Open letter to my brother. (Originally)

Afoofoo, how are you? And what is this "Jessie" madness? DO YOU GOTS A GIIIIILFRIEEEEEND, OOOHHHHHHH???! (Afoofoo and Jessie sitting in a tree: K-I-S-S-I-N-G!)

How's your foot, by the way? And school? Do you have like ninety ladeeez trying to take care of you? hahaha, I bet you do.

I still love your happy gangsta dancer. He makes me smile, so I saved him onto my computer so I can keep looking at him. I like to smile, but sometimes it feels like I can't, you know? So I take what I can get. Also that shade of blue is really nice.

I started a group on Facebook that's kind of an in-joke with my dorm. On the third floor, this girl Bethany brought some creepy, like, taxidermied-looking crow with her from home (named Edgar), and took a picture of him which she's been sticking on peoples' doors with creepy messages. Lambie, though, has taken a stand against the Edgar menace! I drew a picture of him looking hArDcOrE and calling Edgar out and now... looks like the war's begun! hahaha... there are two Facebook groups about this whole war: a pro-Edgar side, and a pro-Lambie side. LAMBIE IS OUR SAVIOR AND WILL LEAD US FROM THE EDGAR OPPRESSION!

Other than that, Warcraft is like, really friggin fun. My main character is a night-elf hunter, and I've almost got her level up enough to tame beasts to make them fight for me. That's cool. I only have a few more days of free-play left, though. I kind of want to sign up for a the full version, but I feel bad about spending $$ for the game on top of $15/month just to escape from stupid life for a couple hours here and there. Then again, I guess I'm not going to need or WANT to buy any other goofy things, so might as well use my spending money (the stuff I'm not going to save) on something I'll appreciate, right? I don't know. I feel kinda bad.

Also I've been named God of Larcom Hall, by the way. I don't know why; I kind of suck. I don't feel well. But everyone thinks I'm really cool, which shows how much THEY know.

Kidney beans are really good just plain and room temperature. I haven't been eating much because I tend not to when I'm not feeling well, but when I DO eat, for some reason my fall back is always chocolate milk, salad with honey-lime dressing, and kidney beans. I guess I'm alright with that. I don't know.

I've been listening to my music a lot lately. I used to have music on constantly back when I was your age, but then I stopped. I don't know why really.... I guess I realized that I really didn't like what I was listening to. Now I know what I like, though, and I've been playing my iTunes and stuff all the time. My earbud speakers are way better than my lappy's speaker, haha. I've been nominated DJ around here too, for some reason. I don't know... I just like what I like. Whatever.

A couple of the songs on my iTunes always make me think of you when they come on-- "Last Resort" by Papa Roach mostly, but also "Butterfly" by Crazy Town reminds me of you and I. "Numb" by Linkin Park has practically my theme song for the last few months. Reminds me of myself and Matt Tansey. I love that kid; I swear to god I'd be dead now without him. "The Story" by Brandi Carlyle reminds me of Mom; it's kind of overdone and misguided, but sounds alright in the end... I don't really know if that sounds right. "Bible, Candle, and Skull" (Th' Legendary Shackshakers) reminds me of Dad, and I have no friggin' idea why. It's the tempo and piano thing more than the lyrics, I'm sure. Jeffrey doesn't really come to mind with any of my songs. I don't know why that is, kinda makes me feel like shit. Maybe I don't know him as well? Because he's five years younger than me and we never really saw eye-to-eye? I don't know. Maybe it'll get better when we're older.

That's the way it always goes, anyway. Can't get impatient. Getting impatient is probably the worst thing you can do.

I hope I can find someone someday. I guess I’ll just have to hang in there. I can’t be failing too badly. Sometimes the trying’s just so hard though. I get so fucking tired.

Sorry for rambling. I don’t know why I’m talking to you about crap. I guess I feel guilty about laying it all out on one person and am kind of looking for another, I don’t know. It feels nice to free-write though. Since I can’t free-talk. And it keeps my thoughts in order. I don’t even know if I’m going to send this, but oh well. I never know what the fuck I’m doing anyway. I wish my friends would call. Besides Matt, no one wants to talk to me anymore. I don’t know what I did. I wish someone would tell me.

