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

It's a Sniper.

You know, I've almost had this blog for two years. I started it on November 28th, 2010. I'm only lacking four days from my anniversery. I think maybe in the start I planned on blogging a lot. I talked about Anne Frank, my writing inspiration in nearly anything personal. But I really haven't, I've never been consistent with the blog. And I would promise now, but I can't. Why make promises when they're so fragile, I know I won't be in here all the time. This blog is here for me when it is needed. And that's good, good for me and for the people who read it. Though, honestly, over the past two years I only think there are about maybe eight or nine people who have read my blog. And if you're not in that group, let me know. Who are you? Why are you out there? And it seems to me there would be no reason for someone to read my blog, unless they really wanted to know. That doesn't seem to fit in the pattern of my life, I want to know people, I really do. If I was find out if anyone in my life kept a blog I would actively read it, but you know, they don't. And somehow in turn no one really wants to know about me. I mean, maybe there is someone who does, but really there seems to not be. I don't know. And how self-centered is that, I want people to really want to know me. It's like I'm waving a flaming flag in the air and saying, 'Here! Look at me! I'm right here!", but no one ever looks. And if people do look they don't see, not really, they see the outside. Here I am, here is your perception of me. Would you like that on a silver platter? Because I know, I just know, that you won't make the effort to see beyond. And really, why would you.

Let me tell you this, loneliness, she is a sneaky little bitch. She's like this. Imagine me, perfectly content and happy, and then there's my loneliness, living in the back of my mind, waiting to pounce. And she does, all the time. I know she's there too, hiding in the back of me at all times, but yet every time she attacks I am surprised. And it's that surprise, the surprise that hurts me the most. Shouldn't I know I am a lonely person? I know myself, right, or at least part of it. That loneliness, it should be part of the things I know. But I don't. I really don't, and it scares me. There's so much dimension too it than just meets the eye too, because it's substance comes from the moments that the loneliness chooses to appear. Hear me out , okay? I feel less lonely when I'm physically alone than I would when I am surrounded by a group of people. At least when I'm alone, I mean really alone, I have my music, and books, and writing. And they, they are such good friends to me, they keep the loneliness at bay. But with others, with people, it's so ahrd not to feel it. It's like I with them and I know. I can tell from their attitudes, their gestures, their everything. My presence in their lives is fleeting, without me there would no difference, and even if I was to leave than perhaps it would even be better. And I try to be normal, I really do. Normalcy is the hardest thing to grasp. I mean, I speak and I amke jokes and I smile but I can't help but thinking in my mind if they even hear me. Can they really see me? And they can't, they can't understand me. And I'm screaming in my head, it's a torture. Can't you see me!?! Can't you hear!?!
I just want so badly to truly be seen that I don't even no how to handle myself. I don't even know if I can function around people anymore. I mean I can. I am the best actress in the world when it comes to pretending things are okay. I really am. But I'm not, because it hurts. It hurts a lot that no one cares to really no.
And this, this is the worst part. My loneliness it something that has become part of me. I just know it's there. I just know no one will understand me. That's a such a teenager move, I know. But people don't, they really don't. And it's not the lack of understanding that causes the hurt. It's something else. It's the fact that no one even wants to understand. No one even tries to care.
I don't even know if I want someone to understand, because I really think they never will. But I do wish that they would try. Do you know how great it feels for someone to really, really care? Even if they don't care, but they care enough to try. I don't have that. I don't even know if I have friends at all. And the uncertaintity of it hurts me so much. I just, I want to know that someone really cares.
A lot of people say they care but they don't. But really, most of them, most of them just ignore it, ignore me. They walk around pretending they know me or maybe not and they don't see. They don't want to see.

I know I need to stop thinking about this but I really can't. I don't need someone to understand, I need someone to try to. Because no one is.

Fin.
-Keshia

You know.

I've always wanted to imagine this, that I'm like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. You see, Elizabeth really has no remarkable quailty about her appearence, only that she has fine eyes. And I know people are more then just appearences I'd like to think I have fine eyes, or at least eyes that like to see. But really, I'm not here to talk about appearences.

Let me let you know what is happening right now. I am in Orange Beach, in a cozy little house that belongs to John's family. It's half past midnight and in the twin bed beside my bed John is trying to sleep. I am trying to type lightly as not to wake him. And I could sleep, I really could, but I have these feels, all these feels. And I don't know what to do with them other than write. It seems that there is no other option. At least not for me. And I wish it was like that way for the rest of the world. Because really, I admire anyone who can quantify their feelings in the written world. And because it helps me understand myself, and surely if other people wrote then I could obtain a better understanding of them.

