In an overpopulated world, vanity is necessary for survival. The need of the self, above all else, becomes a main factor in the daily pursuit of happiness. Anyone who’s made a difference was extremely aware of themselves, and that was the difference. Humankind is raised to do so, or at least the strongest among it are.



The depression came and went like strong tides. It seemed to be controlled by some satellite, indeed, some forlorn object which she could neither control nor pinpoint. Still, the presence was always there, surging predictably in what she considered routine cycles. “Is my entire life to be lived like this?” She looked for meaning in it. She looked for meaning in the root of it. The cause was disappointing.



She grew up to be a tall American stunner. She didn’t have to try to be slender and she didn’t have to try to be pretty—she merely was. This realization didn’t occur until she was eleven years old, though, and she went through childhood being gawky, wishing she was privileged and had male parts. As a younger girl, she noticed the gender differences among her peers in the ways they interacted. In elementary school, during recess, it was assumed that the boys would dominate the basketball courts and other “balled” sports and the girls stuck with jump ropes, hopscotch and jungle gyms. This carried on outside of school also.



The boys of the neighborhood would play games outside, showing off their competition, athleticism and strength, and she too wanted to play. She was occasionally allowed to partake in such activities of privilege, and her cousin who was similar in age lived across the street. “It’s okay, she can play with us,” he’d vouch for her, but if the majority ruled her out, she had to leave. Depending on who was present, the situation played out differently. “She’s a girl!” was the general excuse to not include her.



One day, however, the neighborhood boys did allow her to play a game with them. This game involved throwing and catching a ball, but whoever had the ball was targeted and sought after to be “smeared”. She felt proud that the boys finally decided to include her, although she didn’t question why they didn’t at first—the acceptance itself was enough for her. She stood on the field eagerly, reaching out her arms when she saw the ball fly in her direction and calling out to have the ball passed to her. They wouldn’t.



She was an obstacle, something to avoid running into another body that served no use to the boys, and therefore she was ignored. She was slighted by this, but retained her optimism and ran around in proximity, pretending to be involved. After several minutes of this, one boy, who was about to be smeared and had no other options of passing, tossed the ball to her. Thrilled, she caught it and ran. She was chased by the boys because she had the object they wanted, but once she gave it away, they immediately lost interest and chased whoever had it. That was the way the game was played.



The ball was passed to her twice again after the first time, before a particularly aggressive boy, who she recognized as one of the boys not wanting her to play, tripped her. She did not possess the ball, but he targeted her for some reason which she did not know. She stood up and resumed playing, but his aggressively towards her resumed, and he tripped her again. This time the other boys noticed. He laughed audibly and the other boys stared. Her humiliation caused her to shed tears, and the humiliation was further extended by this weakness. The drive of anger was stronger, however, and something inside her desperately and obsessively stirred.

She rose, and the act of standing up charged her wildly, so much that the drive of attacking him seemed like something she couldn’t suppress. She ran over to him and tackled him. She leapt towards him and forced him on the ground, and he pulled her shirt and tried to pin her down. She kept her legs strong and loose, maneuvering her body on top of his in a straddle he couldn’t escape. She looked down at his wretched face of what she viewed as hatred and she punched it again and again, cocking her right fist back and giving relentless blows as she could deliver them. He thrusted his hips up, knocking her off balance and slung his arm across, slapping her face and knocking her over.



They aggressively rolled around on the ground, and the other boys stared in amazement at the bizarre display. She felt the need to crush him, to hurt him, to show him pain he wouldn’t expect from her. She was awakened and aroused, strong and determined, and the rush of fighting gave her strength to use her body in ways she never before imagined. She regained her position on top of him, locking her legs against his side and began repeatedly scratching his face until she felt his skin cells collecting under her nails. The power she felt encouraged her to scratch harder, and his squirming body and scrunched face crying out in discomfort began to grow red. Lines of blood scattered across his face in vertical and diagonal directions, and her relentless lust for making him pay hampered her ability to measure the price paid.



A neighbor’s door opened, and before she could see who might see her, she rose up and ran away. The boys who stood staring rushed to the boy on the ground with the scratched face, ignoring her flee. She ran across to her house before anyone could notice. She never looked back, and when she got home, she hid under her bed for hours. During these hours, she felt the fear of having challenged conventions, and having lost control as a result. The combination made her feel in control for the first time in her six years of existence. Eventually her mother came into her room and asked what she was doing. “Nothing,” she sheepishly responded. She crawled out and left the room. Her mother’s initial concern subsided, as she knew her daughter was a queer girl.

