Mailboxes like staircases.

I try to fight it, but I'm simply not strong enough. The sadness seeps in, consuming me in its thick entirety. I am forced to acknowledge that I will never farm coffee in Peru. I'll probably never own a catering company or be a foster mom. I'll definitely never know what it's like to be an astronaut and see home from such a distance. Nor will I travel the globe, gun in my hand, defending my country. I will never fight loneliness for livelihood and I will never be a sculpter and go to sleep with once wet clay, now hardened and dry, caked beneath my fingernails. 

Their bodies, their minds, their actualities, all those people I will never be leave me completely overwhelmed. There is not enough time, I have to settle and trick myself into believing I am satisfied by just knowing them. Our interactions serving as a reminder that although I do not belong among them, they exist, they prosper, they expire. They speak their stories and I listen greedily wanting to fill my head with as much information before my childhood curiosity retreats and replaced with steadfast bitterness. 

I write narratives in my head, allowing my reality to blur together with the lives of others. The edges fade out into each other. I feel what they feel. For a moment, I know them, and I feel them knowing me. Each character builds a nest within my frame, forever sleeping in my spine. I rewrite, remake, and remodel particular characters daily, letting one bleed into another like a domino. My favorites come and go, the disc gets scratched, and the whole thing starts to skip, but in the end the actors did their best, and everything played out perfectly. Taking a bow, they finish their concluding scene unsteadily, and cascade into fragments. The next one stands up, only to remind that our creations can never fully escape us. I find bits and pieces of them recycled with each other. Another beautiful story created.

Perhaps I will become a sculpter after all. Perhaps I already am one. 

Believe in the person you wish to become.

Although capitalism demands people ought to love the holidays, they have a tendency to depress me. The narcissism, another year passing, slowly creeping towards the inevitability of death, consumerism, consumption, greed, debt, facades of happiness.

Perhaps my weariness stems from the way the year's conclusion asks me to take inventory of my life, the way it forces me to ask what I did well, or more haunting, what did I fail to achieve? How effectively did I apply ointment to my internal itch, the one that screams "JUST GO" in the silence that lays between life's songs? And, for failing to listen, am I naive or wise? What is the fault in being in a constant state of transition, always going from one place to another? No matter where you arrive, there you are. Am I running from locations or from the truth that is myself? More importantly, does it even matter?

My 2013 inventory exists as a cocktail of both under and overwhelmingness. New health. Old mistakes. Apologies. Amends. Falling in love. Falling out of love. I broke up with friends and built new ones on more stable foundations. I lost inspiration and found it tucked deep within the corners of locked drawers. Rewind. Repeat. Replay. As if fantastical relationships are excuses to not go out and live the life I dream of, love grew into a crutch. Maybe I should go, would go in a past life, but my happiness here in this moment is too sweet to abandon. I'm so in love, right here, precisely in this instance. Will a time in which I am not ever present itself? How could it, with such a sincere appreciation of the idiosyncrasies of the world? Such peculiarities leave me with a desire to kiss all the worry away, there, in that moment, of whatever it is that exists within my field of vision. Crying. Laughing. You for simply being you. The faults and strengths of each embodiment, every existence worthy of knowing and understanding. My ability to see humanity in such blatant awfulness and terror is what scares me most about myself. My fright is nothing compared to my fascination. I feel too much. I'm concerned and then I am left with a choice: feel nothing, turn numb, apathetic, disenchantment or feel nauseous from all the back-and-forth tugging, all the spinning in circles. So, I sit down on the floor, do nothing, catch my breath, but then, then, I rise. I fight because that is my only response. My sole survival tool.

Will 2014 be yet another year of so much nothing and yet so much everything? Of spinning in circles, overexcitement, a perpetual imbalance of whelm, of catching my breath fearfully, only to respond with an invented humanity, my addiction to change, and an unquenchable thirst for justice. Oh, most certainly. Most certainly.

A Quick Word on Why Blogspot Matters.

It was senior year, I was slowly shutting the door to high school and tugging open a new one. I found myself anxiously burdened with the personal crisis cliche when "What do I want to do with my life?" transitions from a thought exercise in English class to a practical question. Bored, alienated, and craving an outlet, I convinced myself that the best way to answer that treacherous question was to go public about who I've been and who I now was. Shortly after, TheOnyxClam went public. Going public forced me to stop worrying, take a stand, and have a freaking opinion.

My writing for TheOnyxClam, not my Blue Ribbon wanna-be prep school background, taught me how to develop interesting angles for posts, emphasized the extent of my passion for writing, and proved I could follow topics with consistency and do my research. Most importantly, however, my blog writing, has taught me I am capable. It serves as my first glimmer of hope that the sum would be greater than its parts when I merge my writing skill and personal experiences with my political beliefs.

TheOnyxClam is the first public online space where I truly felt my opinion mattered. Before, I'd been one of two young women, either guilt-stricken and whimpering "Aw, I'm not smart like those women. I don't know enough about this" or, angsty and cynical with statements like, "Who the fuck cares what I think?" TheOnyxClam proves that I do know and people do care. Learning that has been more influential than anything else in regards to me becoming whole again. My blog strengthened my self-efficiency, serving as a springboard for the acquisition of resilience and courage.

Self Reflection in True Blue Middle Class Fashion.

In high school, I started going to a lot of punk shows in the Cleveland area. They were always held in one of three holes in the wall located in the abandoned forgotten areas of downtown. That’s what’s special about Cleveland; it leaves behind ruins and spreads outward and onward like a plague. Strip malls and strip joints. Chain-link fences that lead to series of chain stores. My best friend played the guitar in true brute fashion and I was beginning to devote my life to all the movements so closely associated with punk rock. So together, along with all the other attendees, we acknowledged that music is better when played faster, louder, more aggressive, and more passionate.

The majority of the crowd was composed of bored middle class young people drawn together by a common understanding that the world is far from the way it should be. However, the promise of college and a stable income didn’t steal us all away, and when you went to a show, you could always find a handful of true blue die-hards. The rest of us? We would grow up to vote Democratic, our registered so-called loyalty to the Peace and Freedom Party leftover from idealism at the age of eighteen as lingering notions of social equality guilt us into pitiful charity donations. The beauty of the whole punk movement, however, is the few that never make that leap. Their honest and sincere work ethic, the extent of their commitment and devotion, their punk squats and communes. They had made it, as we all grabbed our coats, sold out, and went home.

I remember when one of these die-hards kissed my mouth and took me out for coffee the following day. He was outstanding in his audacity, confusing in his perfect blend of both adorable cuteness and chiseled sexiness, hilarious in his rebellion. Evan was fast, sharp-witted, and spoke with a sword of a tongue. As we drove around in his wrecked Chrsyler always one sharp breath away from complete collapse, he made me feel gross and guilty. Our outings concluded in altercations with other small minded locals of my small town. I remember him yelling, “Burn the rich for warmth!” Laughing and running clumsily in my thick platforms, I imagined that line as a tried and true authentic punk phrase. Regardless, it stuck with me. Something about making a use out of useless people (not that all the rich are useless, but you get my point) and consuming the people who consume too much made perfect sense to me.

Now, it dawns on me that I have never again heard anyone utter that phrase, nor have I seen it tagged beneath a bridge or aside a building. I know of no Anarcho-syndicalists that upon a moment of triumph, shouted it in the greedy face of their boss and I have never seen it scrawled in white-out on the back of a leather jacket amongst handmade patches and crass pins. I have never heard it anywhere except the sincere in-it-to-win-it mouth of that dirty die-hard.

Today, as I sit curled up in my private liberal arts school dorm room, my Jeffrey Campbell boots that cost about the same price as a Georgian minimum wage worker would earn in a week glaring at me, a plastic bank card that knows the extent of my Tazo tea addiction happily residing in my Urban Outfitters wallet, I am a sell out. My eccentric donation record, a callback to my punk roots, cannot justify my lifestyle. Abolish rape culture, construct shelters for runaways, legalize gay, none of which hinder my consumption. Just like my hometown’s landscape, my consumption is a plague upon the world. In stereotypical middle-class fashion, my ability to seek new revelations upon looking back at my youth indicates a freshly heightened ego. All the sitting and thinking, sitting and writing, in the world cannot remedy the fact that I have grown old and comfortable, and all because I was afraid.