Borders


Sometimes there's this thing inside you and you think you should let it out, but you're pretty sure you shouldn't because if you do, you don't think you can get it stuffed back inside. It's too big and you're not sure how it got into you in the first place, but you figure out it must have started small and just grown without you thinking about it. Like, it took on a life of its own and you don't even know it until it's ready to swallow you whole.

You stand there and you stare at something, like a picture, or something, and you just stare and you think if you focus long enough or hard enough it'll just take you over and when you turn around or turn away, you'll be it and it will be you, only you won't exist anymore.

Sometimes I think that it's already happened and I'm not me anymore. Because I don't feel like I did before and I don't want the same things and then something will happen or someone will happen by and then all of a sudden I'm me again and it's gone, but not, because it's like, still there. Inside me. Again.

I stare out of my window sometimes and I think about things. I think stupid things like why the people in the movies act the way they do, especially horror movies, and I know that they're scripted and it's not like life, but it seems like they'd have some common sense and I think if you made people smarter in movies then maybe movies wouldn't be so bad. But then I think deeper thoughts and I think about books and the people in them and, even though the books are smarter, the people really aren't and I wonder if that's like life too.

I always thought that I'd know it all once I got to high school, that it would all make sense, that there'd be this picture, sort of like a puzzle all coming together, so that you could finally see what the picture on the box was supposed to look like. But I'm beginning to realize that that's not the case.

The picture just doesn't get finished. Doesn't get clearer. It's still blurry and confusing, like a snowstorm in a waterball, where it's a normal sunny scene but there's snow falling down. All disjointed and disconcerting and wrong.

I look back, look out the rear window as we drive away and I wonder if I should feel bad. Then I wonder if I do.

Then I think that maybe I don't exist anymore. Whatever it was inside me owned me the minute I looked into his eyes and knew the answer, knew what he'd done. What they'd done. It took over and Angela ceased to exist the minute I knew that, in spite of all that, or maybe because of it, I didn't have any choice but to walk away.


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