WatchingStars• Show poetry

A Guided Tour

I walk down that hallway in my memory. Unextraordinary and plain. Vibrant and magnificant. Harsh and biting. Melancholy and filled with the deepest sadness known to man. Misunderstood and a little crazy. A confusing maze of chaos and fate. All in one little hallway. Who has the right to describe their life as interesting? Fascinating? Brilliant? Fame, fortune, and all other deciding factors known to man are wiped clean in this jumbled up hallway of my mind. What makes someone different? Every person in the world is on an endless search for who they are, what their purpose is. The rules plainly laid out. I am what I do, I am who I love, I am what I say, think, eat. For me, there is no everlasting love filled with emotion, no sob story full of emotional breakdowns. There are weaker, blurrier, less satisfying versions, hidden behind a cloak of adolescence. First loves that are not really loves. Deaths not really remembered, and panic attacks thread from the fibres of unwoven friendships. Mostly, I am no one extraordinary. I am me. I am the girl who loves too deeply. I am the girl who's emotions overthrow logic. I am the girl who fell in love with her best friend. I am the girl who ruined everything. I am the motherless, the loveless, the hopeless. The legal adult undecided. The one who cares beyond reason. Trusting no one, loving everyone. The Stevie Nicks reject.
As I walk, I reflect on life so far. Will you reflect with me? My emotions run from me in a constant stream, and if you are uncertain, you can leave. Break my heart. Pull me back down to my two year old darkness. I am strange, weird, different, bizarre, abnormal, unfamiliar and unusual. Just like everyone else. I long for that connection. Every person I am aquainted with and can barely relate to is a failure in my eyes. So willing to bear my heart to the world, but am rejected by the fear it holds inside. Lacking judgement, yet still venturing towards the unkown, I breath originality and conformity.
My memory turns bleak as I remember the hospital. Winding corridors, strange faces, and the fascination I felt. There was the horror of the dead and dying. Those with whom my mother was one. She looked up at me with her chemo swollen face and told me she loved me. I told her I felt the same, then walked away from her for the last time. There is a type of regret most people never feel in a life time. It is a slow, festering regret that pulls at you when you least expect it, leaves long enough for you to believe you've rid of it, then strikes at the most inopportune times. It tastes your sadness like a thick syrupy dessert, then engulfs you. Breaks you down. Tears you apart. I loath it with the deepest part of my soul, and long for it just the same. It's a blessed relief to be able to feel anything, even so many years later.
Are you still with me? I know it's dull. How can you feel for me when all I do is talk about the inconsequential? That which you have most likely never felt. Not that you are heartless. You've probably been through the worst kind of pain in your life.
My worst pain was the median of high school. Those two years full of dark anger and subtle shadows which lurked in my brain. The pain that is said to be felt by most that age, but still frowned upon by those who don't understand that it can't be prevented. There was a darkness. It sat in my head and confirmed my worst fears. It screamed alone, unloved, unwanted, unbelieveably pathetic. Those around me shrank back and tried to shield themselves from my doubt. But we were all affected, weren't we? Only now do I remember this stage and see my foolishness. But we all have moments of weakness, don't we?
Don't we?
Then we move on to the first love. Ah, that love that dampens your heart with fear and enlightens it until you feel you have reached your full potential. The love that makes you breath a sigh of relief that you will not be alone forever after all. That love that makes you soar above all those who don't have what you have. It makes you capable of anything, and every thought, every action, every emotion, comes down to him. Have you ever felt the realization that maybe it was not love? After everything ends and you cannot look at your best friend the same ever again, you realize you have killed a friendship over a tormented, trivial worry.
It's depressing, emotional and dull, but not all bad, this life lived by me. When a connection is all you ask for, all your goal is, how can you justify the longing you always feel? In the end, it's the people. The cliched reality that those you keep close to your heart are the only ones that matter. The other reality is the one person I can almost always rely on to stay with me, no matter how badly I desire a break.
It's me. It's Kate. The one who's future seems so agonizingly far away. Only a small portion has been told, and I see you are still by my side.
How unfortunate.
And I feel your story will be significantly more important. I will be here. Always here in this hallway of my memory. And I will be waiting.

"Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine
I have been eating poetry."
- Mark Strand, "Eating Poetry."