God's Skin

Notes: 4 / 1 week ago

Summer Edits.

when marimba rhythm starts to play…

I’m listening to some odd re-run music in the cool, dark, early hours of the morning. There is a large truck outside of my apartment, singing with the birds, though they were in the trees an hour ago and the truck has only recently re-awakened.

The blue of the sky is lightening. It is coming from deep, velvety near-black, slowly fading into…well, tumblr blue.

I feel the need to clean my room again. I haven’t properly slept in my bed for four months. Because it is too comfortable and I am too terrible at getting to sleep on time to wake up for an early alarm, and I would be waking up in just short of an hour and a half (who am I kidding? I would be waking up in two hours, rushing to get myself dressed and out the door in time to avoid just enough traffic to make me even later, make me miss the beginning of first period) to teach lessons that I barely understood myself until they were over to young adults, only three or four years younger than myself, already so very fed up with the world, and so very angry and hopeless.

They all said they would miss me. Even though they hardly regarded anything I did as important, they all were sad that I would not be teaching them any longer.

I busted my ass on this past semester. I had two classes. One of them was worth four classes-worth of credits. And I still don’t graduate until spring 2014. I knew it was going to be like that. Everyone knew it was going to be like that. But everyone was still disappointed that I am going back to school for more than just the fall. But I finished one major. I can start teaching. But it’s still disappointing.

As far as I can tell, every spring is going to be miserable from now on. I promised myself 2012 would be full of pain so that I could get my work done. 2012 was full of more pain than I could have imagined.

“They say when a parent dies, a child feels its own mortality.”

Everywhere I turn, I think of my father. There was no closure for us. There never will be. Things had been going so well.

Things had been going so well.

The drag performances I’ve been doing have all been so amazing to participate in. To meet all the people I’ve met, to share some of the funny stories and to be there for some of the scariest shit of my life. To feel pretty. It’s all been a meager attempt to distract myself from actual life. But it’s at least been engaging.

I was in a sculpture show, the Senior BFA show, kind of funny, especially since I need at least 7 more classes to get my sculpture BFA. But the only thing I heard about my performance piece, my single performance piece and my DVD of prior performances, me, the only one doing performances, is that my work has come so far, that it reacts viscerally with the audience, that I disgust and entrance, and that my physical objects that I make have only gotten better in their realizations. And I smiled and said thank you, while holding back literal tears because it was the first real feeling that I had in months, that I was proud and that the professors were proud of how far I had come, even with all of my cutting corners, even with how my classmates had been able to spend every day in the studio while I spent a week constructing the performance piece. But that’s how it goes, because time is running out. Forever.

I feel like someone tipped me over and poured me out. I’ve felt very little except stress, except this dread, this winding and twisting and scraping metal and concrete taste, for five months. For five months, being unable to connect the dots of me. Seeking the distractions, oversleeping, marathoning old movies and tv shows.

I’ve avoided talking to many, many people. Avoided seeing them. Closed myself inside my apartment, drew the curtains, grabbed a glass of wine (It’s a recent thing, I found a red wine I could die for. It’s so gothy, and the bottle is so pretty, and it just tastes like really fancy grape juice and flowers) and leaving all my work unfinished and just lying on the couch (or the beanbag that was also my bed) and ignoring everything because it was easier to forget that I exist. But now I have a little bit of time.

And the forever-question comes back up. The thing I, we, are always asking our self. You know, every once in a while, in the lull between the everything.

How have I changed, how have things changed, that I have arrived here, at this point in my life, with the way things are?

I barely even know. Again, I can’t see the connection.

But for now.

I’ve made some great friends this past year. I’ve started speaking almost constantly with one of my heroes, a great and prolific writer of things that I thought no one would ever be brave enough to pen down.
I’ve progressed in my sculpture, I’ve progressed in my theatrical makeup. I’ve lost a handful of people who did not resonate with me. I’ve lost a few people who I did not want to lose. I’ve re-evaluated more of my faults, and I’ve realized what was out of my hands, and I’m liberated from a lot of guilt. I’ve had more migraines in this semester than in the past year and a half before it. I’ve gained 30 pounds and lost half of it again (so far). I’ve wasted more money on trying to out-drive and out-drag my feelings than I would care to admit.

And right now, however tired and isolated from myself that I am, I can say I don’t know who and where I am. Again. And again, I feel like I’m going to find myself. No promises of pain to motivate. Just breathing. Breathing and letting the feeling pulse back in. Just enough to find out where this is all going. For now, I mean. Before it all falls apart again. It’s all a blessing, to even be anything at all.

Sometimes we get off easy. Sometimes we have to scribble it out and re-draw it all. But mostly we just turn the page and keep going.

Notes: 4064 / 2 weeks ago from squidtestes (originally from wanderworldwonderlust)

(Source: wanderworldwonderlust)

Notes: 5644 / 3 weeks ago from sportfck (originally from gastonave)

(Source: gastonave)

Notes: 14475 / 3 weeks ago from prettyprincevince (originally from finnualabutler)

"Get out of bed, make a hot drink and go outside. You owe yourself that much. Maybe you still cry in far too many public bathrooms, but I swear, you stay a few seconds less every time. Smile at strangers if it’s all you can do, know that life doesn’t start when the sun rises or the credits roll but when you decide it’s time to go after what you deserve, and you deserve everything because we are alive both only once and a million times every day and every minute is something new to learn and someone new to love, and if it all crashes and burns as it so often does cling on to hope through it all and don’t ever ever ever let it go. Start your life again whenever you need to. Repeat after me: it is not yet the end. It is not yet the end. It is not yet the end."

- a greater reality: (via awake-andunafraidd)

(Source: finnualabutler)

Notes: 1730 / 3 weeks ago from nostalgica (originally from ex0skeletal)

ex0skeletal: