remember, it could have been even earlier) my mom told me I was going to have a baby brother or sister. I was so incredibly excited as being an only child was beginning to bore me. But something went wrong and my mom lost that baby. I don’t really remember much from that time, but what I do remember is being about nine years old and begging my parents for a little sister. They simply laughed and smiled and told me they would do their best. Six months after my tenth birthday, my little sister was born and I was proudest, happiest big brother you would ever see. Believe me, I have the photos to prove it. I remember sitting in the hospital after school and being presented with a t-shirt that proudly exclaimed, “I AM the big brother!” and I remember seeing my baby sister for the first time. Even at ten years-old I understood that something special happened. I asked for a sister and poof! There she was right in front of me, eyes closed, hands balled into fists, lying peacefully in my mom’s arms. My mom wanted to name her Christine, but I insisted that we named her after a childhood friend of mine who had recently moved to Maine, and my parents were kind enough to listen to me. So, you see, my sister is more special to me than any other person in the world. More special to me than even She ever was. 

And now, as I watch her smoke weed, skip class, and continuously lie to myself and our parents, I can’t help but constantly be worried about her. And as she continues to feel invincible, all I can do is sit helplessly and watch, and pray that she figures herself out soon. I don’t even care about the weed. I’ve done my own research on the “drug” and it’s far more helpful than harmful, when used responsibly, anyway. And I don’t care about her skipping class. She gets good grades, but let’s face it, none of that matters past college. I do care about her lying and I do care about the unnecessary stress she creates fro our parents. In that intervention she told us that she feels suffocated at home, that the rules are too strict, and that she can’t wait to be 18 so she can move out. When I pointed out that when she’s home, she’s in her room and unbothered, and when I pointed out that her curfew is midnight (which we found out is actually later than all of her friends’ curfews), and when I pointed out that she doesn’t have to pay for her cell phone bill, car insurance, gas, food, etc., all she had to say was, “So?” I don’t know what it is inside her that makes her think her life is so hard, but it’s incredibly frustrating. And it kills me that I don’t care to do anything else to try and help her. Just like everyone else in my life (by that I mean, Her, of course) she’s made up her mind and there’s nothing I can do about it. 

And now? Well, now I get to sit and watch as everything I once believed in continues to crumble around me. A lot of the time I just want to stop being around, but then I remember that if I’m gone, my sister would never forgive me, my parents would never forgive her, and the world as we know it will most likely end. Sometimes I wish she was still that little three year-old girl that would grab my pinky and hold onto me everywhere I went. Those were the best days: me on the precipice of losing my innocence, her seemingly forever innocent. I wish we could’ve stayed that way forever.