On hindsight, I realize the true meaning of love comes from my siblings. Nineteen years old, when I came out of the closet and realized me and my siblings were “flawed”, or human. Seventeen year old sister—***. Twenty-one year old brother—rehab.

“Do you think it’s ironic that we’re doing this on a playground?” called a voice from the assorted group of friends sitting on the sea of pebbles under the monkey bars. Another voice replied, after a quick cough and croaked, “No, I’m pretty sure everybody does this.”

“I bet the teachers do it too,” agreed the voice of an eighteen year-old boy.

“I’m going to be a teacher one day,” spoke the philosopher girl, who drifted from the conversation into the fog of her thoughts. As a junior in college and an ambitious girl, she lived her life in paranoia and curiosity from the outside world.

As the college students rose from the pebbled area of jungle-gyms, swings and slides, they approached a basketball court in passing to return to the neighborhood.

“Look!” yelled the philosopher girl. “There’s a ball over there, we should play.”

Their evening plans were determined when one boy concluded “We can’t play. The ball is flat.”

Rather than attempting to relive the innocence of childhood, the students under the influence of marijuana watched the possibility of recapturing pure childhood memories diminish through their loss of interest in what was once a childhood gratification of positive reinforcement. Recess was very important to any child in elementary school. My earliest memory of recess consisted of the earliest bonding time with my sister. It was my fifth birthday, and back before my parents divorced my mother was very involved with the community at our schools. My mom set up a birthday party for me in first grade, and my two year-old sister was brought along. My sister, the adorable baby that she was, received all of the attention. On my fifth birthday I wanted everyone to pay attention to me, but my sister was stealing my thunder. I resented her very much for always being the more beautiful of us two, and she always had the most grace. I’ve always felt awkward, quirky, and possibly weird, but it never seemed to distance my sister from loving me.

On that day at recess, while everyone was cooing over how adorable my sister was, I was off sulking on the swing set. I was always the one ignored of my siblings; my brother was the oldest of us three and the only male, and my sister was the youngest and most beautiful baby girl. I was always awkward, alone and blending in with the background. This being said, I made myself solitary from those neglecting my absence and looked up at the clouds. Five years-old and alone on a swing, I watched the cloud pass in the sky and morph from what looked like a snail, to a tomato. Before my very eyes approached a wide-eyes toddler with brand-new teeth and smiling eyes.

Everyone was following her, but she was following me. When she was the one of us preferred, she never failed to love me and remind me she was there.

When recognized as attractive for the first time, I was eager to be wanted so I threw away my virginity.

My sister, always so beautiful and classy didn’t need to put out to be well-liked, desired or noticed. Classy like my mother, my sister determined my fate as the black sheep in my adolescent ****** rebellion.

When my sister and I smoked with work friends, playing on the swing-set together like we had fourteen years earlier, I found out that she was a ******. The illusion of the pristine, classy and virginal sister shattered, but welded back together with love. My sister was not perfect, and my insecurity to being the un-unique, unnoticed and boring middle-child had ended. My older brother always considered the most-intelligent and most-successful was sent to rehab after 4 months of turning twenty one. The self mutilation was concerned as a big issue, and a mental illness could have him removed from the military.

Flawed sibling relationships brings closer bonding and relatable experiences, so exploring life together builds a unique and covalent bond between siblings witnessing life together, having difficulties and disappointments with family. While fulfilling the all-time question of mankind for “the meaning of life”, life interrupts with irony.

It was the little things,

like doing dishes and folding laundry that

set me off.

“FOLD LAUNDRY! WASH THE DISHES! DO CHORES!”

He’d yell and she would just sit there and watch.



We got cursed at and she’d look away.

We’d get spanked and she looked away.

We got full-body massages at nine and eleven;

she looked away.



We, the royal me, yes, was a clean, polite girl with no self

Esteem, who sought perfection but saw flaws

And scars. We could cook and clean and

****, we used manners,

We smiled.



But we, of a degenerate kind, had

the nerve to use our mind and explore

all kinds of places. we used it

in thriving and dying, we used it in wailing and lying and failing

and crying—we used it in intellect

in friends—in the happiest of situations—unlike in adolescence

we surpassed it, kicked it’s *** and learned a thing or two about the brain;

all kinds of literature proved we weren’t just insane!

These ideas, these geniuses, these mistakes amongst ourselves

Let us see how life can be such a glorious hell!

Art and fiction, the laws of science, seeing the universe in our soul:

It makes us feel whole. But even in with this kind,

unstable state of mind, we regress when

Set off by treacherous memories like doing dishes and

folding laundry.

History doesn’t repeat, it reproduces,

It ***** us well

into the darkest hour; we hold it so holy as

it wholly condenses, contracts, cracks, grasps and

Moans. It’s a venereal haunting,

ghosts of a ruthless world that doesn’t give

a **** and only cares about ******* **** up and *******

to be the fittest, survival of the wittiest.



You all want to reproduce your kind

but with the reproduction of your kin

your kind comes out sludge—

the soggy excuse of an abandoned mind

rotting away into “we’re not the first—

it’s always happened, all the time, is that a crime?”



Wreaking havoc amongst a species of your kind?

****! Me! Yes! It’s serious!

To trudge the earth for proof

that birth of war was something

of divine? Is it fine that people die

and never know of the privileged life—the life



We ******* live, ******* for Capitalism

But still getting ****** the same—

Like parents—if you won’t ******* take the time

to ******* notice what’s there and what’s right

what’s not and what is, sometimes—

what is sometimes more than one or two times;



The world is your baby, you can’t just decide

When to care and when to pretend you do

It’s true, getting ******, we all have—just a few

everyone is getting ****** in the entire ******* world

***** ******* with their ******* only want control

Hypocritical ***** in the government—they’re the ones creating ******

We the people, America the ******, swallowing what’s ******* from stores

Money’s flashy in that aspect it can buy whatever fetish

It can satisfy and pleasure

It can torture it can ruin it

It can break a nation’s soul;



Does Earth seem like a hole?

It gets ****** objectively, free of sentiment or affection,

It gets pillaged, ripped and hurled. It fights back

Vulnerable and totally ordinary—rare for our kind.

Who gives a ****, Earth doesn’t have a gender,

It’s not going to tell anyone,

You had a lot to drink,

It was social influence:



It was the way of human kind,

******* for any kind of benefit,

Privilege, artificial sentiment

******* to keep going

Like everyone else

Maybe one day we’ll have a family until,

Until,

they too, will die.

3-19-2014



I feel torn again. The sky has been a consistent white, the white of dull, sad, desolate winter, for three straight days I can’t help wonder if someone, somewhere, is collecting data on social networking sites and analyzing moods based off what is being posted. If weather changes moods and weather is a subject of conversation, surely someone with the access would find a pattern interesting? Anthropological-technology studies must be popular somewhere. I’m sure someone could be focusing on weather, moods, and who is affected, especially if the HARP conspiracy is accurate and weather modification is possible. Besides that, and the prospect of our environment and climate being controlled as well as the NSA keeping a close watch on us, I have been thinking a lot about my place in the world and what I want to do.



Do I want to go to school? If so, I’d need to save up to move out, then begin saving in general, and essentially tie myself to pointless jobs for the next several years. Do I want to make a difference? How could I, unless I was to reject all social conventions and mores decided by the capitalistic corporotacracy in which we live? Do I have the courage to be radical? What would I sacrifice in deciding to be, and deciding not to be?

“It’s going to storm tonight.”

“Yeah.”

He honestly was just going to drop her off tonight, he said. She masked her disappointment with a long exhale of cigarette smoke as she flicked the cigarette ash out the window. She inhaled again. The car ride, although only ten miles and some, to her house, seemed longer than usual. She had nothing certain to look forward to. He was nothing certain. But sometimes she looked forward to him. Him, both strangely attractive and unattractive. Him, both perceptive, thought-evoking yet ignorant and uneducated. She hated how he stereotyped. She hated how he didn’t seem to care for her.

But didn’t he? She thought he might. He would rub her feet at work. They would joke together at work and mutually smile and laugh. His teeth weren’t straight or incredibly white, but she loved his smile. The way he kissed her when they had *** seemed to be passionate. It was the summer. It was July 5th. She would be leaving for college in August, and that weekend would go to her college and see the room she’d be renting in the fall. She would meet her roommates—a family from Delaware who had a house with extra rooms, which non-smoking females could rent—that weekend. She talked about how excited she was to be leaving. He never really made any comments about the matter. She stopped talking about it.

“You probably broke that guy’s heart.”

