Candid Midnight

Squill.

It is two-oh-five in the morning. I am not asleep. I should be asleep. I should not be meandering on the computer with the screen making strange patterns to my steadily blurring vision. I do not know why I am not in bed. And I cannot type. I am making the most dreadful mistakes as I attempt to type up the little bit of a Remus/Tonks sketch I began writing this evening--mistakes like looking down at the notebook in my lap and putting my fingers on the completely wrong keys so that what I type comes out looking as if it was typed by a gorilla or in some thoroughly alien language. I was tired enough to mistake "showdown" for "shadow" in the spelling correction box, therefore dooming poor Remus to a "showdown-framed figure". 

Why am I not asleep?

I have sickeningly bad self-control, and even worse sleeping habits. Blast. And lately I feel as if my life is quietly falling apart at the seams and I'm barely noticing. Everything seems uncomfortable somehow. I'm faking through life the way I've been faking through Biology lately, and one of these days it's all going to fall apart and everyone's going to see what I really am. Sometimes I feel like one of those seemingly happy, well-adjusted, normal people who goes upstairs one day and blows their head off, to everyone's shock. Except I have no intention of blowing my head off. 

I haven't written a maudlin, angsty entry in months--frustrated, annoyed, yes; day-to-day griefs, yes; but the things that are churning in my head don't want to come out in words, and it's easier not to say them anyway. I feel as if, without my knowledge or consent, something died inside me, and I don't feel certain things anymore. Since that horrible day that I blew up at Mum and screamed louder than (possibly) I have ever screamed in my life and biked madly down the road and got lost and taken in by an elderly neighbour and given tea and cookies and sympathy, I feel like I've just...stopped. I snapped, somewhere; something's broken. rambling into repetitive words late at night when I should be bloody sleeping, sleeping, or I'll be a nightmare tomorrow, messing up into next week & beyond; pretending to do schoolwork and sleeping instead. I'm failing everything, damn it, everything, and I'll never get into college at this rate. and the three careers that I've presumed to choose for myself are the most difficult and selective I could possibly ask to get into, so I've set myself up for heartbreak already.

I'm losing capitals and sense and why is everything so dire in the middle of the night? I want to sleep, sleep, sleep; maybe for the rest of tomorrow, but it'll be easy to forget again in the morning as usual. just go on and on and on like a metronome. 

obscenity!, as Hemingway says; this was supposed to be a brief, humourous treatise on my late-night typing mishaps. and here I go into my bloody maudlin unfixable woes. never let yourself go on past midnight. it's two-twenty-five and I AM GOING TO BED if I have to tranquilise myself.

when did I get so broken
I didn't notice everything important leaving me?
falling apart at the seams
- mindy smith

Of Anniversaries, and Other Things

I have felt horrible all day; the strangeness of letting go of emotions I've barely let myself think about for months hung over me like city smog, and even chocolate chip cookies (with pink sugar, which is destined to become a staple of Banui's chocolate chip cookie making) didn't do much good. I woke up this morning with a weight--I thought that saying something would do me good, except I hadn't planned on saying anything, it all just spilled out with that awful candidness that late-night ponderings induce. It didn't help that I spent the bulk of my day at church working on a PowerPoint slideshow for KidsRock (the lack of apostrophe gives the name a dreadful ambiguity--is it Kids Rock, or Kids' Rock?), which was beset with difficulties such as the internet in the office dying, therefore rendering me unable to hunt up the rest of the pictures I needed for Heaven and Hell, and sending me into Dad's office with a disc, which meant that I had to save the bedimmed thing to a disc twice to get it into the Loft.

There was a funeral here today--when we got out of the van there was a long white hearse parked in front of the church. (Since when do they make hearses white? Are they trying to make funerals seem brighter and happier or something? Call me morbid, but there is something rather elegant about that sleek black car with its old-fashioned mould. I hereby refuse--d'you hear me, readers of my published annals of the future?--to be put into a white hearse when I die. Black, thankee. Or very dark blue, which would be amusingly fitting. Right, let's stop here. I'm scaring myself.) A young woman died in a car accident recently, and I'd forgotten just how soon people hold the funeral after a death--one would think that it would take longer to make all the arrangements and buy the--very expensive--required items: coffin, flowers, gravestone, and whatever else one needs for a funeral. And I have to admit that I harboured a morbid curiosity--I've been to two and a half funerals in my lifetime, neither of which I remember very well, and I've been casting my mind around trying to latch onto something for Neil's death in tuesday_skyline. (I've "witnessed" various & sundry funerals in films, television shows, and books, but I have an inkling that movie funerals could have the same sorts of innacuracies and conveniences plaguing them as Law & Order criminal cases--I want to be right, you know; the whole book's supposed to be turning cliches on their heads and it'd be really embarassing to have it all done and realising I'd got bogged down in some cliche I hadn't really given much thought to.)

Anyway. (I don't know why I go off on these bizarre tangents, other than the fact that I am altogether too fond of talking.) I was walking past the worship centre where the funeral ceremonies were being held, when I heard a song I recognised. For some reason throughly unknown to me (as I neither know or am familiar with the deceased), someone had decided to play Switchfoot's "Let That Be Enough", and the lyrics, which have always tugged vaguely at me when I stop long enough to think about them, hurt. In a few words, Jon Foreman brought my loneliness and my unfulfillment and my brokenness to light, and I leaned against the wall beside the door and tried not to cry. Who am I but a girl who knows she's needy? There are just too many things I can't say, too many things I'm terrified of, too many things that keep collapsing. But I can't make these words mine. I can't do it honestly. It worries me. And the song has haunted my mind all day.

Not to sound as if I'm rushing things or brushing things off--I'm not, I hope--but today is my one-year LiveJournal anniversary. And that calls for some vague sort of celebration, eh? I had no idea that when I got myself an account to comment on a deviantART friend's LiveJournal that it would turn into--well, what it's turned into! I've met some amazing people, gotten to know others better, gotten involved in new passions, been given new ideas, and finally got the topical blog I have always envied of others, even if it's not really quite as topical as I'd like it to be, since I have that tendancy to ramble and can't stick to one thing. I have a few essay posts, though; be proud of me! If it were not for LiveJournal, I know naught what--guh. No schmaltzy speech. I promise.

Anyway, thankee to of_arwen, for starting things (I miss you!), and also to aodhwyn, for being my very first new LJ acquaintance, and a spiffing person whose entries are a pleasure to read. (It's odd how I ran into her--I did a search for "Solas" in interests and her name caught my eye, and...well, that's the random nature of LiveJournal!) Thankee to everyone else for coming along for the ride. I will not make the Oscar speech that's become too habitual around Thanksgiving--it gets tiring and I always feel bad if I can't think of enough specific things for people or if I just can't remember them all. And let's face it, you lot are getting to be a rather large group. 

I love you all. Seriously--as I said at the beginning of this terminally long post, I've felt gloomy all day, but just mucking about here (and at deviantART, and the Sugar Quill, and my other usual haunts) has made me feel worlds better--I can actually breathe and laugh right now, and that's amazing. You lot are amazing. 

As a celebration of my first anniversary--pink-sugared cookies for all! Because my homage to Tonks might as well be a sort of homage to all of you, right?

here's a song for you, lovely
remember that it is for you only, for you only
my heart was caught in a landslide
and now it beats for you only, for you only