I Traded “True Love” — In Exchange For True Life

Today is August 4th, 2009. My name is Kari, and somehow, I still manage to believe in something I know nothing about.
Love.
That’s right, bitches, I’m back — the biggest decision of my life, a couple breakups, the birth of my balls, and an identity crisis later, I’m bringing my pearls of wisdom (and/or stupidity) back. It’s the 18th birthday of one of three guys I was cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die certain that I loved. Loved, sure, got the closest to that elusive something special that we’re all looking for whether we admit it or not (because you’re never too young to be loved! Never!); but was I in love?

See, that’s the part that I don’t know anymore.

Once upon a time, my life felt like it sucked. It didn’t. But it felt like it did. Except for that one thing I had which no one else did–love, love, love, love, looooooove.
Bullshit.
I don’t know anymore. Don’t know if I was ever actually in love. Don’t know what I believe about love, about now vs. later, fine vs. extraordinary. Short-term, long-term, my pursuit of happiness. The one thing I thought I had is the one thing I now believe that I don’t. I don’t know anything about love, really, and–let’s face it–who does?

But you know what I do know?

I know consequences are better than regrets. I know the sound the city makes when they open the lawn in Bryant Park during summer movie nights. I know what it feels like to kiss someone with the sun in your eyes. I know the way time freezes when you jump without looking, almost completely certain that you will fall on your ass–but you do it anyway because god, what if there’s that one small chance that you’ll be able to fly? I know what it feels like not to pass it up. I know I’m one terror-stricken step closer to victory because I have finally dared to fight fear. I know failure. I know the taste of teenage passion. I know the way he looked at me. I know the mortification mixed with relief that comes the next morning when you remember what you said last night. I know what it means to want more. I know what it means to live for now and not for later. I know tomorrow is a gift. I know what it is to give up a good thing because there just might be a great thing, even if sometimes there isn’t. I know adrenaline, I know crash, I know burn.

I know not knowing is worse than a no. I know the lyrics to my heartbreak. I know what it means to take a chance–because you’re afraid opportunity only knocks once, more afraid than you are of the risk that comes with it. I know the release that only comes with truth. I know the space outside the box, the world outside my comfort zone. I know consequence, I know rejection. I know how vivid everything becomes when I breathe life into the words I used to write. I know despair, I know betrayal, I know what it means not to sing alone. I know the hand of a beautiful stranger. I know the world isn’t fair and we can’t change that, but we can change whether we have to go through it alone. I know what it means to have secrets worth keeping. I know when you don’t love too much, you don’t love enough. I know wrong. I know wild. I know instinct. I know fear, but I know courage… I know pain, but I know life. I don’t have any more of my shit together than I did in March — if anything, my life is twice as chaotic and three times as exhilarating. So, in a strange way, I have it all figured out.

I’m still in love.

I’m not in love with a guy. Not you of my dreams, or you of my nightmares, or you of my past, or you of my future, or you of my late-night secrets or you of my poetry or you of my songs ; I’m not in love with any of you.
I’m in love with my life.

That is the one thing about me that has always been the same — my capacity to love. I do it all wrong, all reckless and all emotion and all music and too much and too stupid but I do it and I do it with every single fiber of my being.
Once, I was afraid to live.
But I was never, have never, will never be afraid to love.

Internet, I hope you’re happy to see me. But even if you aren’t, I’m not going to shut up.
Why? Fuck, it’s easy. Because I no longer care if what I have to say is stupid.
I don’t write to sound perfect.
I write to sound human.

The Problem With My Voice/14-going-on-15

I’ve finally understood why I was so discontent with the way my blog was turning out.

I’d forgotten the point.

A blog should read, in a sense, like a journal entry, not a school-approved essay–and injecting a profanity midsentence isn’t enough to make the distinction. As opposed to writing with a voice–my voice–I was churning out posts that read like summaries. Hence why the blog became an obligation as opposed to a source of enjoyment. It’s almost involuntary now; I open this “new post” URL and I start writing as if I’m going to fucking hand it in and get it graded.

Enough.

I don’t want to go through my blog and feel as if I’m going to publish it. I want to hear my voice. Rhetorical triangle. Speaker. Audience. I’m talking to YOU. So why don’t I sound like it?
It’s tough, though, to make this sudden shift- LISTEN TO ME! I still sound like I’m writing an essay!
… ! Lightbulb moment ! Why don’t I pretend as if I’m speaking to a specific person? This’ll go hand in hand with my blog revival project–the seven day countdown to my 15th birthday.

14 being my favorite number, it makes sense that my 14th year on the face of the planet was the psychopathic joyride it turned out to be. But I’ve only got seven days left to be fourteen. Ever. There’s no going back, and I feel like it deserves to be commemorated somehow.
So I’m going to record each day to some degree.
Now to decide who to write to on each day…

3/7 – Jack
3/8 – Nira
3/9 -
3/10 -
3/11 -
3/12 -
3/13 – Myself

I’ll fill up those spots as I go along. Hope it’ll work.
Fingers crossed.