He was referring to the guy she met at Dash-In while pumping gas, the guy she spontaneously gave her number to. She wondered what made him say such a thing; he didn’t appear jealous. She struggled to understand how he felt. He never shared anything. Since they started sleeping together, she’d already told him five times that she liked him. She wrote him a poem. He smiled, but never acknowledged her efforts. She liked him but didn’t love him. She knew she never would—they had nothing in common. He was merely a summer dalliance, one of many she’d had in her life, and he wouldn’t be her last. She didn’t crave him, but she craved romance. She craved answers. She struggled with the here and now. She knew her feelings would dissipate once she went away, but she knew herself well enough to know that being around him, for another month and a half, would bother her.

She took it personally that he wouldn’t return to her house. She took everything personally. She took it personally that he never expressed any emotion towards her. She knew he had it. She knew it wouldn’t last. She didn’t want it to last, in fact, she regarded herself as “out of his league” in every possible aspect. He was twenty-five, managing a pool, still, and he never went to college. She was twenty, entering her fourth year of college and finally moving out of her house, with a double-major, and she taught swim lessons and lifeguarded as a summer job. She was a raging narcissist. She was vain, and she expected everyone she slept with to praise her for her beauty and wit. When they didn’t, she took it personally. Often, with the men she slept with, she received no such praise. She took it personally.

She assumed, because he was giving her a ride home, he would enter the house with her, and like the last time, two days prior, they would have ***. When he dropped her off at her house, she left him five dollars for gas. Several minutes after, when she was inside, he texted her and told her that she didn’t need to leave him money. She never responded to that text.

Instead, she texted her neighbor. Like her, he liked to drink. Like her, he liked casual ***. The attraction and un-attraction was mutual. Unlike her boss, she had no feelings for this neighbor. Unlike her boss, she  didn’t feel rejected by this neighbor. Unlike her boss, this neighbor was nineteen, not twenty-five. She wondered if her attraction to her twenty-five year old boss stemmed from the resemblance of another twenty-five year old, one she once loved. Her boss, like the other twenty-five year old, lacked ambition, lacked expressing emotion, lacked the intellectual compatibility that she searched for in a prospective boyfriend and was once addicted to drugs. She found the parallels. In her own way, she considered it closure.

She questioned if she actually liked her boss or if she felt automatically attracted to him because he resembled someone she once loved. The *** was similar. The after-*** was similar. The kissing wasn’t. She saw her boss almost every day. She contemplated ending the summer affair with her young manager, five years her senior, due to the resemblance of the man, the broken mirror who so sickly twisted shards of himself into her, forever damaging her own reflection. This man, her boss, while likable, could never amount to the man, the compost, her former twenty-five year old had been.

The here and now, and the concept of time, in general, had flooded her head with numbers. Dates: she started sleeping with her boss that Father’s Day; they had *** five times since, and he confessed his feelings for her zero times. She hated herself for always wondering what he thought. She hated herself for not actually being sincere. She sensed this man, her boss, was not generally accustomed to such ingenuous women. She was used to stupid men who felt threatened by ingenuous women. It was an emotion-evoking cycle; she would always plunge herself into situations where deadlines existed inevitably. He was writing material.

She took the *** and transformed her thoughts into stanzas. When she was uncertain about him, she wrote prose. She had a boring summer, and while she tried to read books, her writer’s block ate at her. Desperate for material, she resorted to the easiest—and her favorite—method of provoking thoughts: ***. She sometimes grew attached to the person after ***. She’d let herself fall, just a bit, before ripping herself away, emotionally, from the men she was sleeping with. These men only thought about her only once her behavior towards them grew distant and subtly acrid. She knew they knew. They knew she knew. The writing material fell into her lap as she fell into the laps of her men.

She was a poet, a writing fiend, a ****** up girl who only wanted to be interesting. She liked her boss’s smile. She liked his back, and she never minded scratching it while they worked together. She looked forward to going to going away to the university. There, she knew, she would be surrounded by peers who would be legitimately interested in the same things she was, and maybe then she could find someone she could actually let herself become attached to.

For now, her boss, although she liked him, mildly, was all she needed for her creativity just until the summer ended. Although he kept adding soda ash to her pool of affection, she knew that although liking him had become more basic, the summer would soon be over and the pool would be closed.

Love like ours transcends Thanatos versus Eros

Your roots ripped apart my concrete heart

And instead instilled life, and growth, and hope

I hope, I hope that you think of me like that too

Reviving vibes: the energy love revitalizing you.