When you've been moving all day, on your feet for hours, the still silence leaves a film of unfamiliarity about you. It's that foreign feeling of stillness that lets all the anxiety rush to your head like a drug. You stand there without a single thought in your head until it finally dawns on you that the more you try to relax the more pain seeps into your skin. Your spine hardens and creaks in protest and the blood collects behind your eyes.
This is what growing old feels like.
When you're tired everything has an air of vacuity to it. Words that people speak at you are sucked into a black hole floating in front of your droopy eyes.
And on the days that you think you're doing okay and fooling everybody people still ask you if you're okay. They ask you if you're mad at them. If you're pregnant. If you've been crying. If you've been dumped.
And then you start thinking about silly irrational desires ... such as moving away from everyone with only an old photo album of your mothers where all the people in the pictures are beautiful and sad. Some energy drinks ... a trunk full of antique vases and an old typewriter ... and nothing more but a passport and a credit card or two for gas and coffee.
Then you blink and realize you're in a brightly lit room that smells like cheese and body odor and your mind struggles to climb back out of the hole you dug for it.
"Betty, don't go under on us, okay?"
"Aye aye captain skipper." I mumbled tossing wet underwear into a dryer and raking the lint traps with my fingernails, like we used to scrape the popcorn bags for salt and butter on rainy night sleepovers in elementary school.
"Maybe we should send her home ... you could call Rainbow and tell her Betty's too tired to be working..."
"Are you joking? She's the most entertainment I've had all week. Look she's smelling the lint she just pulled out of the trap..."
"I can hear you you know, I mumbled while inhaling the smell of cheap stale fabrics. "What if I collected a bunch of lint and just made a bed out of it ... they should really have beds at work you guys..." I folded my arms and thrust my forehead onto my knuckles trying to force out the sleep from between my eyes.
When the time comes to go to sleep at night and you can't, you know it's because of your head. It's the same as a stuffy nose, only the thoughts are the snot. Sleep requires the absence of intense worrying which my mind is not well equipped to do at times, I think. Sometimes something as simple as the library homepage that you use to navigate to articles and links that will help you with your English paper research triggers a gag reflex that leaves you wanting to go into the kitchen and make something to eat just to procrastinate a little longer.
Through all the stress and worry my mind has felt like a rubix cube that'd been sabotaged and incorrectly manufactured. In the morning I would prolong stirring and moving once awoken by the morning daylight, knowing that responsibility and hard work were waiting for me at the foot of my bed, willing me to shower and slip on my grown up shoes to set off to spend another day of my life feeling like all the links in my brain were part of some divine plan to make the world make sense for the first time and my brain never stops. My brain never actually stops thinking long enough for me to decide what I actually want to think about. It's like when you're playing tetris and some unknown force gets to choose what shape the next block will be and you just have to deal with it when it comes your way.
Sometimes I pretend I don't exist for a moment. That nobody in the world is thinking of me in that moment and therefore in that moment I do not exist. I am erased. I am in Antarctica.
And in that Antarctican moment everything is still. And the stillness isn't prickly and unwelcome like the calm that follows a storm.
Because sometimes an Antarctican moment is all you need to clear your head.
And there is solace in reminding yourself that someday everything will make sense.
Even if it's only for a couple seconds.
And in a million years I never thought that I would find my fix-it kit in a person.
Because for the first time that I'm aware of I have stumbled upon someone who scares me with bluntness. I like you. You're pretty. I like being with you. I don't want to lose you.
And for the first time, I accepted it.
I've spent my whole life rejecting anyone who attempted to care for me and something in me finally broke to where I want to let someone in.
I'm too weak to keep trying. It's harder to stay away than I think it's worth anymore. I want to feel something deeper than cynicism. I want him to read my words and smile.
Bringing a relationship into play coupled with intensely stressful management of school work and friends should have made things doubly more difficult. Instead it made more basic needs float to the surface; firstly the need to keep feeling. I never want to waste another day feeling like a numb discarded condom. Secondly, I want to see what this whole dating scene thing is about. I hesitate to use the word "love", a dirty word in my opinion, more lowly than "cunt" or "cock" any day. Maybe my basic cynical instincts will never fully disappear.
But when I feel his smile warm the inside of my stomach I remember that there's no one else in the world right now that would make it so hard to want to be in Antarctica.
And that's how I know that it's not quite time to give up.