The Way It's Been

There is tape all over my room.

Pieces of masking tape, dangling from when we tried so hard to cheaply shlack the Christmas lights to the purple walls without having to buy 3M Command tape. No matter how many wads of tape we slathered across the wires, they fell down eventually. Now our walls are littered with the left overs. And Lis's loft ladder and the corner dorm floors and our dresser drawers and sometimes I wake up with a ring of tape around my wrist...and the whole room is like a tacky, crude pointillated painting of the enhanced imagination of the youth suffered during claustrophobia.

The tape is maybe an accurate representation of myself...of my mental habits lately. I've been sticking to things that aren't new or exciting or invigorating. I've been grappling to things that are constant and always there for grappling--budgets, factual regurgitation, to-do lists, housing Management. Worrying. Analyzing. It's a chronic cycle in my life--the intellectual stimulation persists fervently for a month or so, always leading up to something big, always in preparation for something--and feels like it could never leave!--and it dwindles like it could never (I always think it could NEVER), and it spirals into me like what I thought was impossible, and it settles viscously somewhere in the lower part of my gut to reveal the things that are always there for me to think about. And those things are a big, bland bore.

But like I said. It's a cycle. It'll come back.

I have this seemingly innocuous symptom--maybe of some mentally clogging virus--where I can make the greatest, most incendiary conversation with notable people, and I am relaxed, and it comes naturally; but eventually, when I get to the point where I truly care about what they think, how they see me, when I am conscious about keeping up this conversation--this is when I choke. And I can't think of a damn thing. And I force it. It happens all the time. I'm afraid of it. When all I really have to do is find the security and serenity I had in the first place with these people, when I didn't care about the image of me flashing before their eyes, when they weren't expecting or depending on the conversation. I just have to reach that point again.

I guess I'm working on it.
Maybe it is all part of the cycle.

Epithetically,
Kaitlin