5 G6T A NEW 2EYB6ARD

WHAT

A3r5ght, that's --  swear. 2ay. He336? ? Oh. Numbers. Got it.

So, I have a new keyboard!

Expect better stories soon. I haven't been posting them because of the technical issues, and also finals. But soon. Soon.

tunnels

It is often hard to notice when you choose to hold your breath.

When playing hide and seek, or lifting something heavy, or watching a movie with an underwater scene, we find ourselves doing it without conscious decision - fists clenched, shoulders tensed, we freeze. Not that holding our breath is at all helpful for our survival, unless a predator with very good ears is looking for us.

Mostly it just presses pause.

A couple weeks ago I was on a sort of field trip for an orchestra competition, and we rode charter buses up through the mountains. The first tunnel we drove through, people were talking and laughing above the muffled rumble of the machine, and as the walls grew close and the sun went out I stopped talking. The conversation sort of halted.

There was only one sigh at the end of that tunnel.

"You hold your breath too?" my bus buddy asked. "My dad taught me! So weird!"

"I wonder why people do that," I said.

We passed through many, many tunnels, winding and straight, broad and narrow, short and long. The strangest part is, the longer we drove, the quieter it would get in the bus through each tunnel, and the greater the sigh at the end. The habit was spreading. It was like we were coming alive again, growing nearer to our roots with each concrete tunnel and incrementally understanding the human of the cave.

It was less superstition and more reverence for life. Things would stop. No movement, no noise, no birds or beasts. No laughter. Above us loomed a mountain older than anything we knew and heavier than anything we've touched. In the tunnel, there is no heaven above, or hell below, or glass to see them through. We are foreigners of a land in which we are not welcome, we are digging through the soul of a rock more sacred than ourselves, we are miners buried with dead canaries and waiting for our lungs to collapse.

Each breath we breathe is stolen.

We are frozen in time as we hurtle through space we ought not occupy.

And then there comes the light we are racing towards, running for our lives, trying desperately to escape the limbo which holds us prisoners, hoping with all we do not have it will set us free and it does. It falls across the roof of the bus like a halo, like a set of wings, and as soon as we touch it we're breathing again.

The last tunnel we passed through on the way back was unimaginably long. There was no way we were holding our breath through this one, we knew. But, gradually, the bus quieted. Movement steadied. No one spoke any longer, we just watched ahead of us for the light we were no longer sure would come. Air was used sparingly. Lungs clenched, eyes darted, feet of percussionists tapped anxiously. Then, after a seeming eternity of darkness, there came the dot of streaming hope, the light of day rushing towards us, and the second we escaped the belly of the mountain the entire bus exhaled and inhaled like we had just resurfaced from an ocean floor. Together. Someone laughed and someone shouted and someone in the front began to applaud until the contagious relief of a limitless sky spread throughout the entire bus.

We had made it.

We laughed and applauded like fish cast from the fishing boat, like birds transcending from the net, because we were alive and we were breathing.

Some things give us our human back.

But I didn't say that, and I didn't say the thing about death either because if words are all I've got to share there are some things saved for people who are sometimes not there. And there are words better whispered than typed.

thoughts on affection, and the strangeness of showing it

     I don't know if this is how teenagers have always been, or if it's just the ones I know, but it seems to me we sure have a starvation for meaningful physical contact. In a weird, unhealthy, my-parents-never-held-me way. The generation holding hands and searching in the dark. People may think, with technology, we've lost our touch, but stick us in a room together and it's HOLD ME HOLD ME HOLD ME.

     Or I just hang out in the theater room too often.

     I gradually got over my tactile defensiveness through the art of holding hands, but that took a lot of analytical thinking, which is still required for me to make sense of the strangeness of human comradeship.

     I went to see one-acts at my school the other night, and ran into Sally before the show started. We sat together in the second row and watched the empty stage.

     Meanwhile, Martensen and his boyfriend snuck out for a minute through one of the stage exits, the hallway one that turns to the left after a few feet. They walked through, directly beside each other, and they didn't hold hands. Not even after it was safe and no one could see. Sally nudged me and pointed at them and said, "Isn't that cute?" and I mentioned the strangeness of their distance, but assumed they got closer eventually.

     I've known Sally since we were kids, and so when we sat together during the play I found myself muffling my laughter in her shoulder without thinking about it. A kind of head-nudge of acknowledgement and comfortable togetherness. And, when I did, she would rest her head on mine.

     There were four or five kissing scenes in the performance. And I just thought, wow, that's a lot of wasted meaning. I mean a kiss is a special thing, and these scenes are awful, except for the first one. They don't know what to do most of the time, they're kids. They bump noses and pull away too soon, clumsy and grimacing and much too much themselves to be anyone else. So they think about someone they love and look at someone they don't and they pretend, because they are acting. I wonder then, if ones who love them watch them from the audience as they kiss a stranger, and if they are saddened at this stolen piece of sacred togetherness meant to be shared with them.

     I'm laughing at a scene about a balloon, I mean really falling apart kind of laughing, and Sally's got her head resting on my head and I'm thinking, that's a really powerful gesture. And then I think about Sally's girlfriend, who lives far away, and I wonder what it's like to want to hold hands and not be able to, because of the whole time and space thing. And I wonder how many times, when people show affection, they mean it for someone else.

