Deal with the devil?

Been listening to this compulsively

And also this

What scares me most about romantic relationships is thinking I don’t have it together enough to be able to give the other person everything they deserve. I can just see myself becoming Gatsby. Having all these great parties and then getting shot in a pool. No, that’s not really what I’m getting at, but you know.

I’m going to a place where someone was shot a few days ago.

In case you haven’t had enough of this torture: https://twitter.com/phantomesss 

I was going to read Jane Eyre as my pre-20th century novel for AP Lit, but I can’t find it, so I’m reading Pride and Prejudice instead. Maybe it’s fate. Maybe I’ll get penalized for losing my copy of Jane Eyre.

It’s a nice feeling to know people have painted me and written songs about me. It’s nice to know I could have been somebody’s muse. At least I’d have that going for me if I died now or something.

I’m trying to learn my lines. I’ve never had to memorize so much Shakespeare. I want to get it down, so I can focus on the acting already, but I have to do it in all these layers like: 1) know what’s happening in the play/ the scene I’m in 2) know my blocking 3) know my lines 4) know what my lines mean 5) act the part how I really want to act the part 6) add in some cool over-the-top things that were completely unscripted so we can all have a laugh.

So I’m making a deal with the devil. Tomorrow, I’ll let him read my poetry and he’ll let me read his songs. Like the song he said he wrote about me. Before we started talking.

I feel like the devil. I’m scared out of my mind.

I started watching this show called Black Mirror. The second episode was set in this slave society where people have to spend their days cycling away on indoor bikes to generate power. They make money from cycling, but they can’t really buy anything but new hats and etc. for their virtual avatars. There’s this guy named Bing who has all this money left over from his dead brother, and he uses it all to buy a ticket for this girl to enter a singing competition and try to escape her cycling existence. She sings for the judges but is told she’s more desired for the pornography channel, and she’s forced to agree because she drank something called Cuppliance that’s supposed to make her comply. When he sees a commercial of the girl on the erotica channel, he loses his shit and started smashing the walls. Then he spends a long time cycling away to earn enough money to enter the same singing competition and he goes on this whole rant about how fucked up the system is and he holds a glass shard from the time he smashed his walls/screens to his neck and threatens to kill himself. The judges seem to love this intense and passionate act of fire  and they offer him his own show on one of their channels where he can rant like that all he wants for 30 minutes twice a week. His act becomes that he holds the glass up to this vein on his neck for the whole time he’s on air and he ends it all like “Goodbye forever…until the same time next week.”

It’s kind of fucked up, but now he can drink orange juice all he wants and look out his gigantic window at a bunch of trees and he never sees the girl again.

---

I went to Roxbury. The lady running the exhibit asked me if I was one of the writers and I said I was and she gave me one of the books with my poem in it to take home, because it was a version that was still being proofread. She shoots and she scores. I spent forever looking at all the art. The ceiling was all exposed with the pipes and everything. I thought it was neat. Some of the writers had their writing printed onto these glass rectangles in the windows. I thought that was neat, but I wasn’t one of them.

~Kasia

Is it Viola or VIOLA?

I’m having some trouble understanding myself lately. I guess I should just see where everything goes, but I feel like I am someone who shifts in the light. Something is always in shadow. Not just to everyone else. To me. I feel so many contradictory things at different times and it makes it really hard for me to know what to trust. One day, I’ll feel this, then I’ll feel that, those things contradict each other, what is real, what is made up, how am I supposed to make decisions about anything when I literally cannot tell where my heart is?

I’m looking forward to this weekend. Friday is open mic night. Saturday, I might take a bus to Boston with my mom and we’ll see my poem being displayed in Roxbury. Sunday, I hope I can go to the mall with Pam, so we can get my ears pierced and I can buy hair dye. I was thinking I’d dye the ends, so my parents won’t give me a hard time about infusing my scalp with deadly chemicals. I can’t choose between pink or blue. I know that sometimes blue can look really swampy and that pink fades nicely, but I’m still conflicted. If I dyed my hair pink now, it would mess up my whole color scheme for my character in Twelfth Night, and if I do dye my hair, I might just end up cutting it later, because it’s grown back a lot and it’s been annoying me. But if I go with pink, I’ll wait until the play is over to do that and I don’t know if I can handle not cutting my hair for that long. Or if I should cut it at all. Maybe I should grow it out.

