I've taken to driving much more slowly around the back roads these past few weeks. It used to be so fast, all about fast fast fast and leaving it all behind but that's never worked for me. Never. Not once. I find myself lethargic and tired and my reaction times aren't what they used to be, just like my brain doesn't now how or why anymore. Even less than it always had. I watch everything much more intently than I ever have and it leaves me with too much thought and not enough action. You know, I used to actually believe that I emerged myself right into the centre of everything but really, retrospect is a wonderful thing. I paid so much fucking attention my whole damn life that I forgot to ask any questions or to let myself be heard. I had all these thoughts and I let them melt away before I could make them into something tangible and beautiful like I always wanted to. I was just never one of the stronger characters. That's all. I'm sure that people think I'm weird. I can't hold a conversation because I don't know what to talk about. I don't. I don't know enough because I don't pay attention to the right things and I don't have any special areas of knowledge. I don't read any newspapers or watch any television and I don't read the right books or spend my time with the right people. I don't get most of the jokes and it's never much bothered me at all because I like things the way I like them and that's that. Relationships have been a difficult thing for me, more and more as I've gotten older and I suppose it's really just because I'm supposed to be my own person now and not anybody else, but I can't find a way to stand alone as just myself. I have so much to offer you know, but not even the people that love me the most can nurture it best because I can't recognise how to meet anybody halfway anymore. It hasn't rained in almost two weeks and it seems so surreal because it's April and it's Ireland and there's just all this dust everywhere. Literally everywhere, like we're all moving fast but I think a person's greatest strength is in being able to keep still when everything else is upside-down and so horrifically inside-out. It's just so damn bright outside that I walk hunched over in case I might be seen. I don't even know what I'm trying to say, I just have all of this drivel inside me and I've been hiding away for so long that I don't know how to stand back up. Really, the thing is, I'm not what I was or who I was when I was seventeen. Nor are any of the friends that I grew up with, and I guess that's okay but it upsets me sometimes, at the worst times. Counting stock at work or bringing the dogs for a walk, or maybe paying for all of my things at the supermarket - I just get this unbelievable, desperate urge to abandon ship and run away because I know that there is so much more away from here. I know that there is somewhere with less discomfort and I know that there are people with less difficulties and more inconsistencies.
I was sitting in the back of a car last night with my head resting against my seatbelt and out the window were all these trees, these old old old trees all twisting and tortured, all wrapped up in themselves and each other and the sky was grey grey grey, dull and grey and the trees had all of these branches and limbs everywhere and driving past, it looked just like static on a TV screen. It seemed so poignant and important, and I almost burst in my rush to tell somebody, but I guess what I'm trying to say here is that there's just not anybody left at all and it kills me. That's all.