Fill in the Blank

I feel like Lenny Hayes. Of course the world wound't know Lenny Hayes yet. Lenny Hayes is this character I have in my head, a character specific to the stroy I'm writing, Italian Bakery. Lenny remains unknown as he remains to be published. But this is him, let me tell, as shortly as I can. Lenny is the typical jcok, quaterback of the football team, very well muscled and debonair with his smiles. In general his intelligence is barely skating along average but his thought processing holds such bars of complexity, that even I have a hard time understanding him sometimes--and I created him. While he is complicated, he is also simple minded. It's like he has two seperate parts, one that things all this big things and others that grasp and go dull in attempts to find meaning in the other half. All in all, Lenny is most confused by emotions. He can't figure them out most of the time, and when he think he has them figured out he is often wrong in his perceptions. Lenny's worst character flaw is that these emotions he can't figure out are all his own. And right now, I, like Lenny, cannot make means or sense form my emotions.

I know emotions are complicated, perhaps the most complicated part in human beings. So it should be logical that they are not easy to figure out. Yes, this is true, but I feel as though that truth should only hold to that of other people. It is easy to say the emotions of another human being are hard to figure out. We're complicated, simply mad people. But shouldn't someone be able to identity with their own emotions. Once again, yes, I know, complicated. But you're yourself, shouldn't you know yourself. You are sad or your are happy. You can have mixed emotions, but surely you can decipher the mixed emotions you half, mixed emotions are usually a balance of good and bad terms. Like, 'Hey, I'm excited to be going on this trip,' but also 'I'm not sure if I enjoy the idea of taking said trip in such a tiny vehicle.' But what happens when one doesn't know. Why can't I, for anything, figure out how I feel? I don't know. And that's the theme, right, I don't know. If I knew this would not be the post I was typing, perhaps something else, either happy or sad. But not this, this confusion. What am I really, a human being almost twenty something girl, sitting in a house not far from the beach mearly four days before Christmas. Yes, that sounds about like me. I can identify that. But, what, may I ask, is this girl feeling?
Is she sad because things aren't how they're supposed to be, it's not like Christmas usually is, she wants to go home to Montevallo, she is tired and everything, and doens't like traveling, and all the other complaints in the world? Yes, let me tell you, it is this. Maybe, are those even reasons to be sad? No, not really. It's selfishness. It's lacking in anything less than human. So many more have is worse than you. So yes sadness, no sadness.
And happiness, it is there too. Youa re with lovely people, have eating lovely food. There is a house over your head, you have a nice boyfreind and a ncie job. In a few days you're going to see your old friends, you're going to smell the smell of growing up, it's going to be Christmas. Yes, yes, yes...but no, no, no.

I don't know. I could say this, I have mixed emotions. But I don't, I don't feel sad. I don't feel happy. There isn't some sort of mixture of both. And at the same time there is not a lack of emotion. There is something there, there has to be or I wouldn't be human, right? I don't know. I can feel it, but I don't know the feeling. It's there, pushing on me like a heavy stone, harder and harder and harder. How can I escape it, or at least figure it out. In the background people are telling these wonderful Christmas stories, they are beautfil touching things. Shouldn't I feel somehow, how wonderful they are. And then I want to leave, I don't want to be here and not sure how it should be handled in the next two and a half weeks. I want to be at Montevallo, I need classes and organization. And most of all, I need to organize my new room. Bothered, blah...this is what? I can't see. I don't feel these things, and I do, all at the same time. They surround me and cover me, but I do not know them. Heavy stones, heavy stones, heavy stones.....

I do not what I want right now, wether it be effected by my emotions or not, I know what I want. I was to be alone, I want to have music. I want to be outside, in air that's not too cold or hot. Although, prefferably, a little more on the cool side. There should be a tress above me, wide braches reaching out in long arcs and curves. Light, from the golden sun dancing between white puffy clouds, will finds it's way between the leaves. It warms my face. And there are books and notebooks, I can write and read. I want this, or even something more simple. Can I somehow make a story to read from music and crawl myself between the notes and write about all my ficitonal characters. Ones like Lenny, who I know and don't know. Who like myself are there and present. I'm not making sense, I know. The sense I make is from my words, and while it may not be apparent it is here. I still don't know. Emotions are like games...I need to figure them out before winning.

Fin.
-Keshia

Currently Reading Just Listen by Sarah Dessen

There is good, there has to be.

"Humanity is good. Some people are terrible and broken but humanity is good. I believe that."
-Hank Green

Today twenty eight people died. I'm sure there are more people, of the billions in the world, who died today. But the twenty eight people I'm thinking of are the lives of a certain elementry school. There are no need for names, as the world I'm sure knows of this. What is worst, perhaps, is that twenty of those human beings were children. Children, who are happy and annoying all at the same time. I mean it, they can be such brats, with their demanding and spoiled attitudes. I mean it. In general, I am not a fan of children. But children, they are so wonderful too. Have you ever seen them when they're playing? They can see whole words, things we can never see. And it's like a miracle to watch them. And they wonder so far, they are so curious about the world. It is one thing to me to know that I do love that fact in children, the curiousity. Yes, know, ask questions. Please, I want you to know the world. I want to guide you in it. And maybe I am secretly a person who loves children, and maybe I will have them some day far for now. I really don't know. But I do know that the worlds they know are magic, it is something we are all born with and somehow all grow out of. When you were younger and you imagined things you saw them, you really, really saw them. Now, you can't, I know you can't. I can't. I use writing as my vice to try to capture the worlds of my youngers days. Children have a gift we do not possess. And others too. What else is a better gift in life than the potential that a human being possesses? Let me tell you what potential is, it's something lying in all of us that means we can do something, something big or small, it doesn't matter. But potential, it is how the world knew we existed. And children, they have more potential than us all, because they have yet to live their lives. They are living, and everyday the potential grows more and more. With that is beauty, the beauty that is hope. This little human being, what a miracolous thing they are, that you know they are going to grow up to leave something to the world. The only problem, though, is when they are robbed of their potential.