I wasn’t going to get my ears pierced, but she told me she had earrings to go with my costume, and obviously I won’t be able to wear them anyway, but I told her I was thinking about it and I think that would be fun. I wonder how much it costs. I’m pretty fucking broke and I’m not that committed to this, I just think it would be fun to go have my earlobes blasted open with her.

Here’s the costume idea, I’m really excited about it:

I’ve been feeling like such a horrible person lately. For not knowing what I want, for knowing what I want, for everything. I feel like I can’t fully trust myself again. There’s just this crazy duality. I had a crying breakdown last night, because I felt so much terror, and I realized how long it’s been since I’ve had one of those. But it’s come back and I feel it again. I think it’s because the whole college thing is looming over my head again, since I’ve started hearing back from schools. I was fine when I didn’t have to think about it. I honestly don’t know what I’m doing or what to believe. I got into Boston University. Sometimes, I’ll think being in Boston sounds nice, other times I’ll think I better do something bigger and more exciting and go to New Orleans. I feel like I don’t have enough perspective to really know what it would be like to actually be in any of those places.

I have three weeks left until the play is over and that scares the hell out of me. I can’t stop everything from accelerating and that scares the hell out of me. Not moving also scares the hell out of me. Not having power over myself scares the hell out of me. Having power over myself and knowing I am capable of making consequential decisions scares the hell out of me. Powerlessness is on both ends of the power spectrum, and no matter what my options are, I am scared and I want to run like hell, but running like hell has only made me feel like I’m missing out. I should embrace direct confrontation. Stop avoiding myself by keeping all of these distractions alive. Stop asking everyone around me for advice when I know that the only person I can and should listen to is myself. Sometime soon, I will corner myself in a dark alley. I’ll be holding a gun, and the other me will be holding a flashlight, and the other me will realize a flashlight is not really a weapon and fighting is futile and trying to run is futile, because the other person has a gun.

~Kasia

Hippocrates 12:3

I’m going to talk a little about the school system. I get disillusioned whenever I hear anyone talking about how they think they don’t “need” to know math or history or something or other for what they think their “career” plan is. Maybe it’s just because I’m the type of person who really wants to learn everything. I took calculus just to expose myself to it, I’m taking AP Chemistry right now just because I enjoy it and it doesn’t have a thing to do with my career plan (although I’ve been questioning how much I enjoy it lately). Maybe that’s just my thing, but it breaks my soul when I hear people say they don’t need to know anything about history, because they’re going to be a science major or something. I think that as human beings, it’s our obligation to at least know where we come from. It really pains me that some people find it unimportant and boring and useless.

Maybe it is just my senseless eccentricity, wanting to expose myself to everything and know all about the basic workings of the world even if they don’t help me be the best cog in the machine that I can be. Maybe because I don’t ever want to feel like I am one. Or maybe I am stupid and close-minded for wanting to discard the possibility for that kind of harmony, the chance to really be a part of something and responsible for maybe not the whole, but at least the part of it that’s needed for the whole to work.

So I suppose that’s hypocritical of me, but so is everything I say. After all, it’s the people who are really focused that run our society. People like me who want everything and maybe don’t know what they want and are dissatisfied with everything and can’t be pinned down can be useless for that kind of thing. Or at least I feel like I’d be useless for helping a society function.

I like to think my being scattered is because I’m a writer and a poet and I need to know about everything and this disorganization fosters creativity, but sometimes it just makes me feel like I’m being pulled apart in every direction.

I think the way our educational system works right now doesn’t give enough opportunity for students to really grow and excel. It’s too sheltered. Learning isn’t really about trying to memorize facts out of a textbook. It’s about having your beliefs challenged. It’s about having the chance to see everything you thought you knew about yourself and the world disproved. Sometimes I feel like there’s this inherent lack of enthusiasm and we could achieve so much if only we all cared about it. I just see all there could be and I get frustrated.

I don’t know how plausible this would be at the high school level, because the courses that have really changed the course of my learning for me have been college-level classes, though not completely, but I don’t know, maybe it’s not possible for that kind of learning to take place unless the students are fully interested. Obviously it has to be a two-way street. But it’s the teacher’s job to get the students interested and push them past the limits they’ve created for themselves in their heads, and sometimes I feel like they’ve given up before they’ve even tried.

Anyway, my point is, this is my least favorite question that I hear asked too often: “Why do I need to know that?” Which is kind of ironic, because I just said it after Eireann read a fun fact off the cap of a Snapple bottle.

