Some Things One Can't Deny (are as follows)...

When I was seven, I thought that by the time I was thirteen I wouldn’t be afraid of the dark anymore. When I was thirteen, I thought, “Well, maybe by the time I’m twenty.” Wrong again, but surely by twenty-five...

I don't understand why I worry so much.

I just do, and what used to matter doesn't anymore. Not as much; not with this rush rush rush and all the running I have been doing.

And talking; so much talking. Saying so much to say nothing. Saying so much to change nothing; to change everything.

Can we pretend I am mute? I am so primitive when I speak aloud—tongue-tied and stumbling—but when I write it is so much easier to say what I want to.
Please, oh please can we just pass notes across the table?

I’m realizing my stories are empty anyway; what do I have to tell? I have no justification for these words that keep pouring from me, so maybe it’s for the best that I feel I am running out.
That I want to say no; wait—just wait a second, or a year. Let me remember a few things—let me stop and breathe and remember what its like to be alone—and I’ll be ok again.
I’m so tired in this rush but I can’t stop, or my kite will catch up to me and I’ll be once more dragged down by the dead weight of summer.

My kite’s name is Despondency. Over the summer I sat still and it hovered over me constantly. Now autumn has come and I run ahead to play in the leaves, to revel in all a change has to offer, but Despondency is only behind me until I am still again; until I’m too tired to run anymore and have to rest. Then it catches up, hovering above so its shadow tucks me in too tight, like an obsessive-compulsive mother.

So to escape it I keep moving. Sometimes I can run and dance laugh with people, but when I can’t do that anymore I still am intent upon fleeing my kite, whose string seems to be tied tightly around my wrist. Too tightly—it cuts off the circulation and with every step I feel a numb tug on my hand, confirming the continual presence of my follower. I’ll stagger and limp and stumble and even occasionally crawl and thoroughly exhaust myself far beyond what I should, because when I stop for too long it settles on me, like a strange and loyal bird whose parroted phrases I am sick of hearing.

Its enough to make me think about going crazy. Not consider doing so, but just think about what it would be like; how it might progress and how I might end up. Sometimes I think it might be kind of nice to be a little crazy, just enough for people to shrug it off when you do something odd. Then I wonder, why don’t I just do those things—those odd things I want to do but don’t because of people? Then I remember that it’s all well and good to cling to cliches like, “dance like no one is watching and sing as if no one is listening”, but it’s a very rare person who is really able to do that. And that I try so hard just to engage in the basics of life that I don’t have it in me, the effort it takes to not care.

So I figure that if I was a little off my rocker, it wouldn’t be so hard—not to care, that is—and I think about what I’d do, if I was a crazy person. If I just did what sounded nice.

I would spend a lot of time in airports, probably. I don’t know why I like them so much. I know what I like about them, but not why I like those things.
I know that I like the hurried people all embarking on journeys so many miles long; I know I like the high ceilings and echoes, the gift shops full of cheap paperbacks and a Starbucks not ten feet away in every direction.

I like the presence of so many people in uniforms, standing everywhere talking into loud speakers, and the extremity of their competent authority makes me feel safe, like a child. Like if I get lost its ok, because all I’d need to do is tug on one of those starched white sleeves and they’d help me get home again.
I like that there is so much happening all around me, like there’s a storm blowing around me and I am in the midst of it, yet I am the only thing not spinning. Like others are off on these big adventures and soon I will dive in and ride the thrilling currents along with them, but until then I can just sit back and marvel; just observe and breathe, reveling in the anticipation of promised excitement.

I like to feel small, like I’m just one in billions and the world out there holds so much more than I could ever hope to understand; so much bigger than I could ever begin to imagine. Airports make me feel that way.

But there’s a bad kind of crazy too; one I don’t like to dwell on, and so of course I worry about it, too.

What if I have kids someday, and have postpartum depression and kill them? If someone can’t control their sanity, how can we not live in fear of turning into the monsters we see on TV, the ones that shock us so much? Something short-circuits in the brain and that’s it—you can’t stop yourself from killing your kids or bombing a bus or screwing a goat or a corpse. I know I’m being morbid, but that only proves my point that normal people don’t do those things. Normal people are shocked and repulsed by those things. Only crazy people do those things, and people don’t choose to go crazy. Those same people can't choose to return to sanity.

So what happens then? What happens when it’s me? When it’s you? You think it’s right, whatever it is. You don’t know the difference, and all that’s left to make you human is that God still loves you. And that, somehow, the fact remains that you’re made in His image.

How does that sound, to think that Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy Jr. and Charles Manson and Edward Gein still had the breath of God in them? How does it feel, to know that you’re the same as them in so many ways? That we’re all the same?

Keep an eye on the chemicals in your brain; make sure to regulate the function of your neuroreceptors. Too much, too little, a tiny little glitch and maybe then…
Is it your fault, if you’re off balance? Where’s the line between responsibility and an insanity plea?

What do you do, when your baby’s dying and the water’s running hot hot why is it so hot and fingers find their way to your throat and when you realize they’re yours somehow it makes perfect sense in the mind of this animal that is you?

Maybe that’s something you don’t want to think about. I didn’t particularly want to think about it either, but majoring in psychology/criminal justice sometimes brings rotten thoughts to the stoop of your mind and leaves them there for you to dispose of on your own. Sometimes you have to touch them to make them go away.

And that’s all I’m doing, note after note, post after post of empty entries and writing—disposing of notions left to fester by inconsiderate circumstance; just my irrelevant shells of whatever. And I dump it on to paper, on to you and on to You, so that this waste—these apple cores and orange peels, coffee grounds and words—don’t hem me in the way everything else seems to grow to eventually do.