I had a dream last night about riding on a Greyhound bus. It was being driven my this tiny old man with white hair and his tiny old lady sister was sitting in the outside seat on the first row on the right. I was the only passenger, because mom paid them to drive me away to do what I needed to do. Then they started being horrible-- I don’t even know what they were doing, but I remember being horrified and disgusted and terribly, terribly upset, and finally I told them I couldn’t take it anymore and that I’d just pay my fare and leave right then on the side of the highway (it was the middle of nowhere, though, so it was a really empty highway) Well the old woman got really angry saying I couldn’t do that because mom was paying a lot of money so that I could do what I always wanted to do. The old man was upset too, but the really quiet kind of upset, and then you know how the windshields on Greyhound busses are floor-to-ceiling? He opened a sliding door in the middle of the windshield (while the bus was still moving) and just stepped right out of it and the bus ran him over. The old lady shut up real fast and was horrified, but I got into the driver’s seat and stopped the bus (the break was a big black lever on the I guess ceiling that I had to pull down to activate?) and then we brought the old man back onto the bus to see if he was okay. He was: he had only a few long red scrapes on his back where the undercarriage of the bus scraped him (I guess when he went under he did it feet first and straight, so that the bus only skimmed over him and he missed the wheels). The old lady was then really worried and kind of like a kid because she didn’t know what to do, but I told her that the cuts didn’t look so bad, and that all she needed was to put a little bacatracin or antibiotic cream on them and then some long strips of gauze, which we did (she did the ointment; I did the gauze) and he’d be okay. And we did, and I woke up.

I’m almost crying again. It’s the third time in four days. I don’t know what’s wrong with me; I never cry. I’m not homesick. I don’t miss family at all, which makes me horrible; I don’t really know why I don’t even miss home, I’m just so glad to have been able to leave. I think at home I couldn’t think right. I couldn’t think at all; I’d just try not to think and just to forget what I should have been thinking of, but now that I don’t have you guys around I can finally think for myself and for real like I couldn’t before, and I think I’ve discovered more than a few things about myself that I really wish sometimes that I hadn’t. It’ll be okay, though; that’s just life. You just have to live it, even when you don’t want to. Even if nobody would really notice either way. It’s just what you have to do. One of those things, I guess.

One of those things.

Jesus. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I’m so tired of crying. I want to just forget again, sometimes. I just want to be someone who can’t fucking read peoples’ minds and ride and be ridden like some kind of freaking shaman or whatever. Because I can do that, did you know? I really can. I thought everyone else could too, but I found out that’s not true. I can read people’s minds, Tony. I’ve always been able to. I’ve always been able to get these fucking hunches that always wind up right and I’ve always been able to go inside people and wear them like a cloak and find out every fucking thing they never thought anyone could know about. And syncretism? It isn’t normal either. I feel words in colors, shapes, and textures; every sentence and phrase has a visual aesthetic in my mind that just doesn’t fucking exist. It’s called syncretism, and I read about it in The Week some time over the summer… the guy was autistic, but wrote an article about how he saw things. I’ve always brought that up with people. Does “12” have a color to you? It’s navy and white, but that’s one color. “Tony” doesn’t have a color, except really dark argyle/plaid, but it’s a very heavy name. Some words are like that. “Fuck” is jade/forest green and cream a little bit, but again that’s only one color, not two.

Words kind of help me deal. “Elegist”, my screen name here, is more or less my “mantra”. A mantra is a word you say to make yourself calm and focused; the word “elegist” is just really soothing to me. That sounds really fucking insane, but that’s the truth. The color’s really nice and the texture is just right. It just works out that it means something significant too: an elegist is a person who writes elegies, and an elegy is a speech in praise of the dead. Almost everyone I’ve ever respected fully is dead somehow. All I can do is remember them, I guess.

We had a debate the other day in my first year seminar about the nature of heroes. One thing that stood out to me was that most of the class was against me… they said you could never be truly alone. I think that’s not true. Of course people can be alone. My professor said that if people are said to be alone, it’s only because the public wants to hear that because it makes a good story. Whatever. He also said that Gilgamesh was on a quest to “learn to become human”. The class said that was heroic. Except me. I said that’s what people do… everyone looked at me like I was insane. You just know how to be human. You just do it. I conceded the point, but I still believe that, at least for some of us, at least for me, you do have to learn how to do it. And the learning is hard. And it hurts. And there’s nothing heroic about loneliness, nor about being unsure, nor about cynicism, nor about me, but logically I guess the class outnumbered me on the first three points, so what do I know.

Nothing, obviously.

I’m done crying now. You ever get that feeling where if you were to turn to stone right that minute, you wouldn’t notice? I get that all the time. Just… numb. Sometimes I can’t feel anything at all. I never cut myself, but I think maybe that making my fingers bleed and driving myself into massive headaches and then refusing painkillers is kind of similar. Not like in Saladfingers, “I like when the red water comes out”; its not the blood or the pain that I want, it’s just that if I hurt too bad to think, then I can finally let go. And if you’re bleeding or bruised or claiming a migraine, then people will worry about you and understand that you need time and effort to feel better; if it’s just that you’re too damn tired, not because you haven’t slept, but because you’re soul’s too weary to carry your body , or that you have too much on your mind to handle putting even the strain of conversation on it, people say that “it’ll be okay” or “stop being antisocial”. Well, that just makes it worse. No one understands pain on the inside, and I couldn’t ask for anyone to help me feel better. I can’t do that. But if I’m bleeding or I’m blind from a migraine or my legs are black and blue, they’ll understand “I just need to lie down”. I don’t want sympathy. I want to lie down.

(at this point you called and… well, you know how THAT went)