La Sotto Voce

This is going to be my forum to make a public apology. So bear with me. This probably applies to you so keep reading.

I am a terrible friend. More accurately, I am terrible at keeping friends. I push everyone away because of one thing or another and then I just run, without giving anyone any word on what my plan will be. Something in me snaps and I am off out of their lives just as quickly as I've managed to remove them from mine. I hate it when other people do that to me, obviously because the things you hate in others are actually the things you do. I mean, I am obsessively checking my phone for a text that will never come because the person I am waiting to make contact has made that decision to remove me without telling me any reason why.

It's a twisted world to live in: constantly seeking love from those who don't want you and leaving the one's who love you because that seems just too good to be true. I constantly feel like I am losing friends because either I am alienating them or they are alienating me.

Here is where an apology is due: I'm sorry if I've managed to do this. I'm sorry if I played God and decided that I didn't need you in my life. And if you felt some pain losing our friendship, then I was absolutely wrong in every way shape and form. Today in Burnham's class, we talked about how my generation is afraid to trust genuineness. I am a horrible offender of this. I only feel compelled to trust you if I am the one making the effort and being honest. However, if you want to reciprocate that then I run like a dog with his tail between his legs.

I don't want to be this person anymore. With transferring on the horizon, I am already severing ties that I don't think will make the cross-state bond. What I should be doing is fostering these connections so they do just that...make the cross. So I am saying to all of you and to myself that this is the first quiet voice speaking out against my own failings as a friend. La sotto voce is screaming to save me from myself.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted.

I've been trying to write in here for a very long time but the task of allowing myself to open up even a small portion of my heart is sure to lead to the damn breaking and an all too sudden release of the pent up anguish I've been trying to subdue. But perhaps, that won't be the case tonight because I am as numb as I am loose. There is a certain place in drinking that I think most writers spent a great portion of their lives. It's this place where you finally set your pen to paper. When you finally abandon all the sadness and tears and worries and fears and just let your words ooze onto the blank expanse. But they ooze in the way you've planned. Your brain still hangs onto the fact that it is telling a certain story and not allowing that story to be colored by the feelings and the emotions that take reality and twist it. No, I am not ready to bear my soul because I have my wits about me still. I am tired of my own whining and self-deprecative feelings so I am going to drown them in alcohol and nicotine and whatever substance I can get to take all of these emotions that are ruining my reality and extinguish them.

I hate feelings so down. I think I understand Sylvia Plath a little better now. I understand depression a lot better now. I think that I need to understand how to confront it and use it in my writing but I cannot write unless I am under this level of sedation. This level of sedation turns off the pumps of chemicals in my brain that tell me that I am worth nothing and that this writing is read by no one because no one cares. And yet, when I am in this state, I am still thinking all of those things but writing seems like maybe this is my paper trail. That when I fall off the face of the map, at least people have this trail of the thought of what I was.

I've been thinking a lot about that lately. When I'm gone, what will people remember? What will people who have completely dropped out of my life in these past few months have to take with them? I want them to remember all of the times I was there for them as much as I want them to remember all of the times that I hated them and that I was mean to them. I want them to remember me for who I was at that moment because I don't want them to know me once I have chosen to lose them from my lives. And then I think about the people who are here with me now, friends who I honestly care about, and I start worrying about losing them and then I wonder if they care if they are losing me.

I want to be transient again. I want to not care about where I am and who I know. I want to lose people like I lose socks. Because like Holden Caufield said, "Don't tell anyone anything, because then you'll start missing them"