Death and Life and Loneliness

In March, or was it April, over Spring Break, I went to stay with my Tia y Tio in Victoria for a couple of days. While I was there, they got a phone call saying that their son had died in a car crash. They hadn't seen him in a long time, and he had some problems, but still, he was their son, and they loved him unconditionally. I saw my aunt's face when she heard, and thats one of those things that I will never forget, that look of complete pain and sorrow. She looked like the sun would never shine again, and it shook me all the way through. I stayed at a friend's place that night, and then came home the next day, but it stuck with me these four months. And then today, I found out that their son's, my cousin's, girlfriend had died in a car crash a couple of days ago. The same cause of death, only four months apart, and people who had been dating. What are the odds?? And it makes me think, what if her death wasn't accidental? What if she was just so emotionally shattered by his death that she caused her own? I guess we'll never know.
I never even met her, but I still feel sad for her, for a life ended too soon, for her friends and her family, just like I felt bad when my cousin died. I hadn't seen him since I was a toddler, I don't even remember his face. I just remember the way he smelled, and the doll he gave me, and his black runners. I remember sitting on the arm of the old brown sofa in our house that we lived in then, holding my new doll and looking up at him and his girlfriend of that time. I remember that she was blond and wore a jean jacket. I still have the doll they gave me. It's funny, the things you remember.
I find myself talking to dead people sometimes. Not like having a conversation with them, not like a psychic, but more like just chatting, in case they can hear me, when I'm walking to the bus stop, or cleaning the bathroom, or washing the dishes. I talk about what I know about them. I talk about their families sometimes, whats going on, in case they can't see it for themselves. It makes me feel better, I guess, the knowledge that maybe I'm making them feel better.
The last three and a half years, so many people I know have died. There was one week, a couple of January's ago, when a whole bunch of people I knew died; a man named Ken Moore, who I'd known since I was a toddler, my friend's Grandma, the Nan of the guy who sat next to me in school, even my pet hamster died that week. It really shook me. I was only twelve, and it was like the entire world was slowly dying off. Every morning for the next couple of weeks I woke up and wondered if anyone I knew had died overnight. It's not a good way to live. It makes you sad, and scared, and lonely. You separate yourself from people, in case they die next.
I used to have dreams when I was a little kid, about my mum leaving me alone. It was always the same dream; I was playing on the rocks outside of my sister's school; I was too little to go to school yet. I was wearing my red party dress and my white stockings and my little black mary janes, with my hair down, which I hardly ever did, because it was so long and tangled so easily. I was jumping from boulder to boulder, like I always did. My mum was talking to another adult while I played. I was jumping, and I landed wrong and slipped and cut my knee, ripping my white tights at the same time. I can remember when that actually happened. I got blood all over my tights and had to throw them out. But when I really did that, my mum picked me up and took me into the school and cleaned and bandaged my knee. In the dream, though, she just looked at me, and got on her bike, her old yellow and silver one, and rode away, with my standing there screaming after her. I remember waking up from that dream crying in the dark, and climbing into my sister's bed, because I was too afraid of being left alone. I had that dream again last night, for the first time since I was a little kid, probably for the first time since I started kindergarten. I'd nearly forgotten about it, and then I woke up in the wee hours of the morning, crying in the dark like I did when I was little. But my sister moved out a couple of weeks ago. She's not here anymore. I have to grow up and deal with it myself.

Growing Up

So this is growing up. Making these difficult decisions, making calls that you don't have to make. Doing things for other people, giving up the things that mean the most to you so that other people are happy, even when it means sacrificing your own happiness. Right now, I'm so sad that I feel all raw inside. I've given up something that I've been looking forward to for two years, to save my family stress. A lot of stress, and I feel glad for them, but I'm still selfish enough to be sad for me. I feel like my heart is breaking, and I feel guilty for feeling sad. It feels so self-absorbed of me. I guess that every once and a while, you need to take a little time to be sad, and then you have to suck it up and get on with your life. It's been less than 24 hours since I made that call, and it's still too fresh. I can pretend, but every so often, I need to let it out. Or maybe I don't. I guess I'll just hold it together and pretend that it's all okay. I can do that.

