The Champagne Soapbox

Some people feel what most people don’t. Some people watch people until they implode. Put me in a movie and everybody will know. I’m a star, the one the people say you are, of the movies we watch that remind us of a future not far. The shooting one that disappears into oblivion for me to chase into eternity without a vision of its journey. The empty minded, and the heavy minded, and the heavy bodied, and the empty bodied – all individual versions of my own humanity screaming at the sky and asking her why people give more credit to the guy. My eyes too wide to become wet again in my own sack of sacred skin. My limbs too foreign to become known again in my own sacred sack of skin. A biological phenomenon participating in spiritual experiment. A psychological phenomenon convincing that I was a misprint.

Around the round world, she chased after her star so far that she found the waking sun instead. Of course, we believe we are worthy of more notoriety for creations apart from our own manifestation of reality. The sun is brighter than me. She’s warmer than me. She’s more than I’ll ever be. She cares for everyone. Becoming unsatisfied in my own fun, coming home to no son, I become lost in finding a direction to run. Too tired to keep running, so I sit where I am and wonder why the sun feels so nice. The grass where I have laid leaves a bed in my shape. When the season changes, again, I will peer back at dead grass and remember to mourn the woman once scorned.

I make it look easy to be squeezed, like a lemon with stolen skin. How are you still hungry for me even when I’m so sour? I’m living in given skin, although it doesn’t feel like my skin, and it takes work for me to feel as it my own again. “This is what I need to remember when I’m depressed” every time I win. To prepare for your children grieving your cat’s death when it’s only the beginning. It sucks to be the trying flower and the shitty gardener when there is nothing you can do without water. With every anticipating moment, there is an assumed recovery for me to prepare for. My therapist never heard the term “anticipatory anxiety,” and since then I’ve been listening to only my own advice. At this point, it’s like I’m paying for a friend and I tell my friends that and they say that it’s the same. I forgot that my therapist is probably selling my data to third party companies to better predict my consumer patterns. I forgot that my therapist is my friend.

Do you realize how human I am? Most men don’t even perceive me to be woman. They look at the girlhood of it all to find a brunette doll at the core of my being with a belly button that giggles when pressed. Everyone looks at me like a mirror, so I’m careful with those who look through me like glass. They’ve seen me shatter like glass. I hold them as if they’ll be my last. How much depth do you see below the pane? Put your face up to it and expect me on the other side of their perspective spinning around a selfish spiral of self-ego and imploding within paranoid suspicion. Talk to me through practiced lines, appropriate and exploitative despite their refine. Genuinely – most of them just hear mumbles that don’t completely register as words, believe some blurred lines of my clear headline, and only focus on the image of me that’s fabricated in their mind. Maybe nothing is interesting, and maybe nothing matters, and maybe that’s the good part of it all.

I lie to Uber drivers when they give me a reason to. I tell stories to Uber drivers when they don’t. Stare at me with your wrinkled eyes through the mirror and tell me how basic I am to be writing on a blog about basic shit. I can’t tell if your spit qualifies as drool. You’re not reading this, but I want to let you know that I went to the grocery store yesterday and stared too long at a stranger. If you took anything from this conversation, let it be that you’re dying and so am I. If I die alone, is that all I’ll be remembered by? I cry without blinking, I drive without breathing, I grind my jaw while sleeping. Nothing is new, everything is new, and I forget that you too are human.

You know, you should really schedule your un/predictable emotional recessions. There are ways to hack it now. Just focus on your wellbeing and dance in the sun or some shit. Read something thick and fulfilling that you forget to think about how thin you are becoming. Drink water when you can’t find your appetite. Focus on your breath when your heartbeat is bouncing. Take a relaxing bath and see how long you can hold your breath underwater. Light a candle, try holding the match and see if you feel your finger get hotter. When it burns, let it remind you of your mortality. Go get a band-aid, slap it on, call it a day how about we? We can reschedule depression. Let’s ask depression what time works best? Hey, Depression – what time works best? Anytime. Any day. Sometimes all the time. Always some time.

A past time. My parents would describe me to have been a quiet kid. I’m sure most people would’ve pictured me as a happy kid, and I think I am a happy kid. I was very observant and smirking in my shy nature, pretty smart, pretty for a girl and smart for a girl. I got so excited to meet the tooth fairy that I pulled a few more out to save her the trip. I got so excited to meet my sister that I would sleep by her crib. I got so excited to slip into my dreams only to wake up still feeling asleep. I feel so much more awake now in memories, and I wonder if I’m living too much in the past in order to make the present time fast. I don’t mean to speed things up, but I’m on the run.

You said I was mellow. Maybe I’m just exhausted. I like listening to sad music. I like listening to music so loud I can’t think. I’m begging people to hear the music I have in my head, constantly organizing a lousy hum drum of quite pessimistic voices while masking optimism. It’s like “hey, I forgot who I am and I hate the casualty of a repetitive day-day, but you’re fine so you just represent the community of being fine and satisfied while I try to open my window today.” I’m not doing much except practicing a genuine smile in the mirror, do my friends use me and I’m oblivious to it, hugging a dirty blanket while experimenting with metronome breathing, do I find passion in anything other than my thoughts, staring through my ceiling with a steady ice cube melting on my forehead, taking care of myself to a maladaptive obsessive compulsive point, do you ever think about purpose. That’s the thing: if nothing matters, why are you worried?

Positive Nihilism. The once neon starkness of emotional stunting now faded and dusty in the childhood attic I visit when it’s a holiday or whenever there is a happy yet sulky occasion. Wait, why am I talking to you again? Yeah, you seem like you have it figured out? Studying psychology with a focus on cognition while being active in therapy was just me playing the part of Pavlov’s dog. Salivating every time I pulled out a treat and rang the bell with my own paw. I’m rewarding myself for solving a problem I created. At one point you become comfortable knowing that someone is sleeping in the same position directly above and below you, in a different dimension or in a separate unit.

You paint yourself white and fill up with noise, like a reflection of a nuclear bomb and you’re the last one remaining. You paint yourself white, acting like you are empty when really you are every color. The emptiness inside of you to be felt as full, too full, almost never full, a sip remaining of the spilled milk you cry over. Exchanging energy with yourself and becoming higher with every thought. People keep asking you why you are blue, red, green. Let them perceive, finally.