If you read it and think it means something, thanks. It's not written for this audience, but rather for a summer. If you think it's complete trash, feel free to tell me, but it doesn't matter to me. I didn't write it for anyone but myself, clearly.
From summer’s past, I see my smile on glossy photographs. Other people, other times. Happy people trapped behind shiny finishes, disparate from reality. Memories of better times, smiling times, click click click through the pictures and they’re recreations of a world of people reveling in all life has to offer. Click click click and the pictures blur into a memory click click click click click it’s a movie of our past, a recreation of something once lost and gone forever.
By day, I sit through blurred classes and empty rooms. Life flows before my glazed eyes as I recreate those days, you know, the ones before, when life was good. A cycle of sleep, work, exertion, and more work blurs into a streak across the pages, a dull gray punctuated more often by the black dots of self-reflective despair than the white splotches of happiness.
By night, my eyes smear the text of my screen, vaguely seeking to hold onto what we once had, recreating the past. In small boxes and in collections of post-it notes we share our hollow recollections, stored in notebooks, Frisbees, blankets, and in pictures. Before sleep, click click click and a hundred some odd smiles flash before my face as I remember what life can be. What life isn’t.
I tell myself depression is a symptom of being sick and not running and spending too much time stressed over too much money playing poker and having a bad weekend and… It’s not true. It’s depression rooted in the knowledge that the past always slips away, and its to the future that we have to look. But when I turn to the future and see nothing but a gradually darker gray smudge as far as my puny unelevated eyes can see, where is there to turn but the past for the bright white splotches of smiling faces and happy people?
Into music I delve. Recreating moments through shared memories as I imagine others listening next to me, just on the other side of the walls of sound I engulf in, breathe in and hope that others hear as well. From the fake plastic chords of The Beach Boys in the cheer-me-the-fuck-up mode of being to the surfer-gone-stoner mentality of Radiohead and the slamming drums I drown myself in music. It doesn’t work. The soundtrack of our summer plays in our head to the beat of click click click goes the slideshow and I’m back among those smiling people, somehow my face is distorted upwards and I’m happy on that screen.
Who is that person? I wish I was a happy guy from California with a fro. The jokes ring hollow in my ears, desperate attempts to hold onto our identity as we feel ourselves slipping away. Like middle school friends, reciting our old catchwords and funny phrases to each other when we meet, looking to the past and not the future, looking inwards at our memories instead of outwards at each other.
It’s getting late and the strains of light up my room remind me of Collin’s floppy hair and tomato juice and late night pizza boxes embroidered with the poetry of our summer. Click click click goes the slideshow and my eyes blur into my computer screen as the last of you disappears off my buddy list, a list to remind us who our friends are, who we’ve met. Disconnected, the pictures are memories of happy people, trapped in time, living happy cycles over and over again in a vicious cycle, vicious only because I’m trapped on the outside.
I want back in.