Anyway, the observation that I’ve made not just in school, but in general (like when I was directing a play) is that if one person shows enthusiasm about something, it rubs off on everyone around them. If you care about something, it’s easier than it seems to make other people care about it too. I guess it took me a while to realize that, but here we are. I think that it’s in human nature for us to be inherently curious about the world, and anything that quells that is because we’ve created all these imagined boundaries for ourselves of things that we should be interested in and things we should leave alone. I think that’s why so many people are afraid to immerse themselves in the arts. They think, “Oh, I could never be an artist,” “I could never write like you,” just because they’ve never tried it, but the truth is, even for the people who seem naturally inclined, it took years and years of practice just to get to where they are, which may still not be where they want to be. Hopefully it’s not, or what else is there to strive for? My point is, so many people are discouraged from even taking the risk when the truth is that it’s degrading for EVERYONE, whether you’re just starting out or not. I hate that people will set these imaginary boundaries for themselves when they don’t have to exist in the first place. There’s so much potential to tap into, but sometimes it goes invisible for such a long time. I don’t mean to say that I don’t think people will naturally do what they’re inclined towards, but I think our school system should work to erase those imaginary lines, because the most difficult beliefs to challenge are the ones we have about ourselves.

~Kasia

I don’t think adding more fire will get all the anger out

THINGS I AM MAD ABOUT:

• I have so much fucking chemistry to do and I can’t understand any of it.
• I’ve been avoiding talking to my director about how I’m missing a tech week rehearsal to go to a concert shhh I’m not telling her THAT PART.
• Northeastern waitlisted me. I didn’t want to go anyway but what the fuck. Who the fuck do you think you are to make me feel like I’m disposable. You’re the disposable one.
• I haven’t even told /some/people/ about getting into/getting rejected by college. I was going to when I found out, but then I didn’t and now I don’t feel like it’s that important again.
• I’m sick, I lost my voice, I feel like I’m dying.
• How can you break your phone so easily
• I’M TOO SICK TO HAVE PLANS
• I can’t concentrate on anything because sick sick sick sick siiiiiick
• MY HAIR IS TOO LONG
• I haven’t showered in longer than I want to admit or even remember
• I actually feel disgusting
• I’m really worried about not getting into schools
• I will have another admissions decision today to a school I don’t care about very much but I still care because yesterday when Northeastern waitlisted me I cried
• I JUST WANT TO FEEL BETTER SO I CAN DO THINGS
• I MISS DOING THINGS
• I DON’T LIKE STASIS
• I keep having to repeat myself because my voice is so fucked up right now
• I should not have worn contacts today/ ever
• Fuck me
• “My maiden name, which I dropped like it was hot, because I hate my family”
• Isn’t it funny how I can hate my family and love my family
• I really need to write my novel
• I need time to talk to people for GOD’S SAKE
• GOD
• AHHHHHHHHHH
• AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
• If I could sweat or fight or fuck whatever sickness is in me right now I would
• I want to be in a room full of steam
• I have to go outside and it’s gonna be cold
• I’m really hot in this sweater
• I can hardly fucking speak
• And people expect me!! To speak to them!!!!
• The fuck?
• I got into UMass Amherst but it’s in the middle of nowhere
• I’m so poor
• I applied to Not Your Average Joe’s as a waitress and I got a rejection email yesterday, like how many qualifications do I need to fucking serve food to people?? GOD.
• Fine, I don’t want you anyway.
• FINE
• Today, my dad once again did this thing where he left for school without me and drove my brother first because apparently that’s a fun thing to do, I don’t know, also he’s a control freak who was just mad that I didn’t have on the right jacket
• You know how sometimes people do that thing where you know they see you peripherally but they won’t turn to you for some reason?
• I am gonna be okay. I need to take things as they come. Just forget it.

~Kasia

Sick and feverish and falling gently into delirium

Is my mental state really destined to be bad right now no matter what? That trips me up a little. I thought I was doing better than I ever have before. Maybe it’s a delusion. Maybe my “better” is still pretty bad.

I feel really hot right now. I might have a fever.

I hate being sick. For obvious reasons, too, like I feel horrible, but I feel like it makes me put things on hold and I don’t like putting things on hold. I can’t put effort into anything. All that speed down the drain.

Now my plans for this weekend are kind of ruined. That’s so stupid. I just want to do things. I don’t know why I’m frustrated. I thought it’d be nice to have a break from things and to have this as an excuse, but I can’t really afford it.

