ReflectionsThe summer seems to be slipping by so quickly. It seems that in no time at all, it will soon be July. With the end of Summer fast approaching, the coming of Indian Summer will soon be here. School will be back in session, classes will start, people that I've become so used to seeing everyday after two years will return from the far reaches they have gone to, and my birthday will be there too. I know, most people get excited about their birthdays. Presents, an excuse to party and not study, but not me. I dread them more and more each year. Each birthday is just another reminder that my life is quickly slipping past me. And what have I accomplished? I know, I know, I'm young. I'm not talking about achieving an Olympic gold medal or finding the cure for cancer. I'm talking about things that every person should have achieved by the time they enter adulthood (age 20). This birthday, I know, is going to be especially hard for me being the twentieth. I will officially be saying good-bye to my teens that I feel as though I hardly got to grasp. College has been the closest I've come to having a childhood. I'm not even entirely sure how mine was obliterated, but it was. I have no fond memories. I was almost always alone and had more friends in books than in real life. There's a line from the movie You've Got Mail that always struck me. "Shouldn't books remind us of life and not the other way around?" But the sad thing is, my life doesn't even remind me of books or movies. I've never known a happy ending. There's never been anyone there at just the right moment to just hug me and tell me everything's going to be okay. There hasn't even been anyone to just tell me things are okay. I often wish that I could go back and change things. I wish that I could have maybe lived with my father or at least gotten to know him better. I wish that we would have gone fishing more often and that once I'd entered middle school that contact wouldn't have been lost and basically irretrievably gone. Even now as I try and patch things up, I realize, we share nothing in common and we are just too far apart now to cross the chasm that has grown up between us. For him, he feels that all he can do is give me money, and I feel lost every time I try and write an e-mail. I have nothing to say. My life itself is too boring for any interest. Even as I try and write to my friends over the summer, I chose to write about the most random of stories that aren't even vaguely related to me. If I could go back, maybe things could have been different between my mother and I. Maybe we would have been able to reach a point where hugs were not painful things that were trying on both of us. Where we didn't hear strain in each other's voices as we speak the words, "I love you" because we're trying to hid the fact that they aren't really felt but are in fact, only words. Going back, maybe I would know my cousins and not just be acquaintances to them twice a year and would rather be on an island someplace alone for the holidays than be with them. Maybe if I could go back, I wouldn't always be the butt of jokes with my family for I would have a significant other. I would no longer have to hear them go on and on about how my cousins are married or marrying and I have yet to even date. If I could go back, I wouldn't have had a date for the junior prom but I would have had one for the senior prom. I wouldn't be turning twenty years old and never slow danced. I wouldn't be turning twenty and regretting the one kiss I have had. I wouldn't have the regrets I do at all. And if I did have regrets, they wouldn't be for the things I haven't done, they would be for the broken leg I got jumping off that waterful in the back woods, or the scrapes I got taking karate lessons, or hell, maybe even pissing off a bull. But I would have memories. I wouldn't have to look back on the last twenty years of my life and pretty much only have me sitting on a swing in my back yard listening to the high school marching band practice across the street dreaming of someday being in that band only to join it and find out that it was a lousy dream. Maybe I wouldn't be at Duquesne anymore. Maybe I wouldn't even be a science major. Who knows who I would be. That's the problem with the what if game. But I know right now, that if I had everything to do over again, this is not what I would chose for myself again. I cannot say at all, that if I could do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing because it's just not true. I would change everything. I would change me. I would chose happiness. I would chose friends from the very beginning. I would chose friends who were more like me and more outgoing. I would stop letting myself be talked out of things. I would stop letting people talk down to me even if they are my family. I would stop being scared to do the things I want. I would stop being scared of doing things on my own if no one else will join me. I'm turning twenty soon. And I have nothing to look back on with any amount of joy. Even the happy moments still have their rain clouds. Every moment of my life is a joke. I feel as though I've spent my entire life being the character that exists simply to help move along the plot for the main characters. I'm there, I do have purpose, but it is not for myself. I will never know the happiness and the joys that the main characters do, but I'm free to watch and occaisionally move a plot forward. God, I sound so fucking depressed...and I am. Not nearly as depressed as I have been in the past, but still it worries me. More and more often I enter these bouts and the only cure I know is change. But how often can I really try and upheave my life and change it and how much power do I have for these changes? My power wanes and it was limited to begin with. I just don't know what to do anymore. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to try killing myself or anything stupid like that. This entire rant is about how I want to live. So offing myself would certainly defeat the point. But I'm tired of waiting for life to happen to me. Because I have some serious doubts that God has remembered me. Hell, even living here in Towers, I have maintenance trying to get into my room every other day or someone trying to move in because they're with a weekend group, all because, I've slipped through the cracks. My existance is so meaningless, that apparently I don't even take up space anymore. And as for next year, I've heard rumors that I may be utterly screwed for housing. Again, they're rumors, but they worry me nonetheless. And how can I not be worried? Apparently, I'm invisible to ORL for the summer, why should that status not carry on into the fall semester when they fill my assigned floor with boys instead of freshmen girls? So, just to clarify mostly for myself: I want to start living, damn it. I don't care if my life is to be a comedy or a tragedy, but damn it, I want it to be a life and not just an auxilary role to someone else's. I want to have something meaningful in my life. And to God: Why can't I have someone? Why can't someone in this entire goddman universe just love me? Because you seemed to have forgotten to have my family love me so I'm asking nicely, can somebody else love me? Can you please help me find this person who will take care of me when I can't? Who will hug me and make me feel safe? Because I really, really need somebody. I need to feel like if I should die tomorrow that I won't be forgotten so easily. Yeah, I've got friends and they'll miss me, but they will forget me with time. Everyone does. You made me to be like the perfect CIA agent, I can walk into a room, make people smile, and as soon as I leave and my presence is gone, so is their memory of me. I want meaning in my life, God. Please. And I'm not going to make any stupid pie crust promises or deals or bargains. If I was gonna do that, I'd go bury some voodoo box at the crossroads. But if you're really out there and you're really omnipresent, I'm just asking you for a little bit of help. I don't want to look back at my fiftieth birthday and say that my years as a young adult were just as meaningless and non-memorable as my childhood and teenage years. | 
