Personal

What it comes down to is that I’m sad. All the time. I’ve been a diagnosed Major Depressive for three years now. Whatever shrink I’m seeing has always thrown about “Atypical” because most of the time, when I’m absolutely forced to, I can operate semi-functionally with people. A smile is a lot easier to fake than it should be. But man, it drags you down. It gets hard to get out of bed in the morning. It gets hard to justify not stepping onto train tracks. It’s hard to explain to someone that you’re so fucking sad that sometimes it physically hurts.

It gets hard to do anything you love. It gets hard to write. It gets hard to pick out a record to put on the turntable. It gets hard to motivate yourself to eat. And when you do get out and do things, the fun doesn’t last. It’s exhausting, to say the least. When I can muster up the energy to text someone, whether it’s a short response, or I’m genuinely trying to be jovial with them, it is literally every bit of energy I have.

I’m taking a break because everything is just too much. I’m trying to write something real, dealing with the pressures and stresses of this promotion, as well as personal issues, and confusing and constantly changing interpersonal relationships. I don’t know when I’ll be back, or if I’ll even be better when I do come back. I’m not really looking for sympathy/empathy/etc. This is just an explanation.

- Nick.

A New American Classic: American Hearts: Flash of Silver

a-new-american-classic:

I wonder what she’s doing here. It’s early in the morning, the city is just rumbling to life and except for a smattering of strangers scattered along sidewalk tables, everyone is inside avoiding the rain. And then there’s her. She’s standing with all her weight on one leg, arms crossed, hair pulled back, staring into the water. The sleeves on her jacket are pulled halfway up her hands and it’s apparent that it’s probably belongs to someone who’s seen what she looks like underneath. Her arms uncross and slender fingers dig into a pocket. The sun glints off of something metallic, surely a coin, and I’m racking my brain to figure out what’s going on without the luxury of seeing her face.

I wonder what she’ll wish for. I sit and sip at my juice, struggling over whether or not I should tell her that this particular fountain is a total crap shoot when it comes to cosmic wish fulfillment. Maybe her job is awful. The boss rides her too hard, or some jackass in upper management makes a lewd comment everytime her blouse fits a little too tight in the top. Perhaps her grandmother is in the hospital with something terminal, and she’s spent every night for the past month sleeping in agonizingly awkward hospital chairs. For all I know she’s wishing on a midnight train to take her our of a city painted up with her poor decisions and past mistakes.

I wonder if she’ll even have to stop her. The waiter brings around another glass as I wait on her to slide the coin back into her pocket. Instead, I watch her elbow bend and wait for the comforting ring of her thumbnail knocking a dead president into the air, but it never comes. It never comes because it was never a coin. The silver band arcs through the air, the sun catching for the briefest of moments in the modest gemstone, and lands silently in the water.

I wonder if it’s landed next to mine.

American Hearts: Flash of Silver

I wonder what she’s doing here. It’s early in the morning, the city is just rumbling to life and except for a smattering of strangers scattered along sidewalk tables, everyone is inside avoiding the rain. And then there’s her. She’s standing with all her weight on one leg, arms crossed, hair pulled back, staring into the water. The sleeves on her jacket are pulled halfway up her hands and it’s apparent that it’s probably belongs to someone who’s seen what she looks like underneath. Her arms uncross and slender fingers dig into a pocket. The sun glints off of something metallic, surely a coin, and I’m racking my brain to figure out what’s going on without the luxury of seeing her face.

I wonder what she’ll wish for. I sit and sip at my juice, struggling over whether or not I should tell her that this particular fountain is a total crap shoot when it comes to cosmic wish fulfillment. Maybe her job is awful. The boss rides her too hard, or some jackass in upper management makes a lewd comment everytime her blouse fits a little too tight in the top. Perhaps her grandmother is in the hospital with something terminal, and she’s spent every night for the past month sleeping in agonizingly awkward hospital chairs. For all I know she’s wishing on a midnight train to take her our of a city painted up with her poor decisions and past mistakes.

I wonder if she’ll even have to stop her. The waiter brings around another glass as I wait on her to slide the coin back into her pocket. Instead, I watch her elbow bend and wait for the comforting ring of her thumbnail knocking a dead president into the air, but it never comes. It never comes because it was never a coin. The silver band arcs through the air, the sun catching for the briefest of moments in the modest gemstone, and lands silently in the water.

I wonder if it’s landed next to mine.

Source: inkstained.net

Q:Your bone structure is incredible. You have a really aesthetically pleasing face that I would love to draw, but I don't want to be creepy about it. So would you mind if I did sometime?

Anonymous

I don’t even know what to say, and I suppose I can’t really stop you from drawing me if you want to. I think it’s pretty rad, I’m flattered, and I’d absolutely want to see it.