Okay, concentrate. There is this. When I was younger and in elementry school we had this kind of festival every year. It was a thing were the playground was turned into something spectacular, filled with little games that gave you prizes and stands that fed you hotdogs and snowcones. Of course, though, you had to buy tickets to do these things, four tickets per dollar. I remember so clearly the raw, unadulterated jealousy I felt for kids who would bring in twenty dollar bills like it was no big deal and walk away with a handful of tickets. I always had five dollars, twenty tickets to spare. I was an organized kid, just like I am an organized person now (okay, I admit, not exactly organized, just OCD to an extreme level) and I tried to balance my tickets. I spent about 75% of them on games (where I could earn back their value in prizes) and  about 25% on food (a corndog, snowcone, and drink.) But I always saved three tickets for one particular thing. Something I did for the first time in kindegarten, and something that became a tradition for my next five years of gradeschool. I got a balloon. The balloon stand was near this little red shed we kept on the playground. A red shed which at anytime in the year could be opened by a magical set of keys owned by the P.E. teacher, hidden in it jumprops, hulahoops, basketballs, scooters, and other toys that told us we had a free day in PE. But the balloon, getting back on subject. Every year, I got a different color, and I can only remember the color the first year, it was a bright emarald green. I remember loving the helium tanks, how they were like big, tube shaped, silver robots who could fill the balloon until it could fly. But its flight was stopped by a ribbon attatched to it that was then given to the secure hold of your hand.
That first year I got my green balloon and went out to this little field beside our playground. It was the place where we would sometimes have kickball matches. And when I was in the field, I let go of the balloon and I watched it rise, it's greenness bright amoung the pale blue sky and fluffy white clouds. And I watched it, as it floated further and further. I watched it until my eyes watered from looking so hard and it became a tiny black dot on the skyline that dissapeared suddenly, sucked up by the vaccumm that was the sky and my vision which couldn't hold out longer. And somehow I did this again next year, and the year after that, and so on and so forth.
I remember the feels I had when I let the balloon release. How it wad the immiediate sense of loss, how for one scrambling moment I wanted to jump out and grab the string just so the balloon would be mine again. And then the wonder, wonder as the balloon dance and and bobbed in the wind as it carried on higher. This was followed shortly after by jealousy, jealousy because I wanted to float away like the balloon. And then there was a peaceful happiness, happiness because I had set the balloon free to the world. And finaly just the desperate looking, the struggle just to keep the balloon in my sight. I never wanted it to dissappear. But it did.

You know, I really have no idea what I'm saying with this. Don't pay attention to me.

Fin.
Keshia

Currently Reading: Holes by Louis Sacher

Impetus

There's a thing that is very upsetting to me about other human beings. It's not nesscarily something that would upset they, themselves, but to me it seems too horrible. And I know I've talked about this before. I just have to revisit it, because I really feel like it something that drives into my brain day in and day out. And I just can't understand it. I can't understand the fundamentals in other human beings.

Everthing in my life is driven by my passions. I'm really not a person who does things in my life that I'm passionate for. And I don't understand that, how people can do things in life that they're not passionate for. How can you do something when you know you don't want to? And the whole time there is a pulling in you, a pulling to do something else, something that you're really passionate about. Is it because people are scared? I can understand the fear, I really can. Sometimes passions in life are overwhelming, particuarly in the ones that it seems to shape your lives. Since I'm in college, i'm surrounded by the shaping on lives everyday. There are so many of us, all bright and merry. We are preparing for our future careers. But really, how many of us will actually get our careers? And I think, really, that is what instills the fear the most. One phrase I hate more than anything, because pehaps it's the saddest thing to hear, is when people say they want to do something but they can't because they can't make a career out of it, they can't make any money. And I understand that so well, I really do. Humans have to have material things, it's an impossibility not to. But it seems so terribly sad to me that people can't follow thier passions for fear that they will not make anything off of them. And I think we're all born with passions, and because of that we were meant to follow them. The way of our life should not shape our passions, they are an essential part of us that just are us. Like me, I want to be a writer, and where can I find a career in that? I really can't, there is no value unless I sell books really well. And I know I can teach too, but really it's one of my smaller passions. It can be put off, but my passion in writing can't. I just have to write, and it seems to me if I was in a world where I couldn't write, because I did not follow my passions, then I would go insane.

It's like this. My dream life would be sitting in library all day, full of wonderful books to read and lots of empty notebooks for me to fill up with my thoughts. And in this dream, I have no need for money. I just need my passions.

Fin.
Keshia

Currently Reading: Like the Red Panda by Andrea Siegal

The shy, dark bird.

Sometimes the world has to be a bit unbalanced with things. It's like this. The good has to outweigh the bad for the bit and then the bad has to outweigh the good. It's never at a balance, really. I am okay, don't believe me. There is either too much bad or too much good.
And the hardest part about the good is that it's simply too hard to accept. I'm too busy waiting on the bad to come that my mind can't even be preoccupied with the goodness. It's like the goodness isn't even something that becomes me, it's just there. Kind the opposite of the bad, it sinks into my pores and makes develish little parties all through out me. And espicially at night, it celebrates and dances, all through my brain, giving me thoughts. I think of everything in the bad. I think about how people feel oblidged to me now. I think of the person I used to be, how happiness was so easily achieved. And it gets even worse, I watch my Youtube videos or I look at the pictures and I don't even know who the person in them was. And I'm not even eternally depressed. It's just this, kind of a neautral ground to everything. I am aware of the things that make me sad and yet they don't really make me sad. Instead, I just think about them and they float around in my brain, reminding me of a lot. Making wonder who I am and who I used to be and what part of me is even me.
And then good can't even capture me, he hardly even comes to me. It surrounds me but never becomes part of me. And I don't know why, there is so much good. I am at a beautiful college cmapus, surrounded by freinds who think I'm okay, I am doing decent in my classes, and so much more. There's no good to it, though, no good that can penetrate into me. And I don't know either, because I don't feel it.
I want to be that stone wall, but I'm not the stone wall I once wanted to be. But this isn't a stone wall, this pushes back too much. I'm not pushing, I'm reaching and getting no enough back. This happens, this happens way too much. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Help me.