I’ve really been thinking about how I act different around different people. I think a lot of the time, I try to match the other person’s energy. I don’t know if that’s a good thing anymore. I’ve been told that I’m high-energy lately, so I’m not entirely sure. But if I’m not feeling it, I’ll just fade in and pretend to disappear.

I barely remember Sunday night or anything else that’s distinct at all. It’s the blend of being sick and how it’s been snowing again and it’s just making it all fade in and together. I just feel this general disconnect. I lose how I feel all the time. Whatever was the most important thing to me, even for one second, sinks back so quickly. This fever, whatever it is, has taken over.

I’ve really been obsessed with this poem called Fever 103° by Sylvia Plath. I was going to use it for this English assignment I had but I never showed up to do it. I keep reading it over and over. That seems like a high fever. Maybe it’s the fever I have.

Then there’s this other part of being sick that feels like falling into some delirium, almost like I’ve been given a drug without having to take a drug. It’s become effective from the inside. It’s taken over. It’s nice. I feel like I’m hallucinating.

I’m so worried, I’m so paranoid about screwing things up, I feel like if I fall sick, everything will come out of my grasp and I’ll lose it. I’m crazy.

I kind of don’t feel like telling anyone anything right now.

I think I should cut my hair again. I can’t stand feeling it on my shoulders.

I feel like a mermaid whose voice was stolen from her.

I don’t remember the days anymore. I don’t remember the days anymore. I don’t remember the days anymore. I don’t remember the days anymore

I know that I am worrying for no reason. I just don’t like being sick. It makes me feel like whatever is manifesting physically started on the inside.

~Kasia

Goodbye to Romance, Hello to Romance

I feel a little more qualified (I’m never qualified) to talk about romantic relationships than I did a year ago, so I say: let’s do this. I think romantic relationships are such a volatile subject, because to really understand it, you have to experience it. No advice that anyone else gives you is really going to get through to you until that happens. You can listen to what people tell you, you can try your best to follow through with whatever advice they give you, but until you learn it, until you’re hit in the face with why that is something you should do, you’ll never understand the reason for it. Some things, you can’t even do them without understanding.

I guess we all start from different places and we all have different things we need to learn about relationships before we can make anything successful, because we’ve all had different experiences and the relationships we’ve had with other people, romantic and non-romantic, set us up for whatever other relationships we’ll have. This can be really tricky if we’ve already had bad experiences. Repeatedly. I think sometimes it’ll surprise you if you’ve been treated badly by people your whole life and you suddenly find someone who…doesn’t. And goes to these lengths no one else has gone to for you. You don’t really know how to react to it and you feel wildly unprepared. It can be scary having someone treat you well when you’re not used to it. You might feel like you want to run from it and like you don’t deserve it and like it contradicts your destiny that you decided a long time ago was ETERNAL MISERY. But no matter how well or badly someone treats you, I think either way, it teaches you how to treat other people and how you should want to be treated by people.

A lot of the time, it depends on which phase of your life you’re in. For example, I dated someone I didn’t care about when I was in a phase of my life when I was apathetic towards everything, because I had just tried to kill myself and I felt like nothing I did mattered anyway. It almost seemed like because I betrayed my own trust, I subconsciously decided to stop caring about what was best for me. Maybe I never did at that point in my life. I really don’t know. All I know is, I let myself be treated badly and I wasn’t cautious, but I am now and I can’t just jump into things anymore. Probably for the best. My second relationship came at a time when everything was falling apart for me. That was the rest of my downward spiral. And I guess that had to be part of it. I really can’t explain it any other way. And I think my problem is that if things start getting really bad for me, I will push people away from my darkness. I bring all the rain upon myself.

This has been kind of a touchy subject for me for a while now. Both of the relationships I’ve had up to this point have severely traumatized me. The first one was horrible and forced through and through, and the second one ended really badly and it was the first time my heart was really really broken. Anyway, I think I went on a date yesterday. I had a really great time, and then I went to sleep and I woke up a little past 3 in the morning, and I replayed it in my head again and I felt so calm and excited at the same time. I immediately thought of the night after my last break-up, when I also woke up around that time and immediately started sobbing. What a fucking contrast. Anyway this is kind of terrifying for me.

I think a lot of success has to do with how open you are with the other person and how willing you are to work through your issues together. I can say that in my last relationship, I was pretty secretive, and I had my reasons, but that’s who I am and I can’t change it. Can I? I have my secrets and I need to keep my secrets. I have to keep some things to myself. I don’t know if I can unlearn that or not. I don’t know if I should try. I can feel myself doing it again already, maybe more than ever, and I feel terrible about it but I can’t stop.

