click on words to navigate

Here be some news updates so when I look back at this post in a few weeks' time (or perhaps even months or years later), I won't need to ransack the shelves in my brain for some context:

• Hurricane Sandy - Unprepared as you and the rest of your family are, you still think that nothing will happen, though news reports have been talking about how Sandy is a combination of a snowstorm and hurricane. This casual disregard for your health and safety should be a concern, but you still haven't made the call to your college's wellness center and the red polish on your fingernails is fractured. 
• Midterms are now over. The physical copies were handed back yesterday and you made yourself dizzy while swallowing self-hatred and grief. Tumblr was down again. You went to your classes and ate lunch with two other girls. The following discussion regarding the future allowed them to mention that they scored much higher than you so you broke off devastation with the tips of your fingernails, letting it simmer in your soup before you drank it all down. Now your stomach is trying to purge everything inside it, just as you are trying to renew yourself through living. Trying to gather some sense of yourself again, you entered the library with one of the girls (the other one had lab work in the genomics center at the college), and she promised to scan pdfs of the chemistry questions for the next few chapters. Relieved that you didn't need to take grainy photos of the pages with your iPad in the library's horribly dim lighting, you went to a GoogleDoc and continued to work on a poem. The formatting doesn't work well with this type of blogging site, but here is the first part:
  
  i)
  
  love love love he says and you smile and lie because that’s all you know how to do now
       smile wide, lips pulled tight, until he says love love love into the curves of your lips and you say something back
            you place it on the tip of his tongue and let it dissipate into wisps of smoke inside his lungs
                 he stills when the echoes reach his eyes and you say it again and again and again and again:
                                         i want to die
• When you finally checked your email, the girl did not attach any pdfs and your plans for a weekend filled with work were shot. In a little dark corner of your heart, you're relieved. 
• You received your first graded essay of your college career. A B/B+ is not going to cut it for your family, and you know, so you've been ruminating over what to do. One of the options that you've been flirting with is to write it like an entry post, but with a theme. This way, you can connect the central piece to other pieces, but always go back and again. You were going somewhere with this thought, but you've lost it and it's just too tiring to try to fish for it again.
• You won a ticket from the freshmen dorm advisory to watch The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Logan Lerman, Emma Watson, and Erza Miller? Together in a movie? Existing in the same general place on the Earth's surface? You went to the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13 Theater with a few other freshmen and the movie made you tear up a bit because you remember those sleepless nights in front of a blinking cursor and an empty page, the panicked cramming for SATs and the SAT IIs, and you cannot forget that for all of your work, you only arrived at this particular college. And it's killing you. 
• The checks arrived and you put on the new piece of clothing you bought from Forever21 and a much older coat. You went to the bank and deposited a check, but since the ATM only accepted one check and spat the other back out like it was a particularly atrocious insect, you had to wait on line for a teller. She was incredibly nice and smiled at you and you went home to watch your mother and grandmother paint the rails outside a deep rusted brown. 
• Congratulations. You're growing up. 

Under the realization that I cannot tell my family of my midterm grades (which people have been telling me that it's going to be okay because it's only first term freshmen year, as if that made any difference if it were that or second term senior year), I decided that I have to start studying more. I have to treasure my time more because I'm growing up and I have to do "grown-up" things like cashing checks and figuring out banking, buying and washing clothes, and eating food. I have to pull my grades up because they're awful, they're horrible and hideous and I want to throw up thinking about them. It's not okay and I won't tell my family because I owe them so much more than that, because no matter how much I want to tell them that I'm okay and that I'm going to figure out life, I refuse to give them false hope. I never expected myself to reach this age, but when my birthday came, I only felt a sort of resignation. There were little bits of me that wanted to say something nice or say something disgusting, but I was tired and I did not want to do anything because I didn't know what I wanted to do.

Today, at ass o'clock in the morning, I read some works by several authors and felt an immediate visceral reaction churning in the cells of my body. I burned with hatred, consumed by the fury that these people could write so beautifully, so well, growing up with the English language wrapped around their tongues and hearts like a brand. I remember my first days in a pre-kindergarten class nestled in the bowels of Chinatown, its outsides painted bright and covered with soot. My grandfather took my hand and led me inside the hallways and I had a young Chinese teacher, who bent down to say hello, except I didn't want my grandfather to go and my fear for him leaving me and never returning caused me to throw up on her shoes. I had been a dramatic child.

