I Am Not A Number. I am a HUMAN BEING.

There are times in my life where I am absolutely astounded that I have thoughts and feelings and motivations apart from the people around me, and that they have thoughts and emotions apart from mine. It's hard to explain exactly why this mini-revelation always manages to make me stop in my tracks, but it always does, and every time I feel like I'm getting closer to whatever it is I'm supposed to be “figuring out” as a teenager.

I suppose one of the reasons I'm thinking about this now (and I am not entirely sure why these two things are related, I only know that, somehow, they are) is because another quarter is ending at school, and my grades, as always, are simply horrendous, as they have been for years now. My mother simply adores reminding me of this factoid.

Understand, I am not an unintelligent person. I know I'm entirely capable of comprehending the coursework and doing the homework and passing the exams (with the possible exception of my college-level foreign language, which I am struggling to understand.) I just... don't do the work. I don't do it, and I have no good excuse, and I know that. And I suppose that's where the understanding that I have my own separate thoughts comes in—if I thought about it, I would probably be able to sit down, do my homework, and be done. But I feel like all of these other thoughts are so much more important!

Think about it; I'd rather be able to keep myself from having emotional breakdowns than memorize the formula for statistics that isn't ever useful outside of class. I'd rather learn how to connect and relate with people in my life than take notes on the economy of Europe during our Civil War. I'd rather be on my bike than in a desk. I'd rather be having semi-philosophical, fulfilling conversations with my friends about God and religion and the possibility of an afterlife than sitting in English, beating the symbolism of Huck Finn into the ground. (This is not to say I don't see the value in the symbolism of Huck Finn. I just think we're severely limited by the intellect of select individuals within the classroom and the low expectations that our teachers have for our ability to grasp deeper concepts and meanings.)

I suppose I'm one of those “hippie-people” who feels they would learn better sitting in a bean-bag chair in a field or on a tree-limb reading a book. I feel like all of the valuable things I have learned in my life were learned outside of school—every single valuable lesson or moral I can think of was something I was taught by a friend or discovered by myself, far away from the rigid, conformist, unchanging structure of a public, windowless, required-attendance school. But you know what? That's exactly how I feel. Sure, I like learning new things. Yes, I suppose I'd love to go to college someday. But I'm not going to place all of my effort and my most valuable thoughts and revelations into a form that will fit on a standardized test!

These thoughts and emotions and ideas and discoveries, they are my own. And shoving them aside to with within the straight lines of a school that lines up with the self-imposed boundaries of a classroom seems entirely pointless and stupid. “Yes Mom, I want to go to college. Yes, Mom, I'll take the practice ACT/SAT. Yes Mom, I know I'm smart. YES, Mom! I know my GPA sucks!” But you know what? I don't think I'm defined by a number. Not my grade, not my age, not my IQ or GPA or my goddamned standardized test scores! And you may think that “that's how the world will view you,” but you know what? I don't. I don't think anyone's going to look at a bunch of numbers and decide whether or not I'm worth their time. And if they do? Well, then, they're not worth my time.

I know so many beautiful souls in this world, and not a single one of them cares what my grades are like. And I'm not saying I'm going to completely blow them off—I do want to be able to make a living someday, yes. But I refuse to waste all of this precious time and all of these thoughts like jewels on a school that sucks them up like spaghetti noodles and spits them out as gray-flannel-suit suburban business-people. I do not want to be one of those people. I AM NOT one of those people. I am not.

And I am extremely proud of that.

Insecurities at Seven A.M.

I doubt I'll ever be completely secure in knowing that someone else honestly loves me.

I'm not entirely certain that this insecurity came from someone or something outside of myself; it seems to me to be a nature/nurture cross. But it's possible that I can't see it clearly, and it's one or the other.

In the end, it doesn't matter. The point is, I start to doubt. Worse than that, I begin to suspect. Suspect that the person who swears up and down and backwards that they love me is lying to placate me, to make me less of a psychotic bitch, to make their life easier until they can find a way to leave me.

My best friends would call this fear and suspicion completely unfounded, but I... do not. The concept of friends has finally grown normal to me, but within my close-knit group of friends, I think we have enough drama, love, betrayal, and heartbreak to last each one of us a lifetime, or damn close to it. I have seen and heard the lie “I love you” hundreds of times. And I am always petrified that the people who tell me they love me are doing the same thing—lying.

I feel terrible about this, because I know there are people in my life who honestly do care. I have several best friends, other close friends, and a boyfriend who is so sweet I can't even begin to describe it. (The fact that this description contradicts my post about kitchens doesn't surprise me.)