 (Actual footage of me) XOXO

((I blame my horrible experiences with romance for my melodramatic obsession with Roy Lichtenstein))

Even though I was in an indescribable amount of pain after the second break-up, the first thing I noticed right after was how much mental clarity I suddenly had. It was unmatched. For the first time, I felt like I could keep track of all of my thoughts and where they came from and where they were going. I think it was this quality of not having my train of thought muddled by anyone else and just being able to be alone with my thoughts, because in a way, I really was, so alone. I couldn’t talk about this for so long. I tried a few times, but I felt like whenever I did, I never really heard what I needed said to me. Everyone just told me that I needed to move on. And that didn’t help me deal with what I was actually dealing with, which was not yet moving on but just living with myself in this state for a while. I think I really tortured myself. I wrote about it obsessively (I’m glad I did exploit my pain like that), I replayed everything in my head, every day I would relive the whole relationship again like it was still happening and then at some point, I had to snap out of my trance realize it wasn’t. A lot of living inside my head that way. It was a miserable time, and it was torturous for those few months that I was heartbroken, but I don’t feel anything about it anymore. There was one week last month that I looked at everything that reminded me of that relationship and I can honestly say that I didn’t feel a thing. I don’t remember anything that happened and I don’t remember how I felt. There’s a hole torn open in my memory. It’s a little scary, but it’s better than being in pain all the time, and I finally feel free. I psychologically feel different. From the inside. I think I rewired myself. It’s good.

And honestly, the thought of being in a relationship again freaks me out. I don’t know if I am ready. I don’t know if I have learned enough. I already feel myself pulling away sometimes. Sometimes, I won’t talk about things, because I don’t even want to think about them. And so I keep running away from the idea. And then I’ll run with it for a while. I guess that’s what made me say yes to last night. I just wanted to do it finally. It’s been building up so long. I didn’t want to wait and stall anymore. I just wanted it to happen. I guess the thing that scares me is reaching this point of no return and I don’t know what that point is or if I will recognize it or if it even exists, maybe it’s just something you slowly sink into until you realize you can’t safely back out.

I always feel trapped. I am great at feeling trapped. I guess what I want most is to not want to back out. But I’m afraid I’ll get scared. I’m afraid I’ll close up. I’m afraid I’m afraid I’m afraid. But I had an amazing time last night. Maybe I shouldn’t worry. This really feels different than anything else.

Sometimes I get paranoid about not being able to keep my energy levels up all the time, but I don’t think I need to be paranoid. I feel like the closer I get to people, the more I pull away from them and the less I want them to know about my main preoccupations. It’s like some paradox. I’d feel more comfortable telling strangers about these weirdly personal things than someone who will judge me and try to correlate it with what they already know about me and whom I have to see on a regular basis. I also think there’s this effort paradox. I think I am confusing myself with all these paradoxes I keep pulling out of thin air. Shut up!!!! If you overthink it, you KILL it.

This is the song he wanted to play in the car last night, but he forgot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUW5vRcgNHM

I don’t care, I like him.

~Kasia

BLACK HOLE DON’T READ

I can’t deal with my family sometimes and now is one of those times. I hate it when they tell me they’ll take me somewhere and then they leave without me. Or when they change their minds when they promised they’d do something for me. Or when my dad says he won’t do something because we didn’t plan it ahead. I really hate a lot about my dad. I don’t even feel like he really knows me. He only cares about the parts of me that fit into his little vision of what he wants me to be and anything else, he doesn’t see. He tells me what my priorities should be and anything that he doesn’t think is a priority for me, even if it’s the most important thing in my life to me, even if it’s the thing that keeps me going, gets downgraded to a hobby. I don’t think he knows me as a person at all. He never shuts up. He’ll go on lecturing about something that I honestly don’t give a fuck about and he won’t even care if I’m listening. He just loves the sound of his own voice and he won’t let anyone else talk. If my mom tries to say something, he’ll shut her up and be like ‘I can never say a THING in this house.’ He doesn’t respect my mom. He treats her horribly and it makes me want to cry and it makes her cry. I just want to get her out of here. She works from home and she’s so isolated and I don’t think it’s good for her. He’s called her job a “hobby.”  Whenever she does what he thinks is shouting at him, he’s started saying “Don’t be a feminist.” It just makes me want to punch him. I don’t think I really love him. I know he’s my FATHER and all, but I just don’t feel it. I don’t think I ever felt it while I was conscious of it. Maybe when I was a lot younger and a lot blinder to reality. I don’t feel like you can really love someone unless you know them. Unless you at least know them. I think that maybe, you have to understand one another. I don’t understand him. I don’t think he’s ever made any effort to understand me.

