Moonlight Sonata: Adagio Sostenuto

Haunting, as if someone has lost something, and can’t find it. 

I an see them now, walking up stairs, looking left and right on the top floor, then they come to a window, see the light. The darkness that surrounds it, but still the moon shines on.

They pause to think, what have they come for, it is lost, that is all they know. 

A flashback to a happier time, overshadowed by the knowledge of what is to come. A tear, in its loneliness slides down the thinkers face. He turns away from the window.

Now, fully absorbed in his memories, none too happy, but happier than he was a moment ago. There she is, in the moonlight, beautiful. He is in love.

But someone has stolen her. He chases. She runs away from the man who stole her, they meet, he lifts her, then she is suddenly pulled away. Running back, she screams out his name. 

What is his name? He doesn’t remember. The moon lighting his sillouhette, he continues to walk on. He pauses. 

Where is she now? His love. The scene continues to repeat. His love being taken away. He is getting more and more upset. 

He runs through the dilapidated house. Where is she? He can’t find her. He is alone.

Alone.

Collecting

I collect pictures and organize them meticulously so that later on, I can go back and look at them. Make up stories of what’s going on, wonder about the subject’s life, try to figure out how old they would be now, how they would look from a different angle with different lighting.

I collect pictures of places I want to go and make up memories for myself. In my head I relate to others my most recent trip to Portafino, Italy, where the houses are all shades of the rainbow and everyone is transported by boat. I tell them about the time I went to Greece and tanned out on the white sand, stayed in a white house with a blue roof just like everyone sees in the pictures. I’ll speak to them fluently in french, which I will have just recently picked up while sitting at a little cafe in Paris eating my baguette and looking at the Eiffel Tower. And when I walk away, people always speak of how traveled and wonderful I am, how I’ve gotten just the right amount of sun and how they wished they could hop on a plane and go anywhere they please.

Truth is, I collect photos of people I wish I was, places I want to go, things I want to do, and ideas I wish I had because I feel like if I don’t I won’t have any motivation to do anything on my own. For one who works so hard to be original, I’ve really not. I’ve based my life off of someone else’s interpretation of the world. But I have yet to find my own.

And everyone always tells me that I still have a chance to figure it out, that I’m still young, that I’ve got a long ways to go, but it really sucks going through life not knowing who you are. Just blindly being what everyone else thinks you are. But truth is, I am the way I am because I’ve never known anything different. I collect books because I hope to be a great author like Wilde, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Bronte, Dickens (both of them) and yet I rarely find myself writing anything that will ever come of repute. 

I’m lost. I need a map. Now there’s one thing I don’t collect. I don’t collect maps because I’m quite sure I’ve figured out how to get through life. If I hadn’t done that by now we would have a problem. I collect teddy bears, though. To remind myself that you are never too old to be a little kid again. I aim to hold onto my inner child long past the time I have my own child (another thing I won’t be collecting). 

I need to stop collecting others people’s memories and start collecting my own. I need to stop living the life other people have imagined for me and come up with my own goal. What if I’m not destined to be an actress or a teacher? What if really, my calling is to be a librarian at some random library for the rest of my life? That wouldn’t be too terrible, but since I’ve come up with the idea of being a teacher all my own I think I’ll stick to it. 

My point being I collect a lot. And I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Because alongside my memories and others people’s pictures I’ve accumulated a lot of self-doubt and loathing…which collects whether I like it or not. 

Ah. My inner demons. Now we’ve found something to talk about.

I don’t like myself a lot of the time. I mean, no girl ever looks in the mirror and tells herself she’s gorgeous the moment she rolls out of bed. For me that feeling lasts all day. I feel ugly, I feel fat, I feel uncomfortable in my own skin. I doubt my talents and doubt whether or not I have friends. I also doubt whether anyone cares, even though I should know without a shadow of a doubt that a lot of people care, otherwise the decency I have been shown throughout the years would be really hard to explain. 

But still. I collect inner demons.

I guess you could say I just collect things. Trinkets. Things don’t mean much.

But then again, that’d be a lie.

