24 minutes and a storm left to get through

I don't like music as much as I feel I should so I'm embarassed and confused, but she writes about Art--music just being the form it takes--and then I can understand it and just want to tell her that most of the time I don't know what she's talking about but I feel so much better after reading it.

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A man lit himself on fire. It was supposed to send a message. It was his suicide.

My mom's all about appearances so she lied-in-the-form-of-omission-with-the-other's-assumption to my aunt and took my birthday present to give to me at a wedding I wouldn't be at. Then she sent it in the mail with a lot of cut and torn out articles and cartoons that let me know which appearance my mom pretends and needs me to have for her life to be the same okay-because-I'll-refuse-to-see-it's-not that it's been for probably my whole life and honestly probably two years longer (but I awkwardly transitioned over the brother question last night with Exciting New Friend, so I'll do it again). My birthday present was yet another journal that I'm sure was yet another regift because it doesn't matter what present you give in my family, only that the wrapping was done well, because it's not about what's inside, it's about appearances. But like I've finally opened my mouth (just a little) and said, I don't like journals as presents because if writing is anything it should be personal and writing in a journal that's been given to me is writing in a journal to whoever gave it to me, and that's not what I'm going for. So I offered it to Jessa and she said she'd regift it and I felt better about presents again because maybe someone who really wants it will eventually get it, and hopefully not on a holiday because obligatory gift giving is just another reason to make us all feel bad all over each other. Then Jessa suggested that I just cover it and keep it, and I told her about the first journal that really meant something to me--and maybe the one that ever meant the most because it was all I had--and that it was so ugly but then I covered it in electrical tape and I did a bad job because I was young and it was my first time and I like the ugly that now finds a way to come through because it just doesn't seem quite as ugly anymore. I like the insides and the covered ups.

And then I swallowed the fear and the next time she came over I pulled out that old journal and I showed it to her and I stopped wishing that I shared my writing and shared myself and I did it a little bit and I couldn't let her look, but I could read out loud and she could listen. There was so much of myself I've forgotten and so much that I can't forget.

I would stop reading aloud and get lost in myself and then I came across my suicide entry. It's the one I think of as The Suicide Entry because it's the one where I'd figured out that I didn't want to and the bookful of other entries I'd written didn't really matter as much anymore because I found a way to live, whatever living was at that point, and I started to read it and I had to stop, but I figured out that I shouldn't end the life I couldn't get through and now there's a man who lit himself on fire and committed suicide and wrote paragraph after edited paragraph about it so that I had to scroll down the screen to see how much it was and decide that I wasn't going to read it. Two separate pages that were supposed to have a message and people are going to disagree with me, but he had the wrong message. He had a message I'm not going to read just because he lit himself on fire. We shouldn't be in Iraq, Bush shouldn't be president, and he still shouldn't have lit himself on fire. He shouldn't have committed suicide.

I don't care how that sounds. Some days I'm still that girl figuring it out for the first time and writing an entry I'm not able to re-read, so all days I'm reminding myself.

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Never done, just stopped.
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