2009: Uncensored

New Year’s Resolution 2009

1. Live like you’re dying.

I feel like there should be more fanfare.
Now that I look back, I’ve felt that way about a shitload of things this year. Everything seems to have come and gone so quickly and quietly that their passing makes no sense. There’s no time for me to absorb it, nothing that’s hitting me and saying, HEY. IT’S OVER. YOU’RE DONE. MOVE ON.
Hello?!
It has been a strange year, anticlimactic at some points and completely miraculous at others. My life is STILL a gigantic bloody contradiction, and I’ve realized that’s not going to change. That sucks. That means I’m going to be just as confused at 44 as I am at 14. Fuck.
Maybe I’m just overanalyzing this the way I used to, but I honestly believe the number 14 means more than all those other digits or combinations of digits. Whatever. I hate numbers- they make no sense to me, they’re constructs, they place tags on things that can’t be understood through statistics but nevertheless there is this one number I wish to hang on to.
I was fourteen for the majority of 2008. And though I hate to admit how superstitious I really am underneath all the cynicism I actually think that has something to do with why this year has been such a year. I turn around and the things I’ve gone through in the past 365 days could make up a lifetime, and yet in my eyes it’s still not enough, not enough, not enough. Never enough. It’s not enough until I hit my limits and I still have no idea what and where those are.
In 2008, my father and I became a team. I met the love of my short yet still rapidly waning life, ended a two-year stop in cyberspace, and started a chain of events in the real, tangible world that will go on to shape the next decade of my existence if not my life in its entirety. I lost my lip virginity and started sleeping at 11-12. I broke up with someone for the first time, rejected someone for the first time, even smacked a guy across the face for the first time. I went from the invisible girl to the one who could have anything she wanted if she could be fucked to try, the ugly duckling to the girl three guys ask out at camp. Camp Mason. Religion, Christianity, God. My aunt. A family. My sister. Nira Martinez. Irreversibly breaking a bond. Love too much. Too hard. Too little. Not at all. Taking chances and passing up about three times as many.
Which leads me to the only thing I want to bring into 2009.
At any given moment all of this could be over. I could be standing at a funeral thinking, why did I waste all that time? It could be MY funeral, my life, my wasted life, my nothing. We are never powerless to take charge of our lives. They belong to us, and what we do with them depends on motivation, will, and as always the healthy dose of luck. But what happens when my luck runs out? Is that really the only thing my life is built on?
So I guess looking back on this year, having thrown me headfirst and more prepared than I expected into the kind of whirlwind life I’ve been waiting 13 years to live, I walk away from it knowing that all this was given to me through a little willpower and a lot of luck. And if I don’t tip the scales, even them out- it will be over. If I keep waiting to be ready I will never be ready. I am ready now. Go. Move. Run. Jump. Live. Don’t look back. There’s the world full of experiences and your clock is ticking. This is your life. You control it. Make your decisions. Make your choices. You’ve spent long enough daydreaming every night before you go to bed. Bring it to life. Here’s the path, the runway. We’ve given you the four-inch heels. Walk in them. Don’t stop. Take control.
Then lose it.

Edward Cullen: Satisfying Your Secret Bad-Boy Complex?

Or not so secret, as the case may be.
Below are links to the interpretation of the modern Romeo + Juliet (namely, Bella Swan and Edward Cullen) by one of my favorite authors, Megan McCafferty.
The fact that she does not fall under the ‘obsessed teen-tween fangirl category’ already gives her brownie points. The remainder of the essay- written from a more critical but still irresistably Meyer-magnetized perspective- should serve to set its integrity in stone.

Whether or not you understood a word of what I just said, FOLLOW THESE LINKS IF YOU KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR YOU.
Which most of you don’t, but whatever; if you can identify Ctrl/Command-C + V on your keyboard, you are honor-bound (and Cullen-bound) to check this out.
[Spoiler Alert; Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse (Stephenie Meyer)]

http://www.meganmccafferty.com/archives/2008/12/vampire-books-are-not-my-bag-part-one/
http://www.meganmccafferty.com/archives/2008/12/vampire-books-are-not-my-bag-part-2/
http://www.meganmccafferty.com/archives/2008/12/vampire-books-are-not-my-bag-part-3/

What Would It Be Like To Lose Control

My sister recommended this book to me.

It’s called Bloom, by Elizabeth Scott; a counterpart to Sloppy Firsts [see earlier posts]. I shouldn’t be surprised, really. Something’s always connected us in a way that we might be connected were we really sisters by blood- so much so that shouldn’t come as a shock that we managed to stumble upon the same kind of book that we both really needed to read at the same time.

I knew the second I read the back cover that once I picked it up I wouldn’t put it down. I didn’t. I flipped open the page at 11 and now it’s 1 a.m. and I did not stop for a second. Except for that one spot where I turned the book over, looked up at my ceiling the color of orange sherbet, and said, “something big is going to happen on the next page and I’m not sure I want to know what it is.”
Regardless, I kept reading.

Unlike Sloppy Firsts, it did not bring on a set of realizations. Maybe because my life is less of a mess, in terms of how much I’m fooling myself with every passing day. Maybe because I’m trying harder to stay true to myself and still get somewhere.
But all the same it’s not enough. It might never be enough.
Because we’re human.