A New American Classic: I Think I Fall in Love With Every Girl I Meet: VII-IX

a-new-american-classic:

VII. “Nine in this ear,” she laughs, and “eight in this one.” She points and I am nothing if not a six year-old, in awe at all the studs and rings shining in her cartilage, amazed that you can fit seventeen holes between two ears. I tell her that I could never do it, that I can handle the needle going in, but not all the way through. She smiles and nods, tracing the lines on my bicep. “That’s gorgeous…Flo did it, didn’t he?” I nod and push my hair back, a nervous habit still lingering after all these years and haircuts. “You know he did one of mine, right?” I shake my head as she starts to smirk and look into the crowd, “I can’t show you right now, but play your cards right and maybe later I will.” I was never good at card games, but I was willing to go all in on that notion.

VIII.She speaks in cursive and keeps me on tenterhooks every time she leaves, wondering if she’s gonna stick around this time, or carry some other boy off back to her nest and delight him with the kind of talk you rarely hear outside of those kind of movies. She’s the kind of women men build horses for, invading cities just to worship at her feet, a walking natural disaster, a raging storm cloud of lust and adventure. Men salivate the thought of ripping off that dress, her perfectly painted lips pressed against their flesh. She starts fires, car crashes, and maybe a world war or two. I never cared much for fighting or catastrophes, and though I can’t deny she wears a dress like it was meant for only her, it’s her laugh that gets me the most.


IX. After fourteen hours the only thing I expected to find in that parking lot was parked cars and crickets. I certainly didn’t expect a beautiful girl, let alone her, standing in sweatpants and my t-shirt at four in the morning. I don’t even know what to say to her other than “what in the hell?” I could kick myself for the way it sounds but she seems to understand, ignoring the ink stains, the splinters, the papercuts. She wraps her arms around me and looks up and all I can do is return the favor, every aching muscle returning to life. All I can think of is how touched I am, how badly I want to take her home, pull her hair down and get rid of those sweatpants. It’s a shame the feeling didn’t last.

Except for Maybe One.

“You know that’s about the most ridiculous thing I think I’ve ever heard, right? I can think of plenty of girls you never fell in love with.” Panama laughs into his beer as he takes a sip. I raise my eyebrows in mock indignation as I crack open the cap on another drink.

“Go on. Name one, big guy.” I nod toward him, taking the first gulp of my beer.


“Are you serious? Off the top of my head, Dream Girl.” He smiles, knowing he has me beat right off the bat, and my forehead embraces the tabletop with a dull thud as an exasperated “damnit” squeezes out from between my lips.

“Wait, what?” Scotty chirps from behind his phone, “How do you not love a girl named Dream Girl?”

“Well, for one, I didn’t give her that nickname… or any of her nicknames for that matter. She was this girl freshman year…” I take another drink and begin searching for something on my phone, knowing that Panama will take the reins.

“So, she came from this small town and didn’t really know anybody, You could tell she was kind of looking for a scene to fit into, and she fell in with all the kids from town. And a couple of ‘em took to calling her Dream Girl, because she’d smoke with them and listen to them go on about all that pretentious shit they used to talk about, Ayn Rand and fucking bands that nobody wants to listen to. And she ate it up, man.” He stops to pull out a pack of Camel Wides and begins fishing for a cigarette

“And apparently she gave a killer handjob,” I continue, as he lights up, “And she was always kind of stuck up, y’know? So anyway, she floats in and out of every group and scene she can find for four years. And senior year… or what would’ve been senior year if ee hadn’t been colossal fuck-ups,” I laugh, and Panama nearly chokes on smoke, “Dream Girl takes a Women’s Studies course. And she decides that she’s going to… how did she put it?”

“She’s going to ‘rally up and fight against the male patriarchy and its oppressive standards of beauty.’ And she decides to do so by ignoring the existence of a handy little tool you and I know as the razor,” he replies, punctuating his statement with a puff of smoke. Scotty is swimming in alcohol, wide-eyed and hooked on the juicy worm the story is becoming.

“Right. So she foregoes shaving for roughly six months, and Spring rolls around. And you know what it’s like, that first day of Spring, every girl on campus pulls out a sundress and you can’t help but smile as you fail that test you didn’t study for…And so does Dream Girl, rocking pits like mine, and legs hairier than his,” I nod toward Panama and he gives me the same look of mock indignation I’d gifted him with earlier.

“And she’s giving all these interviews to local papers about what she’s doing, right? She gives all these awful one-dimensional answers, and she even manages to piss off the feminist organization on campus. It was just ridiculous, man. And a couple months later, she starts fooling around with Zach. At some point she stops him before anything big can happen, to explain her hairy situation.”

“What happened?”

“Well, Zach said he had to see it. So they kept fooling around…and Zach said it was a lot like…”

“Petting a damp Wookie,” Zach laughs, walking in the room with another case of beer, drawing a cringe from the rest of us, “She got a boyfriend two months later, went back to shaving everything. Real put together that one.”

“And I believe I win this round,” Panama adds, sliding the deck of cards toward me, “So you deal this round.”

Source: inkstained.net