The Champagne Soapbox

I’m sick and I’m crying in my car. I keep looking around to see if people are looking. I cant stop looking.

The nostalgia of an incoming autumn always puts me in some weird headspace. I always get sick. This is my first time being sick alone. It’s incredibly depressing. You make your stupid soup and take your stupid meds and get overcharged at a medical facility and judged for not mastering the art of taking care of yourself. Being sick alone is almost embarrassing, but the act of being sick is almost pleasurable when there is someone who is there to acknowledge your sickness or sulk in it with you. The weather is turning over a new color and there is a filter that makes the world look fulfilled. I envy that.

So, I’m crying in the car again. I realized my birthday is next week, and I have no childlike expectation to experience it in depth. Maybe growing up is finding comfort in simplicity and losing nostalgia in serendipity. Aging past the post-teen boy-feening depressions I had a few years ago, I experience sadness like a clown after people laughed at him. They say southerners can smell the rain before it comes, and they can. I can smell the depression before I start to feel nothing.

My sister would always have swimming parties. She’s born in June. We’re both water signs, so playing mermaids came naturally. We would push each other in and meet each other at the bottom and flap our fins until we believed we were magical actually. Now that I’m older, I don’t believe there is a bottom of the pool. If I jump too deep, there’s no one to help me find my way back.

Competitively, my mortal buoyancy reminds me that I’m at the lowest seat of the plane that’s taking off. The lowest low and highest high. I’m dangling my knees from the highest branch of the steepest tree. I’m constantly flying freely and dodging things in the shape of love or opportunity. I see love as a temporary loss in identity. I got a concussion once and had to wear rose glasses to see. I stopped wearing them because they looked stupid, and I started looking down at independence as something earned and not free.

I don’t think I have ever thought so high of myself. I don’t think I’ve ever considered myself. I’m finally considered, and I’m finally enough. At least to myself. That’s the mid-twenties part about this piece. It’s that crying in the car won’t exactly give you anymore peace. You start to think until you can’t breathe, and you realize your birthday is a funeral and death (when it comes) will be a breeze. I think the universe likes to watch me be, and I often think about the television screen she uses to judge or improve me.

The warm breath of summer starts to thin and so does my anxiety, well to a point. Kisses feel uncomfortable when the Texas sun chooses you to be its target, but autumn tastes of the freshness comparative of snogging someone new. It’s like watching your parents grow old and expecting you to take care of yourself when you’re sick. My mom picks up the chance to take care of me when she sees I’m doing it quite well alone. I wonder if people think of me when they’re alone, or if I’m just the pillar of a balance beam measuring the vibrations between seams of a jagged tapestry. I was sick for a week. No one knew of me for a week. I didn’t exist for a week, and yet they wanted to know if I were free for a drink. I always am. A drink feels like family and adjusting communal moods is like finding an apple close to the deserted tree. Seems fair.

I care so much about the perfume I wear. I hope I can control the sense you make of me, intentionally. I’ve landed at a point where my self-image reflects my ego and touches upon reality. Someone told me I always smell good, so I change what I wear hoping that my aura wears stronger and lasts longer.

I’m sick and no one cares. I sneeze and no one blesses me. How am I supposed to sleep well at night half trusting my divinity? I crave a bit more than self-intimacy but my curiosity for men who lack the ability to understand me emotionally has led me toward clarity. Lately, I cling to my independence like it’s become endangered. Mary loved Jesus before they met by the manger. The burning marsh by the feeder road church reminds me that men and my raised religion taught me anger.

My birthday is just a few days from Halloween. I hated sharing a holiday. I forget that my birthday is coming up, yet I am quick to check if my neighbor started decorating. I’m barefoot on my balcony looking through peoples windows making sure my life appears to be a bit more interesting. The girl across me just got a boyfriend. The couple on the first floor switch holding a cigarette in the morning. The guy adjacent from me has a weed pen, a big dog, and an addiction to p***. I close my window when his opens, and I wonder what they think of me.

A girl with brown eyes and shorter hair – an inch every time I reveal myself to be seen. Everything about her is big. Big denim pants, big t-shirt, and big over the ear headphones with a pace that sometimes includes a hop skip or dance. She keeps holding her cats hand. She smiles with all her teeth. She talks incredibly too loud. She doesn’t cover her mouth when she coughs. She sits in her car and cries when she feels no one is watching her. She closes her curtains too late, hoping someone is watching. What does that say about me? I watched this guy walk in the bush ahead of my car to go pee (lmao). He played it off like I didn’t see. Do people even see me when I don’t ask or prompt them to attend a birthday party to grieve my 23?

I spend most time being hard on myself and soft with others. Sometimes life reminds you to be soft to yourself by being hard to you. I got slapped by whiplash from the flapping wind driving windows down on the freeway. I woke up with a steel boot on my chest after sharing a cigarette (or more). I’m sitting in the car looking to see how fast a puffy face will disappear when the gold sun asks to invade my sunken space. It took my breath away, in a painful kind of way. I got out of the car and let my face dry. I wish I could feel weightless everyday. This week is my birthday, and I wish my birthday hadn’t become just another day.

Everything’s changed, everyone’s changed, I’ve changed and yet I’m the only one who ended up the same. Nothing every seems perfectly settled and I toss around my comforter like it’s a hair out of place on my wedding day. I run my tongue over the chip in my tooth like a dog that’s dying to get loose from the collar ball and chain that’s holding it back from being lost. It’s hard to get out of bed when you actually like your boss. Life is good when you consider time to be of high cost.

As for this next year, I let go of the friends who ran away. I let go of the pain I carry when I know it’ll all just be okay. To the boys I’ve let back in just to watch them rot and crowd my mind with their deliberate decay. The birthday feels like I’m the ring leader for my own circus and I have to beg people to come let me entertain. I got pancakes and chocolate chips to make the morning of – just so I can wake up and know that being alone is okay. I wish for more slow mornings. I let go of quick mornings and mourning younger versions of myself that I hated at the time. I trust the universe to course correct my path when I accept things not for me. I let go of love that’s hard and accept love that finds me. All I want to do in this life is be me because I’m the only one capable of complete understanding of my own being.

I’m cool as shit (that’s okay to say). I write, and I care, and I’m passionate, and I’m wise, and I’m crazy, and I’m loud, and I know myself, and I only have two secrets, and I’m sure of myself, and I love deeply, and I’m expressive in my own right. I hope that my life continues to be this bright, for the light to crash through my window when I’m crying in my car just to ask if I’m alright.

To be real –

Thank you for being my friend over the years. I get fairly emotional thinking about this 23rd. I’ve traveled the most I have ever in my life, and I’ve discovered a passion for the aisle seat. I’ve shed the shyness the world granted me after a rough year with a rough relationship and rough expectations for myself. I live a life that I’m happy with. I forget about concert tickets, I don’t beg for forgiveness, I trust myself and I love being my dad’s princess. I just expect happiness to return after sadness. A funeral is a celebration of life, and I thank the universe for allowing me to explore some more and hopefully forever.

Cheers to those who get devastatingly depressed when their birthday comes and you ask if your friends really care about you and fuck you’re getting older and you just want your mom to call the grocery store for you to see if they can make you your favorite cake. Twenty-four is next door.

Bye bye