He never apologizes to anyone. I don’t think he’s ever said a sincere word in his life. I think that even when he’s trying to tell me he’s proud of me for something, it gets forced out. He constantly tries to make a fight between me and my mom where there isn’t one. Sure, sometimes she’ll say something crude or start yelling at me out of nowhere, but I’ve learned to work with that. I’ve learned not to get so worked up about it. I’ve learned that if I just wait a few seconds and I don’t return the fire, she’ll mellow down a few comebacks later and we’ll be okay. It’s taken me a long time to find that way to get to her. I don’t want anyone messing with it. We used to fight every day. We used to have endless screaming matches.

It saddens me, seeing her with him sometimes. Sometimes. Sometimes, they gang up on me. Sometimes, they are equally cruel to me. But I like it best when I can be alone with her and he’s not there. I think she’s happier. I think we’re all happier. I think she hates the sound of him coming home.

I never really know what to do. It’s hard to get people to do things if they don’t have that spark of will on their own. It has to come from them. But I also understand that sometimes, people need a push to get their lives to where they want them to be. And I can see her happy when she’s with me. I just don’t know if she wants what I want for her. I don’t want to interfere and have it backfire in her face. I don’t know what to do. I can’t be the one making all the plans. I can’t be the one making all the rules. I can’t become just another tyrant for her, even if I am the one who cares, even if I’m the one who’ll be broken if I screw anything up for her and make her more miserable.

Be satisfied with this, I’ll never give anyone the whole story.

~Kasia

Through the rosy filter

Things I really am grateful for and appreciate:

• My mom who buys me tickets to Stevie Nicks and plans our trips to New York and cares about my accomplishments and begs to read my poetry and comes to all my shows and brings me coffee and worries about me and drags me out of bed after a bad break-up and supports me and is sitting on my bed right now reciting poetry to me in Polish and who just read me this poem she put in her father’s obituary and who’s so sentimental and feels everything so deeply and oh God, so that’s where I get that from
• My brother who subtly makes it easier for me to deal with my parents and who can make me laugh even in an unpleasant situation and whom I always have fun hanging out with when my parents go out of town and who seems to truly enjoy my company and who tells me more things now than he used to and whom I love and whom I’m getting more and more proud of every day
• My dad who drives me to my job interviews in the middle of the day if I ask him and makes sure to at least tell me when he’s proud of me
• My friend who gives me his jacket when I’m cold and invites me places and steals me ice cream from work and plays me his songs on guitar and asks to read my poetry every day and cares enough about my life to read the entire script of my freshman one act and lends me books and sends me music and makes me laugh and comes to my shows and tells me his secrets and gets mad at me when I don’t tell him about important things that happen to me right away
• The fact that my mom and her brother have been back in touch
• Having good friends who I get to see every day in school
• Having good friends who take me shopping and come to my shows
• Having good friends who are in said shows WITH me
• KAREN who would come all the way from North Andover to see my 30-minute play where she gets to talk to me for like 20 minutes after not seeing me for 7 years
• Also Karen who lets me hang out all day in an exact replica of my old apartment and plays with me on the playground where we used to go when we were kids and will wait hours for me to try on all the clothes I want and who slips things like “By the way I lost my virginity in this parking lot” into conversation and tells me all these stories about the crazy people she encountered while working as security in an amusement park like a lady who tried to bring in a gun and another one who tried to smuggle in 20 loaves of bread and Karen was like “You gonna eat all those by yourself?”
• Karen who was equally obsessed with the idea of finding me and found me after all these years
• Having the opportunity to participate in theatre and make that my life
• Getting to play Fabian in Twelfth Night and spend a lot of time with people I love
• Kira who I talk to every day even though I don’t see her nearly enough
• Having my own room and my own space
• Having access to books
• Just…getting to share experiences with other people is nice
• People who give me flowers
• My lovely friend who paints me and gets more excited about me dramatically cutting my hair than I do and holds me when I’m breaking down and hugs me when she sees me in the hallway and remembers all these details about me and completely takes over when I need one of my actors in dramatic skull make-up
• Shreya who pushes me to lengths I didn’t know I had in me and believes in me more than I do and puts everything into perspective for me
• Having too many options
• The whole world is my pool of knowledge
• People who randomly compliment me
• The fact that my bed looks like outer space
• The possibility of seeing movies at the movie theater
• Being able to be myself
• Teachers I can honestly rant to
• The fact that I am a lot more open than I used to be
• People who get excited for me and make me excited for me in the process
• Having a laptop that doesn’t take ten minutes to turn on
• I’ve been pretty happy and I’ve had a beautiful last few months
• I have my dead grandmother’s dress and jacket in my closet
• The number of people who congratulated me on my play
• I have so many shades of lipstick. But not blue
• This book of the greatest American poets that I have on my shelf
• Being able to get a good education
• I’ve seen some really beautiful places like Spain and Paris and San Francisco and Zakopane and northern California
• The fact that I’ve managed to maintain a high GPA
• My own never burning out fire
• Having the perspective I have
• Anyone who reads this mess
• The fact that I have people I can talk to when I’m feeling down and how it’s become a lot easier for me to talk about my issues
• Being able to go outside and look at the moon when it’s full
• The sheer existence of the ocean
• Having friends in all of my classes
• I have truly been enjoying my life more than I ever have before