Now, I'm bitter. I'm so incredibly bitter and angry because I know I cannot have that sort of relationship with a language. I can't. It's not in me. Words are not able to flow from me like they come out of their bodies. My words will be hindered by the synapses in my brain, unable to connect and translate words from one language to another. My five-year-old self, who recoiled from English, would not recognize this me. I probably would not be able to understand my six-year-old self and it's this painful recognition of something that I do not have the power to change, that really hurts.

So. It's Saturday tonight and I'm finally in my room in Brooklyn, using a computer with its screen resolution stretched too wide, like someone took a roller to it, and a keyboard that my fingers stumble over, but I'm home. The rumbling computer at my foot plays a Southern Gothic mix someone reblogged on Tumblr. My life has been composed of visiting various social networking sites for the past few months, perhaps even past few years. I would like to pinpoint the exact moment I passed the Welcome-to-the-Internet-Your-Life-is-Probably-Over-Now threshold, and then neatly carve and separate the different past-"me"s into labeled boxes so it will turn out to look something like this:

2004 - 2006: CCS fansites
2006 - 2008: FF.net
2008 - 2012: LiveJournal
2010 - 2010: InsaneJournal
2009 - present: DreamWidth
2010 - present: Tumblr
2011 - present: AO3
2011 - present: Twitter
2012 - present: Blogger
2012 - present: WordPress

Maybe one day I really will be able to pack it up and contextualize my Internet identity. It is interesting to see how my footprints on the Internet have evolved. There are certain social networking sites I definitely enjoy, but for the most part, I suppose I am the sort of person who likes to stay connected to friends through words. I enjoy photosets of edits and/or gifs, but I want to talk to people, to leave comments and to hoard the little bits of information they feed me about their lives. In a way, I believe that I feed off people, that I want to live through people and their lives, their experiences. I want to know when you wake up in the morning, if you want to throw the covers back over your head to keep a thin blanket between you and the sunlight or if you drag yourself into the bathroom with a hand over your face to get ready for the day. I want to know what you eat for lunch, what you wear for sleep, what you have in your homes, whether they're all on your back or spread out through several houses on different continents. I want to know about that person who smiled at you today, that person who yelled at you three years ago, that person who made you feel smaller than anything, and the person who made you walk with a bounce in your step. I want to know things that I am not privy to, perhaps because I wish you the best, perhaps because I wish that I am anywhere but here.

I've been thinking of leaving short notes for myself, or rather, writing short letters to forgiveness. Dear Forgiveness, I would begin. Dear Forgiveness.

And I will write something because it's something I need to do. I was on the phone with a friend from Barnard and we talked until my cell phone ran out of battery, which it does quite often because it's old, and we Skyped instead. Perched on my bed, I made sad noises at her pixelated face and she told me to stop hating myself so much.

The problem is, it's hard not to hate myself. There's society telling me that I should hate myself, people online who tell me that I should, people behind my back, some of my friends, some of my family members, and most of me.

I have been telling myself that I should be hated because who would ever love a person like me? I'm a bit of an asshole really, a bitter back-stabbing wreck of a person, an angry spiteful person who has a twisted smirk-smile on her face and judgment in the set of her jaw.

I've been writing this over and over and over and over and over for the past few years, saying that it doesn't matter, that I am a person and I should love myself, I should, I should, but I can't and why don't I love myself, I don't understand.Many days, afternoons, nights, I've sat at the edge of my bed and hunched my back and thought of nothing, but that's not entirely true. I sat there and tried to think of ways to die creatively, because even a gunshot wound to the head isn't a guaranteed death and drowning would be nice except for that part where you panic and thrash around and your brain is begging for oxygen and you regret it and you regret it so fucking much--And then you're dead so.This has been my first entry on this site. It's confusing and disjointed, but I'm still proud that I did it, I wrote it. It's nearly Sunday, but I haven't started my work because I self-sabotage so often I've often what it meant to love.