Self-Involvement.

People are all so self-involved. Everyone thinks that they're totally misunderstood and tragic.
Take my parents, for example. They're fighting, loudly, and not caring that my little brother is crying himself to sleep, because they're too busy proving that they're the martyr. It's maddening.
I had to go tuck him in and get his reading light and close his door so he can't hear them, and his blinds so that he doesn't wake up with the sun. And my dad's just banging on about how he brings in the money and we're a bunch of ungrateful little shits, and he made my mum cry. And I'm angry.
Most people, when they get angry, it's hot, like a fire. Instead, I get an icy coldness filling me. I know it's bad when I can't feel my face, like now.
I hate it here. I envy my sister; she gets to leave in a week.

Habits

It's funny, the little things you get used to , and don't even realize it. I had a hat sitting on top of my TV, a funny, floppy paper one that I made myself. I'm quite proud of it, and I quite like it sitting there. But the sun was getting in my eyes when I was out in it today, so I came and got my hat to ward it off. And then my TV looked weirdly empty. Strange.
It's the same with my library card. I had the same one since I was a little kid, and I'd memorized the number. But my old card cracked, so I had to get a new one, and it has a different number, and it really threw me off.
It's the same when I get a new notebook, or I move around a piece of furniture in my house, or reorganize the dish cupboard to throw off my family, and I end up throwing myself off.
I guess it's the same with habits. I tap the ledge in my stairwell on the way down it every time I come down. If I slip and go rolling down the stairs, which happens upon occasion, I have to get up and walk back up the stairs and tap the ledge. It's just one of those things.
I wonder if that transfers to the way you act. Like, if you're always a little bit sarcastically evil, are you always truly like that? Is it just a way to cover what you're actually thinking?? A way to make people laugh? Maybe give yourself some inside-my-own-head time when you're in public. And can you stop it? Can you break yourself of that habit?

Insanity??

I've been thinking a lot lately about what exactly constitutes insanity. Is it when you're walking to the bus stop carrying your shoes and talking to yourself?? Or is it when you waltz alone in your living room to Doug and the Slugs?? Or is it that little voice that you hear late and night, saying 'Is there room in your head for one more?? Or perhaps it's forgetting to eat for three days, or maybe realizing that when you sync it up right, Dark Side of the Moon seems like it's narrating The Wizard of Oz. Or perhaps it's talking on the phone while sitting on top of the washing machine. Or maybe it's when the person on the other end hangs up and you still sit there, listening to the dial tone for half an hour, thinking of nothing.
And who gets to say, really?? I mean, sometimes you have the more definable types of insane, like schizophrenia, but even that can be iffy sometimes. What if someone just seems schizo, but really they're just lonely?? Or maybe trying to get attention?? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that schizophrenia isn't an actual condition, because it is. I'm just saying that things aren't always set in stone.
So, what do you think?? What's your definition of crazy??

Poetry

I don't know if I've mentioned it, but I'm a total poetry nut. Points go out to whoever can tell me the author of the poem below.

since feeling is first
who pays attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
-the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for lifes not a paragraph

and death i think is no parenthesis

What I Want

A while ago, a friend asked me what I really wanted. People are always saying what they don't want, but who really knows what they want. What they want to happen, who they want, how they want things to turn out. And I realized that I don't really know everything that I want. People are confusing, and the only thing I want is to figure them out. It's all very confusing, it feels like everything is twisting and swirling and changing around me, and I'm standing still. It's like when you're in the car and it looks like all the houses and mailboxes and what have you are moving, and you're standing still. Except that they keep twisting 360 degrees instead of just in a line on either side, and I don't know which ones I want and which can just leave, and which are gone and I want back, and I just...don't know.