OTF 15: A Summer’s sorrow

What you are about to read is an omelet of rapidly typed thoughts; a frenzy of feelings all battling for space and recognition. This is word vomit—thoughts that had reached a tipping point and thus decided to force their way out. The words found this page. This is a confession. A declaration of guilt, pride and fear all compressed by a summer's heat. And while these past months have been luxurious, slow and splendid, I am ravaged. What appears below has been manifested through a slapping of the keys. The words were everything I was scared to admit. The act of throwing them out was atomic. The feeling of typing was a physical transcendence, My fingers typed the sentence faster than the words could develop. The words were my mind and my heart—a dark dank cave at the innermost core of my being that I could only access in the dead of a summer’s night and place here. I have been reminded why I love to write. I have been reminded the way in which words can hold me. Give me a place to relinquish the control I have fought for this entire summer. The sentences I wrote are far from perfect, distant from even good, but they are true. I am proud of myself for being brave. I haven’t wrotten a lot this summer, because I have been scared. But, today, and right now, I am not scared. I am ready to face the Truth and the pain and the angst. Rather than sit in the complete darkness, I will choose to flail my arms in hopes that I may hit something that can See me. If not, I will yell into the abyss: I SEE YOU!! I SEE YOU TREY!! 

Another summer has come and gone. Has kissed me a golden brown. I am left to wonder whether I will ever feel the rush of time. Whether time will ever release me from its shackles and be on my side. 

The Hawaiian breeze in my sister’s hair as my uncle says something disgraceful in a crowded room. This summer I waved goodbye to the past and have developed an obsessive twitch towards the future. I am at the mercy of perpetual yin and yang. The end of a journey, the start of a new one. What is in my hands is so precious that dread has already filled my heart at the thought of it abandoning me. Why can’t I love more? Why can’t I love harder? Why can’t I say thank you??? 

I have mastered the art of only thinking about the yin. Throwing the yang away to the bottomless pits of my laughs and the sun, until I lay down to go to sleep and I feel like a stranger. I am dreadful, and I’ll do anything in the world to keep myself from accepting it. 

The future is a big monster, one that terrorized me through the nights of my youth. My life makes up its teeth and a grandfather clock its claws. What do I need to be happy. If I wrote something beautiful that people loved and cried over would I feel better? I am stuck here, flailing my arms in the dark.

The loss of a home is a weight I am crumbling under. Will I ever be this comfortably uncomfortable? How can I accept change when the sand of time runs coarse and leaves my hands bare, with nothing but the objects of creation staring back at me. I can’t create anything. I am so scared of being bad. The pressure locks me away, keeping me from doing anything. Why don’t I believe in myself? 

A plugged pipe is never good for the infrastructure of a house. 2000 rent for a tiny apartment in NYC where I can begin my ceaseless tread on the mill of life. I go out on Thursday and Friday and Saturday and I convince myself that improv will be the cherry on top that makes me feel complete. I’m scared that I’ll never feel complete. That I am depressed and a bad artist. I can’t draw and I don’t seek to lead, and I am passive in the days of my life. 

I feel like a failure. I am starting to doubt myself and wish that I was different. I have never felt like this before. Pessimisms knock on my door, ready to tell me that all I have done is WASTE. Thrown today in the fucking trash. 

I am 21 and I can do anything I want. I can go anywhere and I can commit myself to being true to me. I can say these words and type these things and tell everyone around me that I BELIEVE IN MYSELF and still there is this unreachable itch. I feel foreign to myself. I am getting older and smarter and all I can do is continue to forget the shape of my love. 

The better Trey exists as a figment of my imagination. My commitment to becoming better keeps me stagnant. I am satiated by this need, never doing more than what I need to do to feel Okay. Why can’t I just enjoy my time? I am so committed to figuring things out, and yet I believe I am so bad at it. 

Through it all, I am proud of my will to live. An ounce of apathy makes me hopeless. I never want to stop hurting and yearning and desiring. It gives me power and makes me feel Here. 

I had a list I made at the beginning of this summer. I wanted to do a lot of things. I wanted to learn all of adobe suite. I wanted to write and read and make a short film. I’ve completed just a few. Instead, I’ve begged for jobs and have watched the day pass by. 

I wonder when I will be loved. 

This summer I have done hundreds of pushups. Can I rely on myself? 

Even now I wish I could’ve written more. That I had more to say. That I could feel enough to write something beautiful. I wish things weren’t so hard. 

I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

I am now halfway through my senior year. I am about to leave class. I will go and lie in the sun and listen to an album and write about it.

I will keep trying.