Psychosis

Sometimes I think there is a fact about me that I don't think a lot of people realize. They may see it, or know of it a little, but they do not know how severe it is. I love the ficitonal world, all the ones I have read or seen, and people don't seem to comprehend how deep that love is. Not that they should, because if they did, they may just figured how fucked up I truly am. And really, that's anything that I want anyone to see.

 But there are certain occassion when I feel myself slipping. It's like there is this line in between the real world and the fictional world. For most people I imagine it's thick and bold. The dividing line of reality should be a distinct one. Most of the time, I feel like my line is mostly hazy. And I don't know if its because I love the ficitonal world so badly and wish so much for it to be true that I convince myself that it is true or because there really is something mentally wrong with me. If it is the later than it is not surprising and I really accept that. And it's scary how accepting of it I would be. There are moments though, when it's more than just hazy, it's broken. And all of a sudden all of these fictional ideas comes pouring into my head. Some are those of others, stories written by other people that I cling unto so despretly, it's really like I'm trapped in a flood and they are the only thing keeping me afloat. And then there are mine, scavaenging vangeful little things that throw fits if I don't release them unto the world. But they are there, all the fiction, pouring into reality. And it should be something that is overwhelming but it's not. It's small and I barely see it, so engrossed is my mind in the fiction that I barely see the way it dictates my realy life. Little things will happen. I will recall I story I thought I heard someone tell me and tell people of it. It will only be later that I realize it wans't a story I read at all but something that happened to a character in the book once. Or sometimes, particulary with character sof my own creation, my way of thinking about a certian thing will completly morph into the way of thinking of that character. Little things, I don't know them. And even when it's borken, or when it's hazy I am there wishing and hoping it was all real. Sometimes I really do think that it I believe hard enough the things I imagine will come true. And I'm always surprised when they don't.

This isn't a blog about anything in particular.


Fin.
-Keshia

Currently Reading Peter and Wendy  by J. M. Barrie

An Ever Constant String

Last night I had my first quasi rehearsal for the College Night Purple Pit chorus. Only it wasn't really a rehearsal, more like a fill out paperwork/get to know each other meeting in which we all proceeded to sing 'Singing in the Rain' at the end, only with PV symbols instead of thumbs up, because let's face it, we're not Golds.

But one thing I found quite interesting was one game we played to get to know each other. One thing I should mention first is that I knew no one in the room. I mean, I may have seem them around school and or something but I don't know them. So I basically in a room of strangers, and so I thought the whole game of getting to know each other was good, particulary when everyone else seems to know everyone else. I was the only stranger in the room, I felt unknown, which is not a feeling I particulary want to feel when I'm going to be working with these people on a show for the next month. In my experience I found that being the quiet one with no friends in group things like a theatre production is not a great feeling. Not that I expect to get suddenly chummy with the people in the group, but you know, knowing my name would be something nice.

But, alas, to the game, basically we had this purple string and Alex (leader of all things voice and purple) said an interesting fact about himself and held to the end of the string and tossed it to someone else. The concept was that you say something interesting about yourself and then toss the ball of string to someone else, while holding unto the string yourself. In the end it all becomes some sort of big tangled mess, a web weaving between all of us, and connecting us all at the same time. Things like that, right in the feels. And it worked, we were tangled, all covered in purple string and knowing new facts about each other. I was flustered when it came to me, not expecting it, so I said the first thing that popped in my mind, that I spent last summer in Washington. Which wasn't really interesting at all, considering some people delivered facts like they had once swam with manitees or they were an active bee keeper. It made me realize that my life isn't really that interesting or complex at all, I'm just a girl who likes to read and write. And I really have no problem with that, I like that simplicity in life. I hope for more one day, but essentially when you dig down deep into to me I will just be that, a girl starving for fiction, reading and writing running all amuck.

But really what I'm trying to say is something else, and maybe I can do it without starting every paragraph with the word 'But.' There's a point, and it is that as cheesy as it sounds we really all are connected, by some invisible string. It's quite tangled and sometimes can stop us and hold us back or send us foward to new places, catching us sometimes when we fall. But regardless of all, it's there. Human beings are entirely too different from one another to be understood. It's a fact I accept and regret because I want so badly to be really understood and yet it is not a possibility. I'm not one, however, to lose hopes of non possibilities. They stay there. But there is a string, some connecting agency to me and the rest of the world, I have to know that, not just hope it. Maybe it's a good thing or a bad thing, it's not something I could clearly know. Someone told me the other day that we're not born a person, and really we're not. When we're babies we perhaps all for some infinitly yet miniscule moments, we understand each other fully and completly. But from the second our life differs from one another, we become another person. Maybe therein lies the mystery of the string, in that moment it was made, and yet no matter how different things become it can't be broken.

As for rehearsal we lifted string above our heads and piled in one big sprawling purple mess on the front desk. It was us, what small connections we had made last night. Our strings.

Fin.
-Keshia

Currently Reading The Little White Bird by J.M. Barrie

An Introvert.

"I like being an introvert. I like being quiet. I like being thoughtful. I like spending time on my own. And I hope that if we do meet, you will accept me for that. Social awkwardness included."

