These Days by Khristina Cabrera (17, New Jersey)

​These days--

​These days I roll out of bed with an innate weariness that stretches back to the beginning of time, back to the creation of humans, though it is always with a sense of individuality that this funny feeling takes up space in my mind, and it seems as though I’m the only one who has ever felt low. These days I listen to classical music to remember that it is autumn: Bach, Beethoven, Chopin. There are the newer composers, too. Marianelli. Alexandre Desplat’s Little Women. Bluebird. These days I feel a different kind of loneliness, the loneliness of watching things go by and by, like tracing the blurry outlines of buildings through a moving window. 

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I get up. I go to school. I arrive home. I finish my homework, if I’m not preoccupied with vague notions of all the things I am missing, the way people who are missing a limb sometimes feel it as though it had always been there, as though it had never gone away.

​​Now I must disclose an intimate confession that almost embarrasses me to see jotted down. This is the first time I have written in a very, very long time, perhaps for weeks now. Writing, too, makes me feel lonely, though writing has always been a very lonely thing indeed, for all the people who fool themselves into thinking they understand others. There is a quote I remember vividly from Lana Del Rey’s poetry book, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, something I liked initially for the way it made me feel but now somewhat despise, all for the same reason: “Poets, like comics, are inherently quite sad / better off alone.” I do not fancy myself a comic, or even a poet. Humor and poetry, like most things, do not come easy to me. I’ve come to a point in my brief life where I am suddenly realizing that I do not excel at anything I try. I used to think writing came easily to me; it used to come easily to me. Writing is easy when I’m happy, but I have not been truly happy for a while now, and thus everything I write falls flat, the way a lonely barman might tell jokes to an empty room until the sun comes up and he must go back to his house, the house which cannot be called a home.

What hits me the hardest is the loss of the world as I used to see it. Innately some people’s minds are wired to pick out ideas for stories in cracks in the pavement, and for my entire life I was that way. Everything to me now is rather dull and brittle, crumbling underneath my touch—for I do believe that most things I touch go to absolute and utter shit. Nothing much excites me anymore. I have nothing going on. There is nothing to look forward to. I don’t feel anything except for a deep and vast void of something I cannot put a name to, but something that I should be able to put a name to, as I’ve been feeling it for so long now. School is a mere distraction from the things that plague my mind, and at the same time it’s a direct confrontation of all the things I despise in my life. It’s difficult for me to see people laughing with their friends because I cannot laugh with my friends and mean it. There seems to be a physical barrier between me and everyone else at the school—everyone who is nice and normal and good—and I cannot seem to penetrate that surface, to get close with anyone.

I have no artful conclusion to this impulsive smattering of ramblings, thoughts here and there that I tried to pick out of my brain. I believe the best I can say is, At least I wrote something! That’s a start! A start for what, I don’t know. If I’m being honest, the whole time I was writing I was thinking about how I have a calculus quiz tomorrow. Logarithms and exponents—yet another two things I don’t understand, things that most people in the world do not understand or even wish to understand. Somehow, these very things are always deemed more important than English literature—which is something that, again, I am not very good at. But that is another thing I cannot say aloud.