~Kasia

Things I Really Fucking Hate

• The way my dad always talks to me in this condescending tone
• How easily I get tired of my clothes
• The fact that I insist on wearing uncomfortable things just for the aesthetic value
• Having to ask my parents whenever I want to do something even though I’m a legal fucking adult
• Always feeling uncertain about my future mental state
• My shit ZTE phone that keeps spazzing when I try to type because I smashed it on the floor ten too many times
• The writing process when I feel like everything I’m putting down is incoherent shit
• Feeling like I am repeating myself
• The fact that I can’t just go drive myself and buy pink hair dye
• The fact that I’m expected to adhere to this concept of ‘Time’
• When I’m acting in something and I don’t say something the way I intended
• The whole concept of ‘Out of Sight, out of Mind’ and how it’s increasingly evident in my life
• Feeling like nothing really comes naturally to me
• Getting acne when I’m not even stressed
• When people make casting decisions I wildly disagree with
• Not seeing certain people every single day
• The fact that nobody will just come up and offer me a waitress job out of the middle of nowhere
• People who don’t swear
• People who can’t relate to existential pain
• When my parents make too big of a deal of arbitrary things
• Having to be around people who’ve witnessed me in some weird phases of my life who I don’t even talk to
• Watermelon
• The word “hobby”
• When my dad refers to theatre as my “hobby”
• My hobby that I spend 16 hours a day on
• Being able to picture exactly how I could slip off the edge again and spiral into some tragic downfall
• The fact that at some point in my life, I will once again be preoccupied with mortality
• Not knowing if I should cut my hair or let it grow
• Knowing there are people who do awful things who will never change
• People who make me feel alone and misunderstood because they don’t share in my thoughts and can’t relate to my aspirations for myself
• Stasis
• When people take things that belong to me but won’t admit to it so I spent hours searching for them like an idiot
• Missed opportunities
• Thinking about the fact that if I live that long, I will have to one day relinquish the title of Rebellious Teenager
• Being unable to comprehend people who can play flamenco on guitar (Colin)
• Not seeing some people often enough
• Having so much opportunity to lose touch and disconnect with people
• When directors keep casting the same actors over and over again in every main role
• The fact that there’s so much potential in some people, especially actors, but they just haven’t had the right characters written for them
• Self-insertion like for example what I just did
• The fact that I need superficial, weirdly-colored sheets of swirling, politically-affiliated paper in order to survive in a capitalist society
• The fleeting and fast-dwindling quality of everything
• The fact that as a people, we’ve stopped using candles so much. I think it’s because they invented electricity or something?
• The desert lack of opportunities where I can imagine them
• Getting overwhelmed by the uncertainty of the future
• The fact that my mom thought it was okay to throw away my flowers that I wanted to keep for sentimental reasons just because they were dead
• The terrifying space between conceiving the idea and executing it remotely well
• I don’t have enough stickers
• Not being able to remember traumatic things that happened to me
• Having to sacrifice my mental state in order to remember the traumatic things that happened to me
• Knowing I can’t experience a car crash in a spiritual way unless I attain some serious injury
• The fact that I missed both World War I and World War II
• A disappointing lack of flapper nightclubs and dressing like flappers
• New Orleans is so far away
• I’m not producing a movie right now
• What if someday I don’t feel anymore like the whole world is open and waiting for me?
• Being afraid of intimacy and being in relationships
• The idea of ‘Love’ is so tainted for me
• Not being able to remember how I once felt
• Being constantly afraid of ceasing to see everything through rose-colored glasses
• Not being as close to people as I would like
• Being afraid of getting too close to people
• Someday I will not feel so invincible

~Kasia

everything is a copy of a copy of a copy

I can’t tell if the things that happen to me are really that bizarre and the universe has some weird obsession with me or if I just over-romanticize everything. I guess neither of those alternatives is a bad thing.