Boys

When it comes to boys I generally think of them in terms of failures and successes. Like, the last thing that happened was a failure. Of epic proportions. For me because I was dropping levels to be with someone that didn’t make me happy and who didn’t really deserve me, and for him because there was no way in hell he would ever land a girl like me.

I mean, he couldn’t even spell intelligent, much less actually embody the word. 

Right now I’m in a success. Not only because everyday I wake up with the knowledge that even though I could live without my current boyfriend and he could live without me, we don’t want to. That finally we took the step that made us happiest. I mean seriously, I’ve been waiting for someone like him for awhile. But at the same time, how often do our supposed successes turn to failures?

When will this boy turn into one of the very same failures that has left a mark on my heart? When will we exit the zone of bliss and enter one of futility? I’m worried about it. I’m worried that somewhere down the road I’ll be just a marker for him, and he’ll be another heartache for me.

I’m no stranger to heartache, and not very much of it is boy related, I like to close boys off from my heart, in fact. My rule is to not let anyone in, because then you don’t  get hurt. But once you start showing people how to climb over the wall you’ve built around yourself, random people are in the garden stealing lettuce and you have nothing for your salad, and it’s all gone to shit.

And there’s nothing worse than people stealing your lettuce, or your dignity, aside from a clumsy fairy tale reference (so I apologize). 

I used to look up to Disney Princesses because I figured falling in love would be this really simple process that every child appropriate adaptation of a fairy tale had shown me. According to nightly story time all I had to do was look beautiful, have a good singing voice, have long hair, and wait for Prince Charming to show up. Oh, and once he did show up, it would be love at first sight, and we’d get married and have a million pretty babies and live happily ever after.

Thankfully, I’ve come to terms with reality, and I know that if I want to find a Prince Charming (if there is even such a thing) I won’t be able to do it just sitting around in my tower. Oh, and if you wanna know what my take is on the whole Happily Ever After thing, read my very cynical Pantoum about it, entitled “So Much For a Happy Ending”.

But unfortunately the road to “Happily Ever After” or as I see it, “Happily Ever After Until It’s No Longer Convenient” is a long one filled with tears and occasionally laughter. I mean, there’s the first kiss, and the first time, and the first heartbreak and the first boy that asks you to a dance, and the first PDA violation at school and all those other important firsts that all eventually lead to a girl sitting alone in her room eating Ben and Jerry’s with a spoon and listening to “Teardrops on My Guitar” because Ben & Jerry are the only two men that will never break a woman’s heart and Taylor Swift is like, the expert on heartbreak and break-up. 

Because for every failure, there is a success. What started out good, ended bad. Conversely the statement is false, because Not all success leads to failure. But where boys and dating are concerned, there is at least a 35% chance of heartbreak. Now I just made that number up, but it’s true to a degree.

And what’s really irritating is that the number goes up if the girl is intelligent. Bimbos get all the boys. Pretty, stupid girls get boys because intelligence THREATENS men. They lose control if the girl is smarter. You can’t control a girl who can outwit you. Girls in high school are almost FORCED to dumb themselves down to get a boyfriend. Because they refuse to accept that we love learning. Being smart is fun. It means we don’t have to giggle flirtatiously while simultaneously consuming a sucker and twirling a pigtail around one of our fingers and batting our eyelashes in  order to pass Spanish.  Smart girls know that they don’t NEED a boy, but we DO like the attention, and most boys, especially the cute jock in Trig won’t give smart girls the time of day. And what’s worse is that smart girls think they can’t get boys because they aren’t pretty enough.

Untrue. 

Boys in high school (I’m speaking generally here) don’t appreciate smart girls and don’t pursue them because they might look dumb. I mean, the quarterback of the football team cannot be bested in Math by Susie. That would just be social suicide. And then to date her?!? Mind = blow. (read: sarcastic)

My advice? Wait to date until college. Smart boys. Smart jocks. And smart girls are appreciated. For the most part. Also, don’t wait for your Prince, go out and find him. Then when you get to his house, kick the door, swag on in and proclaim that he’s gonna love you and like it. And then proceed to romantically go on your first date. 

And make you sure Ben, Jerry, and T. Swifty are at home waiting for you in case that doesn’t work out.