Welcome to the Freak Show

I'm such an awful writer.

No really, I am. I don't want to hear any of that crap you roll around inside your mouth. Those placating sounds don't mean anything to me. They never have. So cut it out. Now.

Possibly some of the most infuriating things I deal with daily are the constant reassurances of friends that I am something special. Gifted, would be a good word. I hate that word. Ever since the day my mother tried to buy me a keychain that said "I'm not weird, I'm gifted." That was the day when I realized I was a living joke. So talented, so unique, and so painfully different I soured the taste of the air around me, like lemonade in need of sugar. I'm not gifted, I'm a freak. My talent is making your teeth ache and your tongue feel thick. My writing is the same unsophisticated scrawling of the overconfident author who plasters his molested vocabulary on the page like double aught buckshot.

Don't think I'll mistake your prosaic flattery for an accurate representation of my abilities.

I'm getting older.

I'm 20 now.

It's been two days. 20 years and two days since I was born. An infinitesimal number of instants, events so fast they can't even be said to have really happened, since I breathed my first breath. And yet, only 20 years. Only an afore mentioned miniscule event on the grand scale that is Time, the construct fashioned to make our lives more manageable. To deter madness. Galaxies within galaxies. Forever spiraling inward in Golden Ratio. 1 to 1.6180339887.

I don't want to be older. I don't want to pass out of my teenage years forever. But neither do I want to be a child, clutching to his baby blanket long past the time it was put aside.

I've stopped eating enough. Everything tastes the same. I went to Olive Garden for my birthday. It tasted like the Cracker Barrel breakfast I had that morning. Now, I just hardly even bother any more. I might be sick. I might be dying. I might be overly dramatic.

I think it's the last one.

I thought I was done with letting other people control my emotions. Why is it one word from you makes me feel like I need to die? What is your problem? What did I do to deserve this? You're the one who broke my heart. You're the one who ruined me for months, if not longer. You're the one who haunts my thoughts when I'm with any other girl. Why am I so pathetic for you? You make me ill. You make me want to write black poetry and grow my hair long enough to cover my eyes and never change out of a robe and lie in bed until my muscles atrophy and are replaced with bed sores.

It's a hard fight to write this down, knowing how stupid it makes me sound. Poor little Alan. His life is so hard. No one loves him. Boohoo. I hate it when I get like this. Alex says he needs a catharsis. I say I need my skull tapped and the poison inside drained like maple syrup. Therein lies the simplified difference between the two of us, I think. The psychiatrist's son and the over imaginative wannabe poet.

Maybe when I wake up tomorrow I'll have an incredibly rare case of progeria that only manifests itself shortly after reaching the beginning of the third decade of life. I'll wake up an old man, too old to continue schooling but young enough to use the toilet on my own. Go back to being a child again, if just a tad bit more wrinkly. But that would just be a sorry cop out, wouldn't it? Running away from everything. Something I do too much.

Haha. Baileigh loves me. I know that for sure. Funny how just one little thought like that can make you feel so much better. And suddenly everything I was just feeling seems so remote.