     Afterwards, when the audience filed into the crowded hallway, I ran into Martensen, who was surprised to see me at a public event. He had smudges under his eyes and panic around his shoulders.  He smiled desperately and, strangely enough, held out a crooked pinky. I linked mine around his, surprised at such untimely sentimentality, and he used his other arm to pull me into a hug. Hugs from Martensen are strange, because he is one of the only people in my hug circle who is taller than me. My mouth kind of gets pushed into the indent between his collarbone and shoulder, and it is from this position I asked him what was wrong. Most people don't need a hug so badly immediately after a date.

     "Nothing," he said. "I've just needed that for a while."

     His boyfriend had gone home.

     So I stood outside and thought about the strangeness of stages and intimacy, and decided it was okay to be given the affection meant for a girl who happens to live far away and a boy whose hands happen to belong to someone else, because the initial outlet and inward manifestation of affection don't always align. And it's okay that the love I receive is stolen because maybe one of those false kisses on the stage was meant for me, but given to someone else. In theory, at least. Probably not.

     And then I thought, wow, most of the physical contact I receive is from gay kids and actors. No wonder I'm so confused.

--an angsty teenage tree monster rant, from coffee and an essay due tomorrow--

PDA

Five pre-IB students were on their way out after school, and passed by two things of equal significance:

1. A guy and gal, sprawled out on the tile floor next to the wall, making out

2. A piece of yellow chewed-up gum stuck to the wall above them

A boy who dresses and acts like an eerily accurate representation of my father when he was in high school was very passionately explaining the upcoming election in India to Martensen, who loves every single living being on the planet (minus his father) more than he loves this boy. This boy hates every single living being on the planet (minus his father) more than he hates Martensen. Which is always hilarious to watch, a hateful person loving a loving person who hates them.

Two short and wonderfully odd choir girls, one obsessed with theory of religion who carries a mug everywhere, the other obsessed with marine biology who wears a pin on her backpack that says "Day of SHADY," walked with us as well. Both are equally obsessed with each other. This is also hilarious to watch, because they interact as if birthed from the same womb or buried in the same coffin or somehow simultaneously both at once.

So we passed by objects 1 and 2, as the boy went on about the electoral scandals and Martensen pretended to listen. The girl with the mug pointed a small, enraged finger at the gum on the wall (object #2), and shouted very loudly, "THIS IS WHY SOCIETY IS CRUMBLING!"

The guy and gal on the floor very abruptly sprung apart from their embrace, frightened and shocked at the high-pitched, kind-throated voice of justice that had just awoken them from the euphoria of each other, accusing them of the entire fall of all of society as a whole.

The mug girl, still furious, still pointing at the gum, did not recognize the mistake at all, and neither did the two boys enthralled in Indian parliament. Marine Biology girl and I were the only ones to witness what had happened.

I, laughing to pieces at such outrageously beautiful timing, and realizing the herd was hurrying onward, dragged the angry mug-clutching girl away by her backpack straps. As we left the scene, I shouted to the poor couple that it was the gum, and not they themselves, that was responsible for the crumbling of society, and that they may continue if they so desired.

On the Fence

One morning on the way to school, my mother dropped me off the second the cars stacked up, as she normally and rightly does. This particular morning we were a bit late, and so I was left a fair distance from the school, marked on this helpful and vague map with a red 'x'.

As I did not wish to walk all the way around and follow the cars, and was probably going to be late, I decided to take the short and blocked path. However, once I approached the padlocked gate and it became quite clear I was not flexible enough to crawl beneath, I stood and considered my options as a boy with a longboard walked up from behind me. He dropped his backpack and board over the fence and then climbed over.

So I thought, as I always seem to think when someone does something I can't do, "Hey, I can do that!"

It was a six-foot chain-link fence, and I was a six-foot lanky teenage girl wearing boots. There was no snow, and the boots were not fashionable. They were very ugly, very old black boots I bought with my dad for eleven dollars at a vintage thrift store, with dull, round toes and no design. I wear them on sentimental days because they fit my feet well and no one can see my socks.

I looked along the top of the fence for inconsistencies, and found one on a side facing the oncoming cars on their way into the parking lot. It seemed to be the shortest piece of fencing, so I walked over, tossed my backpack, and proceeded to climb the fence.

The toe of my boot would not fit in the chain-link.

But I had already begun, and it didn't look  like a terribly difficult thing, so I decided I could just wriggle my way over with my arms. This coming from someone who could never scale the rope in elementary school, and got C's all through gym.

The thing about this section of the fence is that all of the people in their cars can see it very well.

And I got stuck.

There are Moments of Revelation in life that occur suddenly and unexpectedly, in which all you are and have ever been is made clear in that moment. It hits like a ton of bricks, stopping you in your tracks. And you look at yourself as if for the first time, objectively, and reflect on your time spent on earth.

This was one of those moments.

Eventually my arms let go and my brain caught up and I walked all the way around the fence, and then through the rock pit, and across the parking lot, and into the school. Fifteen minutes had passed. I checked my phone for the time, and noticed a text from Martensen, which read:

"I thought we weren't allowed to climb the fence?"

which is like Robin Hood asking Friar Tuck if stealing is wrong.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Don't have existential crises while unsuccessfully climbing fences where everyone can see you fail. Follow for more equally helpful life lessons!

my keyboard broke

My keyboard broke.

crying

"The thing is I just don't cry anymore. Hardly ever. Not even when I should. I give myself maybe 4 times a year on average now, and that's only for stuff so bad I ignore it."

"When was the last time you cried?"

"Oh... Last night."

She shook her head tiredly. "That's always the worst answer."