I am so seemingly different right now. I'm okay, unbalanced but okay.

I don't know. I just think of it in this way. Sometimes when you're walking in the park and you see this one long bird, high on the treebranch, the little weak end of it that looks like it will snap off in the wind. And it's a cold day, with low lying cool gray clouds, and a calm humidity in the air. You're on a park bench, with your hands pressed into the soft pockets of your jacket to keep them from the chill. The grass looks light green, slightly yellowed but damp from the melting of the morning dew. And the gray sidewalk looks almost the same shade of the sky, so you look up and instead of seeing the sky you see the bird, with it's black wings so dark there are shades of deep purple and green buried into it. And the bird turns it's head and looks at you, then with a silent nod it lifts it's wings and flies away.


Fin.
-Keshia

#103/100 Books in 2012: A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb

Pandemonium

"You'll never know the true value of a moment until it becomes a memory"

Sometimes I just get really anxious with my life. I'm not sure how. I try to watch videos, I try to read, I try to occupy myself in any way, shape, or form and it doesn't really work. So I guess I'd be restless, not anxious. But I'm always anxious when I'm restless and always restless when I'm anxious. It just happens. I just can't be a normal human being who can sit there without a functioning thought. It's just, I don't know. And the worst part it that when I'm like this, I try to write in my journal a lot. And it usually ends with me scrawling 'I don't know' for every other sentence.

And now it's getting worse. Not that is inevitably happens everyday, it's just I've noticed and exceeding amount of reslestness and anxiety within myself over the past year or so, and I'm not sure why. Here, take an infinite list of 'I don't knows' into that. And I find it hard sometimes, like there are moments when I literally have to stop what I am doing at the moment and think, "Is this my life?" and then remind myself, going back into my timeline, of how I came to be and how I'm in the position I am today. And I don't know. I feel like I'm becoming senile or something and I'm only nineteen. It just seems so odd to me that I've come to point where I'm not just living my life but I also have to remind myself that this is my life. And it makes me restless, I feel like something should be happening but even if something is happening, I feel this way. It happens anywhere and everywhere. Such as the first weekend here at Montevallo, there was this party of the quad. It was dark, there were bright lights and music, and I was dancing with my friends. Like prom all over agian but less fancy and a little bit more uncomfortable. It was fun, I was having fun. But I was standing there and reminding myself that yes, this is my life. This is how I am. And it kind of ruined me and I left and walked around campus thinking about stuff and my life and my friends. And I cried and I don't even know why. I'm kind of fucked up in the sense that I cry for no reason. My tears are way too selfish.

And it gets even worse than that, because I have weird theories about it. Like there are two of me, searching through a field for each other and this field is life or something. I don't know, I have weird thoughts. And if we ever find each other we might find something else. I don't know, I'll become a whole person. Like questions in my life about my life and about me that could be answered and I'll see something. Have you ever read the theories of self actualization? Something like that. But more of a sense and not so much actual fufillment. Because I think I'll never be fufilled, because there's always more learning I can. Even unto my dying breath I intend on learning more.  But these two Keshias, they're wondering through this field and they pass each other, not where they can see each other but where if they would've turned just another inch or two they could've seen each other. But they don't and they keep going and it's terrible, because I feel like that's why I'm restless. Maybe I just almost grasped something that was bigger and better and the absence of it and it's presence and hope makes it horrible. Like a wrenching in my stomach trying to turn me back around. But I keep fucking walking and let it pull me tighter and tighter until I just break apart. And I don't even know what I almost had and I can't think of it anymore. Nothing will suffice for me, and I have to remind myself that this is my life. And this is what has happened. And this is what I hope to happen even if it doesn't. But it is my life and it keeps going.

Fin.
-Keshia

#96/100 Books in 2012: Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

I'm a college kid now!

So, hello there, it's been a while....hasn't it always???

So I am now at the beautiful University of Montevallo and I have been for the past two weeks. It's incredible and I love it. There's nothing like being on the campus. It's one of those things that cannot be put into words. It's just; Montevallo is one of those college campuses with lots or trees, abundaunt amounts of sunshine, cobblestone paths, and buildings full or history.

I don't have much to say, other than I can't understand how anyone wouldn't want to learn for the rest of their lives. I know there is real world experience and I know things are good, but I love learning a lot. God, I wanna be in college forever.

Fin
-Keshia

#90/100 Books in 2012: A Series of Unfotunte Events; The Slippery Slope byt Lemony Snicket