You know what I really think about when I think about the children who were lost today. I think about their hands. I think about how soft and small they were. Thier hands are no yet cracked or callussed. There are tight lines and cleanching fists. Scars can't be seen on their fingers. Instead, they are little things, soft and rounded, in all colors of the lightest pink to the darkest brown. And these hands, in my mind are always doing the same things. They are playing, grasping handfuls of sand to build a castle or clinging to the rope of a swing as their bodies bound in the air. In school the hands are scrawling on paper, witty little answers that they don't even see the human in. The hands can being things not so good either, shoving glue in the pink rosebud lips or sticking on forefinger into the nostril. And most of all I see them reaching toward the world that is all their own. Their hands are so unlike ours. They are hands they were once like ours but hands that we can never have again. You see, their hands are untouched by the world. Just soft things at play, things that do not yet know hardness. And this is what I see, this is what I keep trying to erase so badly from my head but I can't. I see these same hands, this gentle playing things, covered in blood.

I do not know the mind of the man who did this. I do not see how he is human, he must be broken. I know he has to be. I'm not angry at him either. I know the things he did were horrible. But when someone is so terribly broken, it not in my authority to judge the bad things they have done.They can't be judged on the same level as us because we are humans, whole pieces. They are not. People like the man today are no longer human. But I do know that these people exists, people like him who have broken to the point that they are not really heare anymore. And know, with them existing the worlds seems without hope but it is not. Like Hanke Green says, humantiy has to be good. I know that.

Sometimes when bad things happen it is easy for people to say the world is messed up. I can not see that as something that holds truth. There is bad. More bad in the world that there should be. But in spite of bad, there is good. There has to be good, because if there wasn't what else would t...

here be? I do not think there is a lesson to be learned in the recent events but I do think there is no cause for people to believe the whole of the world is wrapped in badness. Bad things happen, things that are out of our control. And I think it is our job as humans not to despise our world for its badness but to try our hardest to fix the broken bits that cause the bad.

Fin.
-Keshia

Currently Reading: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Irrevocably, a reader...

"At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.”

 

This is what you should know about me, I love reading. Other than writing I think there is nothing dearer to me in the world. And at some points I even question if I do love writing more, because there is so much more effort to it. And sometimes I don't like effort. But reading, reading is beautiful. I can't quite remember the moment when I first learned to read. The quote of above so eloquenty describes what I imagine the experience to be like. To me, though, I've always just read. There was never a point where I can remember not reading. I felt like Iwas born with it, this magic of reading, and in that it became me. When I was younger I would devour books, and I mean that only in the literal sense. A literal sense where I would pick up a bounded group of words and see them with my eyes and know something far greater than I knew before. Mom used to drop me off at the library during the summer, and I remember being in there with the golden sun spilling through the windows, lighting up the pages of all the books around me. It was so lovely, and there are few times in my childhood that I can say are happier than when I was in the library alone. Because those summers, they meant so much to me, they were some of the happiest things I know. And I've always liked everything too, as miracolous as it seems. It seems so to me that the world is beautiful and just because the world has books, books I feel just for me. But there's another magic to books, they are not just for me. They are for everyone. Have you ever just picked up a book and thought about how mnay other people have read it, thought about the miracle of it. In your hands are a thousand lives, lives of every person who touched the book and read it before. And you are connected, connected through the story of the book by the single string of the writer who wrote it. Don't you know thier soul is in there, a little part of them. You hold something so precious of them in your hands, and others have held it too. How, really, can that not be magic?

 

I've never understood people who do not like reading. Or people who make no efforts in reading. It's not within my mind to understand. How can you not read a novel and think of how wonderful it is? How can you see the words, the printed words on page all forming together in this interweaving puzzle that has meaning. It's so beautiful. And how can people not see that. One simply does not like reading, it can't happen in my mind. Perhaps that makes me sadder than anything else, that some can't see the beauty that is the written word. I just don't know. Have you ever read, really read then? Have you ever seen a sentence and thought how someone out there understands? Have you ever learned about a character, one so dear that any tragedy that befalls them pulls on your heartstrings? And most of all have you ever had the hope, when reading, that this is something more. These words, these people, the words they have are that unknown thing floating out in the universe. The thing we all want even when we don't know what it is. And they give you such a taste of it. But only a taste, the rest is for you to have and search for.

 

I really think maybe that's why I like writing so much. Reading has always been a part of me and in turn so is writing. You see, I want to share myself, I want to have some little girl in a library hold my book in her hands and know that someone else out there understands. And that in my words she experienced it, along with others, and felt it. The magic of reading, drawn instrinctly in by writing. It's incredible.

 

Life must be so sad for those in the wordl who don't read. Because to me it, and writing, are my vices of happiness.

 

Fin.

-Keshia

 

Currently Reading: Animal Farm by George Orwell