Charlie McDonnell

There's something I've learned about myself and it's something I've accepted. It's because it's always been here, from as far back as I can remember. And people don't realize this of me, they see other things. But I am not those other things, I am myself, and for the most part I know myself. There are a lot of things I don't know but I'd rather not rely on the observations of others to figure that out. It would make me lose myself, you see?

Let's say this, I am an introvert, and I do like being an introvert. I am always alone and have been ever since I have always known. It's like this, I can be surrounded by a group of people, friends, strangers, I don't care....and I am still alone. That is how it is. I am wrapped up in it and always have been, it's a very tight bind. But I really want to make no efforts to escape. Because I really don't mind or care about being alone. I actually really love it. You see, in order for me to feel not alone I'll have to find someone who understands me. And the world should know by now there is no understanding to me. And so yes, I can have friends. I really can. Does it help me feel any less lonely, no, it'd doesn't. But loneliness doesn't nesscarily have to be a bad thing. I really don't think it is. It makes me sad sometimes, but it's not because of me and my lonliness, it's because of others that I feel like it's bad. The world expects you you to go out and make lots of friends. The world expects you try to find someone to understand you. And in turn the world expects you to dislike the loneliness. But I don't, I really don't. I revel in it, in the staying in being in my bed. In the sitting for hours and just thinking. And yes, I could be going out with friends and doing things, but it wouldn't help. And it doesn't need help. And I really think that is one thing that is so hard to understand about me. I love my lonliness, I really do. And I don't plan to change it much. Because yes I will go out and do things and have friends, and all of that. But it's not going to effect how alone I feel. I will always feel alone when there is a lack of understanding of my character. And yes, I'm only nineteen, I know I have plenty of years left, but so far no one has come even close to  grasping a true understanding of me. No one. Some people understand a few parts of me but no one will understand who I truly am.

Which seems all chessy and cliche, there is a real me, and the world me, and the everything me. So many mes, all different perceptions and things. But I  know who the real me is and she is alone, and she loves it.

Fin.
-Keshia

Currently Reading The Little White Bird by J. M. Barrie

On Places.

I haven't lived in many places in life, really I haven't. In fact I'm probabably a little bit less traveled than most nineteen almost twenty something year old girls. The Bayou, Coden, Everett, Theodore, and now Montevallo. Only five towns I have lived in my life, two of them literally being right beside each other and the other only being only a biut away. I haven't had that much difference in cultureeither, considering four of the five places have been in Alabama. Although I can tell you this, south and north Alabama differ in vastly different ways that can never really be explained but only really experienced. And let me tell you this, every place I have ever lived holds a little bit of my heart.

The Bayou is full of my childhood memories, scattered in here and there all over town. And all the changed that came to the place I grw older, the physical presence of knowing there used to be a resuraunt there or that CVS was once an empty field. And everytime I go there something has been added or taken, a tiny little bit scooted over here and there. I am in the Bayou, eternally growing up. Everytime I see it I get a little older.

In Coden I was older and farther in, people would call them the back woods, changed weren't as evidents there,. But pieces of me are there too, in the park where Marina and I would sit for hours gazing at the ever moving water, it's waves sometimes peaked with white foam and other times the water so shallow we were tempted to step in. There was the cool green grass under my feet as I walked in my yard talking on the phone and the night where the streelights cast a smoky fog from all the fireworks going off to celebrate the new year.

Everett was different, a whole new world and eleven states away. My independence there was glorious, the moving about and having a job. I paid my own bills and made a food bugdet. Then there was the library, the lazy afternoons I spent in the massive place just lounging around and being filled with the wander of fiction. Early morning bus rides where it was only me and the driver were a thrill and the children I played witht he park were so much kinder than the ones I had known before. The most foreign part of all in Everett was getting to know people and people getting to know me, people who hadn't had some pervious knowledge or conception of me. I grew up in a small town, where you literally knew everyone. You weren't friends with them, you just knew them. People who sat beside me at graduation were the same chubby little kids who I had seen on the first day of kindegarten. There were people who I went all thirteen years of school with without ever speaking one word, but I still knew them. In Everett there was none of that.

In Theodore I was back in Alabama again, and it was such a hard unexplainable part of my life that I would never want to go back to it again. I felt useless and torn, my life is nothing to me without a purpose. And os I sought refuge in my work, it became my home and my coworkers became my best friends. Whenever I think of that time I think of the colored walls of Panera and singing and dancing between orders. All the times we shared while working and all the times we shared outside, with parties and beach days and working out together. That was where my heart was at in Theodore.

And now I'm in Montevallo and have been for six months. It's hard to say and I'm not sure how or why but I love this place more than nay other place I have been. It's just something I know, and I have to know. Sometimes I am walking aorund campus, and the sky in a brilliant blue and the grass is a spaklign dewy green, the sunlight it golden and streaming in between the trees in such a way that it feels like a hand is reaching out to me and taking my own and telling me it will be okay. This is where you are, this is where you belong. And even though I've lived here a shorter amount of times than any others I love it more. And I can't help it, my love for this town of Montevallo is pure and simple. My heart is in other places too, sometimes buried deeply and sometimes in view of everything. And I will never forget the places that hold pieces of me and my heart, but I feel as though in my current position of life Montevallo holds most of me. Most of my heart is here.

Fin.
-Keshia

Currently Reading The Little White Bird by J.M. Barry

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