Faith Clayton

More chaotic - No Relief.

Today is the first time I’ve listened to Placebo for quite a while. It was so strange because the first thing I felt like doing was crying. That seems like a pretty irrational feeling to have right off the bat but then again Placebo (whether or not they are a good band) ties into some of the most influential and memorable parts of my growing up. I spent a lot of time with a group of messed up individuals and God knows I was fucked up enough on my own. But it’s always been strange to me that, despite all the trauma and heart-ache and horrible things that took place during those years, I still remember them so fondly because even though my friends were fucked up and I was fucked up and we were all dealing with huge difficulties in our lives, we still managed to have a good time and we made a lot of great memories.

I guess I just miss the feeling of comradeship that I felt back then.

I’m not even sure why I’m writing this. I guess it makes me sad to look back on those days just as much as it makes me happy or nostalgic. I wish most of my friends from then weren’t teen moms or drug addicts or even recovering drug addicts. I wish none of them had ever touched meth or anything. I wish I still talked to people from school but what would we talk about? I’m so out of touch with my own generation, it’s pathetic.

There are days when I feel that I’m out of touch with everything - even myself. I used to be so passionate about so many things: music, books, art, expressing myself and learning. I drew and I painted. I wrote poetry and short stories. It wasn’t the greatest stuff but at least I was reaching. I don’t do anything anymore. I feel like the older I get, the more and more I lose bits of myself that were once significant parts of my being.

I don’t know how I can allow myself to watch as I fade away.

Any boy will kiss the scars on your arm. Very few will ever put forth the effort to find the ones that aren’t on the surface, and even fewer will bother to try and nurse wounds that they believe must surely be healed already.

There is no relief from this endless onslaught of bullshit, is there?

expectingrain:

I told my friend tonight that as soon as we stopped talking I realized how angry I was at you. Well, I said that I realized how much I hated you, but I am ashamed to have said that. All of these bad feelings can’t be good, can’t be something I should sanction. But still, I do— hate you, with a fury I have rarely known. Defeat? The fury of not being able, not being allowed, to level with someone with whom you once felt miraculous and transcendent. To know that I could sit with you and if you would look me in the eye, if you would not look away and we could both be honest with each other for two minutes, we would find great compassion— but to know that you wouldn’t, to know all the ways you hate me back, to know that our dismissal, our disgust, is mutual, is horrifying. To admit defeat only leaves me furious.

You are petty and a coward and a fool and a baby and I am all of those things, too. I think for both of our brains we are greatly off base. And I think that’s exactly what got us there.

When I am away from you like this, like always, like I always will be, I want to hit you, for all the ways my words couldn’t, didn’t. I want to scream and hit you like a toddler learning to fight.

But then I know that if I saw you out in the world I would be paralyzed, overwhelmed; and if you looked at me, truly, from your deepest, sweetest self, I might love you again.

And fuck you, really for that. Because that is something you would never give me.

And how is that any consolation? There is none to be had; I’m almost as lost as you are. You’ll find someone else to idealize and then back away from, someone else to fulfill your pathological ideas about the world and yourself. Maybe no one will try as hard as I did, maybe the next girl will have more dignity, more self-preservation. I don’t; I’d give it all up for the chance to change someone’s mind about me, as if that’s really what it’s all about.

And so I will keep trying to convince everyone and you will keep trying to convince yourself otherwise and maybe I’ll see you in the street one day and cross to the other side.