ニコラスは悲鳴

i need you to listen for just a second. i don’t care if you only shop at thrift stores. And i don’t care if you read nothing but classic novels. It is not important to me whether you are thirteen or thirty four, foreign or native, thin or overweight. I will not judge you. It does not matter to me what kind of haircut you have. what sort of statement you’re making while you lead a vegan lifestyle or if you love steaks and fried eggs. Love sex, hate drugs, do cocaine, listen to simon and Garfunkel. I’m not interested in how superior your taste in underground music is. I couldn’t care less if you’re wearing urban outfitters jeans, thrifted shoes, or a Hollister polo. It is not important to me whether you are a writer, a dreamer, a painter, a gas station clerk, or if you’re living off food stamps. I don’t give a shit if you’re a hippie, a half-assed hipster, an atheist, a devoted Christian, wealthy, dirty, catholic, homeless, jewish, Buddhist, a smoker, a drinker, clean, or shy. I will not judge you. It may be which independent films you’ve seen. what books you’ve read, how high your IQ is. I will still open the door for you. I promise. And i will let you sit near me if another seat is unavailable. Even if you don’t like what I believe in and even if I disagree with some of your ideas. I will fucking respect you. I will offer you some common decency. and not because it’s right, and not because you deserve it, but because that is what makes sense to me. This is what has always made sense to me. I’m a shadow. Neurotic, opaque, and drunk with fascination. I’m your friend. And you don’t have to impress me. because I’m not here to impress you.
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.
Have you ever reminisced one something in the past, thinking of every possible way you could have changed it, made it last, made it work? You spend your days waking up, thinking about it, and going to bed thinking about it, hoping and praying it will come back, nothing lasts forever. We go through our lives thinking about yesterday and not today. You’re in denial, heartache and regretting. We’re young, we’re reckless and we’re alive. We make mistakes, we lose people we love and that’s just the way life works. Letting go isn’t being weak or giving up... Letting go is growing up.
I was never a miracle, that’s bullshit. I’m full of shit the majority of the time. You make up your own mind. I don’t know how to say what I need to say sometimes and I miss everything, I miss everyone miss myself. This is my proxy, some half pretty fantasy, and I am half convinced that you all love me like you say you do but the other half of the time in my real life I sleep alone, pick up books to put them back down. Fold my laundry while wishing I could say sorry, wondering when was the last time I felt something? We’ve been in really bad places. This is how it feels to be me. I need to talk, I am weak. When I think of happy I think of letters better than entire month movies in bed messy morning hair laughing collaboration and real communication being in awe wanting to do your very best for someone no more lies. We’re soft blowing on coffee when it’s too hot, it does not have to be anything more than what it is.
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defences, you build up a whole suit of armour, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should just be friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.
I guess this is growing up. Tear stained pillows every night, staring naked at yourself in the mirror, waiting for a text that will never come. Wishing for impossible things, like narrower thighs or prettier hair. It’s a vicious cycle of being too scared to help someone else, and feeling abandoned by everyone when they are the same. Growing up is feeling self-conscious enough about yourself to break down crying in the school bathroom, and the horrible panicking that comes when you realize you forgot your eyeliner at home. When your parents are screaming at you about your grades, and screaming at you because you came home drunk, and screaming at you because they hate your friends, and you just can’t do anything right. I don’t think i’ll ever know if its just me that is passing time like this, so painfully, or if I am just crying over something that everyone else can be brave about.
You want truth? Well, here it is. 
Eventually, you forget it all. first you forget everything you learned- the dates of wars and Pythagorean theorem. you especially forget everything you didn’t really learn, but just memorized the night before. you forget the names of all but one of two of your favourite teachers, and eventually you forget those, too. you forget your junior year class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend’s home phone number and the lyrics to the song you must have played a million times. and eventually, but slowly, you forget your humiliations – even the ones that seemed indelible, just fade away, you forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. who went to a good college. who threw the best parties. who had the most friends. you forget all of them. even the ones you said you loved, and the ones you actually did. they’re the last to go. and then once you’ve forgotten enough, you love someone else.
Look, the point is there’s no way to be a hundred percent sure about anyone or anything. so you’re left with a choice. either hope for the best or just expect the worst. so fail. be bad at thins. be embarrassed. be afraid. be vulnerable. go out on a limb or two or twelve, & you will fall & it’ll hurt. but the harder you fall, the further you will rise. the louder you fail, the clearer your future becomes. failure is a gift, welcome it. there are people who spend their whole lives wondering how they become the people they became, how certain chances passed them by, why they didn’t take the road less travelled. those people aren’t you. you have front row seats to your own transformation & in transforming yourself, you might even transform the world & it will be electric, & I promise you it will be terrifying. embrace that, embrace the new person you’re becoming. this is your moment. I promise you, it is now, not two minutes from now, not tomorrow, but really now Own that, know that deep in your bones & go to sleep every night knowing that, wake up every morning remembering that & then...keep going. 
Ignore me. I’m sad and I will make you sad. we will disappoint and hurt and leave each other – and then you will forget me. I become too attached to people too easily. People like you. It’s already happened, but I don’t want to ask too much of you. i don’t want to ruin all the fun you’re having. I’ll just leave now. I’ll go away so you can enjoy yourself.
I don’t want to start thinking again. Not ever again. I don’t know if you felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very, morbid, but I just want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think. I want it all to stop spinning. If this gets any worse, I might have to go back to the doctor. It’s getting that bad again.
I wish I wasn’t so hopelessly boring. So oddly discomfited and socially awkward that people grow bored and restless simple talking to me, like they’d prefer to be somewhere else, with someone else. and I hate myself for that. I hate the way I can’t excite a soul, can’t carry on a conversation, or make someone laugh. so willing to please that I stumble over my words, get too flustered and distresses. Then I acquired this tendency of distancing myself away, when people became emotionally close. maybe it’s the way I know they’ll leave me in the end. Because everyone around me always does. And I don’t want to dislike myself more than I already have.