But I'm still afraid. No so much about the best friends, because I think I finally get that they love me for better or worse... but about my boyfriend. I'm petrified that I'm not good enough for him, or that I'm turning into his ex-girlfriend, or that I'm manipulating him or making his life harder or worse. I'm scared that, despite the swearing and promising, I'm getting in his way somehow. That I am not good enough.

And I guess there isn't much else to say on that subject, except to promise him for the thousandth time that I love him, and that won't change.

Observations

So, I'm writing this in the middle of the night on my cell and sending it to my email (in a picture message for the higher character limit). I have to do it now, and get the thoughts out of my head.

Today I started thinking that there are certain things in life that you just have to sit back and watch. Not like a good movie from the safety of your favorite chair, but more like... a car crash. picture this: You're second in line at a red light, and you can only watch as the car in front of you accelerates at suicidal speeds into the oncoming traffic. you can smell the burning rubber of the tires and hear the scree-CRUNCH and the music of broken glass and mangled metal. And It's already too late. And you can't do anything but sit and watch.

I'm watching a friend of mine walk to the edge of a cliff. She won't listen when we tell her there are other ways to the bottom, or that she could, at the very least, grab on to the passing para-gliders and get some help. No. She's convinced that walking straight off the edge of this cliff is the only way. I've screamed myself hoarse trying to talk her down, and I am not the only one, but she refuses to listen. She hangs her toes over the edge, shuts her eyes, and pretends not to hear us.

I'm starting to think she likes the Gothic beauty of a suicidal leap.

I'm one of those people who always ends up sitting out and watching. There are some small renovations going on in my basement right now, and as I went down today to check if there was anything I could do to help, I ended up sitting on the stairs and watching the men struggle with the awkward entertainment cabinet that was custom-built by the previous residents. I don't quite recall taking a seat on the step, but I did what I always do in cases like this—I sat, watched, and forgot I was doing so while I did it. What I mean to say is that, many times, when I find myself standing off to the side and observing something, I forget that I'm actually, physically there, taking up and sometimes getting in the way. I get so absorbed in the action I am watching that It's almost an other-world experience of some sort; I'm almost always entirely fascinated. So I just sit back and watch.

Maybe that's why we plop ourselves in front of the TV so readily, sucking up images of devastation in foreign countries and pretty news anchors in borderline-tacky clothing—because in all of us, there's this ingrained desire to sit back and watch.

After all, if we're the ones watching, then the bad things are not happening to us, are they?

The Kitchen Counter

This post was prompted by Write One Leaf, and the prompt was, “Write One Leaf about something you do in the kitchen.”

I don't spend much time in any sort of kitchen, really. No one in my family cooks much, and my kitchen table is actually in a half-dining-room area caught in the triangle of the stairs, the living room, and the actual kitchen. So, while whichever laptop at my mother's I am using usually rests on the kitchen table, I am rarely in the kitchen itself.

No, it's not my kitchen that came to mind when I read the prompt, which I got through Twitter on my phone in the middle of class one day. It was my boyfriend's kitchen. Particularly, my boyfriend's kitchen counter. And though this deems to digress from the prompt itself, it doesn't bother me too much. This is a place for confessions and truths, after all, and this is one that seems to have been surfacing in my mind a lot lately.

When my boyfriend and I started going out, I was able to take the bus to his house straight after school for one main reason—my mother didn't know we were together. I also told her I was going to a different friend's house every so often, so it hid some of the frequency with which these rendezvous actually occurred. (Using the word rendezvous seems over-dramatized, but it's the closest I can come to what they actually were.) At any rate, what happened was I was able to go home with him straight away after school and stay for hours. At least two of those hours were completely unsupervised—just him and me, and his dog, who is adorable, and who always managed to trip us as we walked in his front door, too wrapped up in our kissing to notice him getting underfoot.

Let me say this now to avoid misconceptions—we did not have sex then, and we have not had sex yet, and we have no immediate plans to change the fact that we are both virgins right now. This, of course, doesn't mean that we didn't take advantage of the supreme amount of alone time given to us. We most certainly did. Most times we'd go into his room, shut the door, and be generally all over each other until we either reached a limit or at least one of us was too strung out and high up and full of sleepy endorphins to keep going. There were times I think he came three or four times in an hour and a half, and that was before I'd even started giving him the hand-jobs. So, yes, we did enjoy the time alone. Very much so.

After we'd decided to stop being completely horny adolescents for the time being, we'd usually end up wandering into his kitchen for food or something to drink. One of the first times we did this, I ended up leaning with my lower back resting on the edge of his counter and my hands behind me to support my weight as he rummaged through the fridge. I can't quite remember why, but he gave up his search for food and turned back to me, and suddenly he was pressed up against me, his entire body resting inch-to-inch along mine. We started kissing, but I couldn't focus on it—my mind was completely consumed by the feeling of his strength pressing me up against the hard edge of the counter. His hips were hard on mine, and the solidness behind me only added to the thrill.

