Nothing Gets So Bad That A Whipser From Your Father Couldn’t Fix It.

For the first time in my life, I cannot put my feelings into words.

It gets more and more frustrating every day, to be a writer staring slack-jawed at blank pages in notebooks, the white computer screen that signifies an empty Microsoft Word document. I barricade myself alone in my room with the sole intent of purging my mind of the emotions that it’s clamoring to communicate and my heart beats hard in my chest, as if my ventricles are making a vain attempt at breaking my ribs open if only to remind me that I am alive and I do have feelings and that these feelings must be documented, they must. So I sit. And I wait. And nothing happens.

People ask me how I am and I feel confused. I could think for hours about my emotions, examining them from various angles, with scientific skepticism and incredible attachment, and they would still be just as foreign to me then as they are at this moment. For the first time, the girl who felt everything feels nothing but a nonplussed resignation. I’m a spectator in my life, no longer experiencing anything for myself but rather living vicariously through the words of others, finding songs and books and poems that encapsulate what I think I should be feeling. It’s the next best thing to having a pulse, I decide.

Every day, I am happy. Or rather, I do things that should make me happy. I have good days, I have great days, and each one just leaves me once more plagiarizing the passion of others – I steal the sentiments of Tim Kasher when he can’t feel anything at all; I intone alongside Sad Brad Smith because no one will make me feel better for a long, long time; And when Frontier Ruckus’s Matt Milia yelps that he’s so lonesome he could drown and no one would kneel themselves down to fish him out, I sink inside because I literally couldn’t have said it better myself and the fact that I’m at such a loss causes me to tremble and ache, as raw as the burst blisters that have come to line my heels and toes after miles of aimless walking. I walk and I walk and I have no where to go, no where to be, and I think never in all my life have I seen eyes as empty as the streets of my city – Another stolen sentiment and my thievery leaves me ashamed of myself.

My social circle crumbles and I stand in the same room alongside them, brushing shoulders at the bar, and not a word is said. My face burns bright and the nights turn into a contest of who can act like they care less as I talk vibrant and brash, smile and flirt, and act like I’m fine. I tilt back bottles and laugh loudly and I’ve gotten so good at the charade that occasionally, I catch myself believing I’m okay only to remember the flaws in my system and I realize: My mind crumbled weeks ago and the girl I am is just the reanimated cadaver of the girl I was.

I remember the way things used to be and it seems more like a dream than a memory – To think there was a time when I loved and was loved and felt the brightness of burning optimism blind my blue eyes seems foreign and strange. But the reality is that that time did exist. And it was barely two months ago that I was the glue that kept my friends together; Now they don’t talk and we don’t go out.

I’ve been back home, back in Ann Arbor for weeks now and my phone rarely rings. If I weren’t so detached, I’d be bitter at the fact that out of all of my great friends, I’ve gotten phone calls from three people in the past four weeks. If I weren’t so detached, I’d be frightened at the ways my life is changing, terrified of the transitional upheaval I’ve found myself forced into. If I weren’t so detached, I’d be full of a fever, spitting insults at the people who talk trash about me, giving me their pity in public only to talk their shit when my back is turned just like that David Bazan song told me they would. If I weren’t so detached, I’d be laughing at the comedy of the tragedy my life has become, one awful event piled on top of the last. If I weren’t so detached, I’d be laughing and smiling and kissing and dancing and screaming and running and drinking and smoking and feeling electric volts course through my veins. If I weren’t so detached. If I weren’t. But I am.

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