So far this year, I've read a book a week. Seems like not a lot to read when I have all the time in the world, but at the same time, nothing ever gets done when there's all this time just lying around waiting to be used up wisely. It's never been something I've been all too good at, this passing time business. I guess that a lot of people do a lot with themselves compared to how I pass my own time. I have a large family outside of just my parents and my brother; countless cousins and aunts and uncles spanning different ages and walks of life. There's one cousin I have, Caroline, and she's only a few months older than me and we spent a lot of time together as kids and I looked up to her in a lot of ways. I think it's safe to say that I was more than jealous. It seemed like she had a lot more than I did in a lot of ways. She was more charismatic and smarter and better looking and we got compared to each other a lot. But what was to compare? She blew me out of the water every time. She still does. On the other hand, I am the family secret. You know, there isn't much about me or beneath my surface when you hear it from them. They feel sorry for me because I tried to kill myself and because I suffer from depression and I guess they're a whole lot of things from angry to disappointed because they think I'm selfish, and I can't argue with how it seems. It is their opinion, and an opinion formed against me means that I am the last person that they will ever want to allow to change it. My family talk about her a lot and what she's been doing with herself and I try to not let it get to me, but it does. She's travelled the world and back again and she's almost a doctor and she's so fucking beautiful and intelligent that it pains me. I sit at home and I read books and I think about thinking about doing something but I never really ever do. I think I'm scared. I feel like I should've put a question mark after that last sentence, to pull myself out of fact and back into wondering if I'm right or wrong. I doubt myself too much. I think that it takes a real person to be able to say whatever it is that they want to say with abandon and without regret. I feel unwell when I look back on my life so far. I'm not upset with my childhood or angry with my parents or disappointed with the way that I was treated because the funniest thing about all this is that there is no other way for me to be. I am in this body, and this body contains my soul, like a vial full of the rarest kind of magic, spilling over the brim, and it is right. I am different to most of my friends. My thought processes don't follow the same paths and my heart doesn't seem to beat to the same rhythm. I don't know what happened to me or where my personality came from. It feels like somebody accidentally pulled me out of a hat at a children's birthday party, and they're still trying to push me back in because their fingers grasped around something from another universe that they can't quite comprehend, but only because they're just not trying hard enough. So I find myself sitting in my room by the light of my lamp when it's not even fully dark and reading a book much too fast, letting my eyes skim over the words but never really taking anything in until I've gotten six pages deep and I can't remember a thing. And I have that feeling in my chest, that one that tells me that I was meant for greater things, the one that makes me drive away to some undecided location trying to find something in the dark that comes just after the light of somebody's headlights. Something that breaks my heart and makes me feel alive.
I don't even know. I think I just need to get out more. Find the mighty souls. The dreamers.
"The candor was infectious. It spread back to the beginning of your life. You tried to tell her, as well as you could, what it was like being you. You described the feeling you'd always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn't worry quite so much about why. You talked about your first day of school. You cried and clutched her leg. You even remembered how her plaid slacks felt, the scratchiness on your cheek. She sent you off to the bus - she interrupted here to say she wasn't much happier than you were - and you hid in the woods until you saw the bus leave and then went home and told her you had missed it. So Mom drove you to school, and by the time you got there you were an hour late. Everybody watched you come in with your little note, and heard you explain that you missed the bus. When you finally sat down you knew that you would never catch up."