I can't really explain why making out in that spot turns me on so much. Perhaps its the way it seems like he's in total control, like a 1950s husband come home from a day at work to find his wife in the kitchen. I think a lot of it is the domination aspect of it in general, really. Both my boyfriend and myself like to be under someone else's control, and I happen to be better at switching than he is, so I end up in the driver's seat, so to speak, much more often than I'd like. But when he presses me up against the almost-sharp edge of the Formica counter top... my mind goes blank and my knees nearly give out, every time, and I don't think he knows it.

Now, I'm not a person who fantasizes a lot, unlike a few of my friends who will text me nearly every day with some new, kinky location for a future sexual exploit. But I do fantasize about this. I want to get to the point someday where he's more comfortable with being in control, and I want him to take me into his kitchen, pin me up against the counter, and fuck me.

I want it to be rough. I want duct tape over my mouth and maybe around my wrists. I want a purple-black-blue bruise across my back where the edge of the counter dug into my flesh. I want it to throb like a brand for days, a reminder of it all. I want every bit of him pressed onto every bit of me, skin on skin, in someplace as mundane and seemingly taboo as the middle of his parents' kitchen. (Because its not really his, is it? No. Not really.)

So... there you have it. One leaf about something I do in the kitchen... or will do. Someday. I hope.

Introduction

As I'm writing this, I have yet to choose the name of the the blog it will eventually introduce. I'm hoping that maybe I'll be able to discover one that fits within the assorted tumbling thoughts that end up on the virtual page.

I want to tell you what this is. This is a collection of transcribed revelations of a mind that is not naïve enough to call itself experienced. (Does that contradict itself? If I'm not naïve enough not know that I am naïve, does that lend me experience? I think not, but perhaps I'm wrong.) This is the place where the most important things go. And this is anonymous, disconnected not from reality but from the life within the reality from which it stems. This is not the only place I exist on the internet, and I have no doubt that some of you who are reading this know me from elsewhere. I can ask only that you not use my name if you decide you need to comment here; call me whatever it is I have decided to call myself. I haven't chosen that yet, either.

Apart from this being a shelf of sorts for my ideas and philosophies, this is also practice. I've been writing for seven years (which is a lot for a girl of my age, but I dislike the idea of telling you how old I actually am), and I've called myself a writer for maybe four or five of those. But recently I've stopped writing. I've lost the ability to stay coherent and eloquent for any extended period of time. I could blame school, as I am still a student; I could blame technology, and the unceasingly increasing amount of hyperactivity produced by things like Twitter, Facebook, and the like; I could blame lack of subject matter and new situations—I am not known for being an extroverted, try-everything-once type of person; I could blame that relative lack of life experience that I mentioned earlier. But in the end, I know the blame falls completely onto myself. I have stopped viewing the world as something to record, and I've started looking at is as something tom experience, to live and breathe and take in. And that is good. I like it.

But I can't forget how to write, because life cannot always be like this.

I don't usually label myself an optimist or a pessimist, because whether I'm one or the other often depends on the emotional climate in my immediate vicinity or the events of the most recent few days, but when I stop, take a breath, and force myself to be honest within my own mind, I have to admit that at my center, I have the smallest, indestructible grain of pessimism. It whispers in the back of my head, reminding me of everything I hate and the disturbing things I've learned that I wish I didn't know. It's also the voice which nags me to write; something, anything. Scraps on restaurant napkins that will get thrown away or poems in the backs of my school notebooks. It tells me to write because, one day, life will go back to being closed off and dark and quite solitary, and I must have something within my own power to help me keep my sanity.

I think that voice is right.

I almost hate to type it, because I feel so strongly the opposite of that right now—life is bright and new and exciting and just generally good—but I know it's true. It's a distinct possibility, even a probability, that in the many years that comprise the rest of my life, I will be set down gently or dropped like a heavy box where the bottom gave way and the items it held came tumbling out, scattering across some rough and heated summer pavement. And all I will have to fall back on when the sodden cardboard finally gives way with a wet, slow sort of tear, will be my writing. My thoughts, my words, and the shape of my own handwriting on paper. (I write best in longhand when I'm overwhelmed, over-full with emotion that's negative. Typing works best for me if I'm happy.)

To double back to my original point, I am writing this for myself as well as all the eyes that ever take it in. And I am not without inspiration. Nightmare Brunette (found here on Blogger and also on Tumblr) and the now-deactivated turntowards of Tumblr both offer a continuous font of ideas, styles, and influence. They (NB in particular) are what inspired me to do this.

So. Are you going to join me on this journey? I'd be glad to have you.