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

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