I’m going to the movies with Colin on Sunday, I’m pretty excited about that. Tomorrow I have to go to this Scholastic ceremony with my family and Kelly for all those awards I won and it’s at the Museum of Fine Arts and I know it’ll be fun. I want to focus on my writing more because the fact that I have so many underdeveloped things floating around is really tearing me apart.

I think it’d be fun to be a waitress if I was to have a job. I used to hate that thought, but now there’s this romantic appeal. I think lately I just like the idea of it.

Colin told me that the first thing he ever noticed about me was my dramatic hair flip. He told me that one day last year, he saw me walking and that he noticed I had a very deliberate walk, that I walk with purpose, with my shoulders back, fast, like I know my destination. He said he remembered that I was wearing a white dress and it was really bright on that day and he looked up and saw this angelic glow and he even remembered he was reading Watchmen that day. I don’t know who the fuck remembers things like that except for me.

Bad war flashbacks.

I am dying to read more, everything I can, because I feel like I’ve been producing more than I have been consuming and there’s just this imbalance, but I don’t have time. I know I don’t have time for ANYTHING unless I make time but I don’t have time.

And at the same time there’s a lot I want to make. It’ll kill me before I figure it out.

Sometimes when I read things, it’ll feel like this voice that’s speaking straight out of me, and when I write, it’s so hard to feel that for some reason. It’s crazy. Other people’s thoughts are more coherent than my own.

I’m just so sick of everything I say. I feel like I keep ripping myself off.

I am a rip-off of myself. I’ve never had an original thought, I’ve stolen it all.  I repeat every word that comes out of my mouth. You are my inner voice?
You’ve heard it all before. I’ve heard it all before. You’ve seen it all before. I’ve seen it all before. You’ve said it all before.

Everything is made up, contrived, derivative, whenever I speak I spit it out in a collage, a patchwork of fabrics, repeating phrases, borrowed words. My old lovers melt into my new lovers. The places I’ve been melt into this one, the bridges of my childhood appear in my backyard, the ages stack up like cards, everything leading up to this moment has piled up.. I am impure. I want to put myself through the water filters and wash all the dirt out. I’ve borrowed this word from you. This word from you. I’ve borrowed all my words. I string them together and pretend it’s not old water. All water is old water. All of history has pressed me into this contrived form. I am the contrived rip-off of a rip-off of a rip-off created under pressure. There is nothing beautiful about it. I will never be clean. My thoughts are a part of a cycle of waste. I wish I could be in a vacuum. Still, clean, pure, unaffected.

I am an accidental thief. I borrow your survival instincts, I borrow your ideas about astronomy, I borrow your numerical system, your alphabet, your names for the parts of my body, your ideologies, your laws, the things you say to your loved ones, the ways that you accidentally seduce people, the way you wear your hair, the poetry you read, the poetry you spit out. Everything you spit out is a multiplication of all these infinite coinciding factors jumping and bumping into one another.

And when I move stones? I steal the sun’s fire. I steal the look in your eyes. I seduce you with the same look you give me. I seduce you with the look my past lovers have given me. Do you know it is my old lovers seducing you? Do you know it is the snarl of my father’s lip, the unsteadiness of my mother’s hands, the light trauma sprinkled over me by the year before, and the year before that, and the year before that? Do you know it is all of history seducing you? My history, the earth’s history, your history, the history of humanity, history, random facts that I have swept up, expectations.

It is not me. The whole world is seducing you. The whole universe and all of history has conspired to transmit these waves of light and sound.

I can’t escape the things that have happened to me, my experiences, what I’ve seen, what I’ve heard, what I’ve read, my family, everyone I’ve ever met, where I come from, you, where I’m going, my own destiny, my own psyche, my dreams, I can’t. I can’t. Will I ever be pure? Will I ever be free?

~Kasia