Humans, oh, we waste so much time trying to be something we aren’t. And every one of those wasted seconds is a second you could’ve spent being free. Being you. The world is a very large place, even if high school isn’t. There is a space on this earth for everyone, for every kind of person from every kind of background. You. Me. Him. Her.
But no matter how many times we hear it- “believe in yourself. be yourself.” I don’t know if any of us actually listen.

I have to be honest- I don’t.
I’m calculating. Manipulative. Most of my actions are the result of careful thought, a pick-one-option-out-of-ten-possible-ones that has gone on for so long it is involuntary and no one ever notices, most notably myself. I can tell myself a lie as easily as I can fabricate a story about why I don’t have my homework. But the difference is, the story about my homework dies the second my lips stop moving, whereas the lies I tell myself always manage to catch up to me.
Even when I try so hard to let go, to just be for a minute, it doesn’t seem to work. I’m still trying for something. It’s as if it’s too late for me. I want and I wish and I yearn but I can’t seem to let go anymore. And everytime my exterior starts to fall a little bit someone picks it up, someone notices and calls out my attitude, asks about my day, wonders if I got enough sleep or am being intentionally bitchy or was somehow offended- does anyone ever consider that maybe I’m just a little bit tired?

My mind works so constantly that sometimes my head hurts. I’ll be standing in the line to return books at the library and my brain will be going at hundreds of thousands of miles an hour and I can’t have ONE MOMENT of peace where all the thoughts will stop going and just shut up! I grit my teeth and beg myself to stop fucking thinking for even the barest of seconds, to give me some sort of relief, but I can’t. It never stops. Life never stops. The game never stops. It’s exhausting and I want to hit the brakes but I can’t find them. I want to let go, but my hands are glued onto the rope and even when I tug with all my strength it’s still not enough.

But I live to hope that perhaps, someday, it will be.

Maybe someday I’ll graduate surrounded by the right friends, not the wrong ones- the ones that everyone’s watching to see if you have. Maybe someday I’ll be able to close my eyes and shut down. Maybe someday I’ll be able to sleep without tossing and turning and dreaming of a day where my life will be better than it is. Maybe someday I’ll look into the eyes of my children and everything will make sense to me.
Maybe someday I’ll sing because I just realized music is the one haven I have where I don’t have to think. I only have to feel. Maybe someday we’ll realize perhaps it’s not that our parents don’t listen; only that we aren’t screaming loud enough. Maybe someday we’ll tell our parents what we really want even though we know they love us and thus can’t bear to disappoint them- because if they truly, honestly love us they will never stop us from forging our dreams to get better lives. What use is a better life when you feel empty when you wake up every morning? Why be right when you’d rather be wrong? Why is wrong defined as wrong when it feels so much more right than right?

No one ever said it was easy to let go- it’s not. But take it one step at a time. Sooner or later, I hope, there will come a time in your life when you’ll have reached your limit.
Sooner or later I hope we’ll all start living for ourselves.

We’re All Slaves to Society

I really shouldn’t be getting this up-close-and-personal this early in my blogging lifespan but fuck it; I just had an epiphany of sorts and it might be marginally beneficial to share it. And if it’s not? What-fucking-ever. At least I have the words saved somewhere.

I just finished a book called “Sloppy Firsts” by Megan McCafferty. I thought it might echo with my recent, angsty-teen mindset. It did. It went above and beyond the call of duty. And this is what I learned.

a) Making sure things with me and the one guy who’s ever really appreciated me for who I truly am are where they should be is more important than getting a conventionally “cool” boyfriend or hooking up with guys or being wanted by them
b) Getting a first kiss that really means something is worth more than getting it over with just so I don’t have to feel like a loser of a lip-virgin at parties
c) Actually doing my homework, not taking naps in Ms. Reilly’s geometry class, and bringing home the best grades possible to my dad is more important than hanging out and eating frozen yogurt and getting fat no matter how low the calories are [not dissing frozen yogurt btw; red mango = orgasmic.]
d) Making friends that will stay true is more important than making friends that will look good in pictures
e) Hanging out with my “sister” and really listening to her is more important than shopping for overpriced clothes that I don’t really love
f) Practicing my violin and not losing touch with the gift my mother gave me whether or not it takes me really far is more important than refreshing my Facebook to see if I got any more comments on my profile picture

My excuse for all of this was that I already have the friends-for-life; I don’t need any more. I don’t care if people like me for all the wrong reasons as long as I can have a good time. So maybe that makes sense. But maybe it’s not enough. Why not make more lifelong friends? Can you ever have “too many” true friends? Hell no. And in allowing myself to think otherwise, I might lose the true friends that I already have. And then what the fuck would I be waking up for?

I go to high school every day worrying about how I act, how I look, and who I’m with at all times just to come home and wonder why I’m alive. I’ve always known that it’s not worth it but I thought it was worth trying for a while. Well, it’s been a month of proverbial PMS, and I was right. It’s not. And fuck trying.

This is who I am. Either you’re comfortable with it, or you’re not.

Now the only thing that remains is seeing whether I have the strength to follow up.