A Blog of Repeats

I came to Kansas to forget. I walked away from my parents’ car and into my dorm room with its sticky-clean linoleum floors, sat down with Jamie’s friends, and started a new life, a life that I thought would be better than the one I left in a place I never chose for myself. In Kansas, I would make all the choices. I would choose all new friends, people I’d tried to imagine for weeks before school started, blurry faces with cool haircuts, glasses, awkward, gawky, sassy, mixed nuts. I would not make the same mistakes with guys as I did in high school - eventually, I would get rid of them all together. I would pick new places to live, I would decide what’s for dinner, I would set the limits on when my parents saw and heard from me, and not vice versa.

I made all the choices. I alienated myself from my real friends, I slept with people I didn’t even care about, I drank and smoked to put a smile on my face the way life never seemed to be able to. My diet’s been inconsistent – I eat chips and salsa for dinner as often as I eat some semblance of a normal meal. I sleep odd hours in places infested with mice, with leaky roofs and doors that don’t shut and lock. I’ve almost ruined my relationship with my parents.

I have a way of throwing away all convention. I want to build everything myself. The way other people have lived their lives is of no matter to me – I will selfishly create my life on my own, my own meanings and understandings, I will forge in the smithy of my soul something something something, yada yada yada.

For the life that I create alone, I will be alone.

For my masterpiece, I will choose the best things with the worst intentions. I will plunge myself into the most challenging situations in life despite not weathering the simplest trials well. I will create a magnum opus of complications so I can say to those around me, look at what a crazy life I live! Think of all the strange tales I will have to tell! This is all fodder for my book. “You live a very Sedaris-y life,” Cay said. It’s a sick pleasure, like taking sugary butterscotch schnapps shots, licking your lips after you gag.

I will paint over the mistakes. I will forgive the people who have hurt me and then not learn from the pain. Instead, I will become them.
I will paint and paint and paint, layer and complicate so much that the past will be unrecoverable and inaccessible. It will be lost in the business of what’s in front of me now. I will repeat. No,

Alone, I will repeat.