Darkness: Meditation (Revised)

The luminescent glow from the compact florescent light bulb fills my room. My homework is stacked in a pile in front of me; each subject half done. I can’t focus. I have gotten to the 15th level of Tetris and now have a new high score of 164 seconds on the expert level of minesweeper. My head is wandering through places beyond where I am now; places of the past, the future; things that have been and never will be.
My fingers pull open the hard, worn green cover of my journal from the mountain school trying to find a topic for this assignment. Having used it as my english journal for over a year now, I have forgotten the words that first graced its crisp white pages, though the person who wrote them has never faded.

Week 1- The flashlight glows. Thick light allows me to see, yet beyond its boundaries is darkness. Outside the darkness is so much deeper. My head races with the thought of my fear of walking back to the dorm. It’s more of a discomfort actually. The flashlight flickers…my roommate is trying to sleep. I remove my glasses and lay down thinking about what tomorrow holds, the changing shadows around my room, and the unknown darkness outside my window.

My eyes dart around my room. The rows of books and organized folders are disrupted only by a small pile of college papers on my bookshelf. I reach for it, the entropy it creates driving me crazy, but my eyes catch the spiral wire binding of my little gray notebook from before I came to Deerfield.
Very few words can be found on these pages. In a world where words limited people to tangible instances, images revealed so much more. Fire fills the first page. Burn. The word is drawn melting down the white paper like ice. I had tried to pull away from my cousin as he held my finger above the flame. “Trust me.” His teenage hand grabbed my little neck. Our eyes met. There was a certainty in him that I admired. His thumb scratched the flint feeding the red into the yellow and blue that danced above the lighter. My eyes grew wide as my finger passed through the flame. I pulled it away protectively, stumbling as he let go of me. At a safe distance, I examined it closely. My pink skin had no sign of damage: visual or sensational. I turned my hand over again and again looking at it from different angles in snapshots between stealing glances at my cousin. I walked back over to him, giving him my finger. “Do it again.” In a trance this time I watched my finger pass through the flame. I felt its heat, though it didn’t burn. My eyes grew wide, the image of the flame filling my eyes with light. The curiosity inside me grasped for it, igniting my obsession with fire, my curiosity toward the world.

Week 3- This stream is beyond words. Everything melts together into perfection. The rocks can still be seen through the moss. The water glimmers as it rushes downstream in flowing waves around the bend. It slides past me down the small waterfall and into a pool beyond coming to a smooth rest, with only small ripples to inform me that the water is still moving.
I keep looking upstream at the rushing water, the unbalanced rock formations and trees on both sides. I haven’t really tried identifying them yet, for now I just want to see everything. The sun keeps going in and out. I’m cold. I think Ill go set up my shelter now and leave this scene behind. I wonder if it’ll change in the morning…

I turn the page of the little wire-bound notepad, reading through my life like a picture book. Consecutive circles imitate the circle of light that emanated from the television on my thirteenth birthday. That night, in a basement room with only a rug and a tv, my friends and I cuddled into the blankets trying to scare each other through the entirety of The Ring. As the tape ended, the sound of the screen going fuzzy, penetrated our innocent laughter. Joking turned to panic. “Turn it off.” Adrenalin rushed through my body as I scrambled toward the television that no one else would go near.
“Its just a movie guys,” I said calmly, my rationale fighting the atmosphere around me. To this day I have yet to find a movie that scares me. Just as ghosts, witches, and vampires cluttered my reading lists in elementary and middle school, psychological horror films fill the dvd collection on the bookshelf next to me. The demon child and a video tape that left you with seven days to live has since been replaced by serial killers who torture their victims before killing them. What makes people go insane? The question took over me.
On the other side of the page was a hole. Not in the paper, it was a drawing; a portal into insanity. A sketch filled with anger and hatred, like when someone punches through a wall. The shiny graphite reminds me of the glow of city lights that I wandered through in my childhood dream. Wolves chased us through streets that are familiar to me now but at that age were just fantasy. Hiding in the night’s shadows, adrenalin pulsed through my body. I remember fear of being hurt, being found, though on some level it almost felt like a game.

Week 4- The games started then. Smoldering pieces of wood were being tossed back and forth and through the air. I joined, picking the fire out of the ashes; feeling both its coldness and its heat. By the end I found myself holding a small log smoldering at one end. By blowing on it we were able to create a flame; it only lasted a few seconds but still it was there. I cast it into the fire before walking back to the dorm. In the light of the common room, I realized that my hands were black with charcoal and I had a welt in my palm. Before I washed my hands I took a picture. There are so many ways of remembering. I wish they could all be permanent.

Carefully rendered depictions of Eminem’s tattoos take up the next two pages of the notebook. His words still flow through me like they had when I started listening to him when I was 11. “See everything you say is real and I respect you cuz you tell it.” I’m lost in the memory of his voice; the memory of rapping on the bus ride to and from lacrosse games.
“There’s no score this game, girls.” I heard Michelle’s encouraging words beyond the beat in my head phones. “Just focus on what we’ve been working on.” Ground balls, defensive positioning, place my shots. I imagined the scenarios as I hopped down the stairs of the bus onto the soft finely ground gravel of the parking lot next to the field. My cleats rolled over the kept grass and newly painted lines defining the field. No score, no numbers, just explode forward, toward the ball. Everything built up in me though time slowed down. I bent low, putting my body between the ball and the other team. Her blond ponytail bounced over her shoulders as I pushed her slender body out of my way with little effort.
“There’s no score.” The words echoed in my head. I picked up the ball and shifted direction, cradling around her one foot placed swiftly in front of the other. Feeling her presence as I reached half field, I switched the ball over to my left hand. I had the stick skills but I knew I’d never have her endurance. I can pick up every ground ball but I will always have to work twice as hard to make it to the goal.
“Cut!” I yelled, relying on my friends to help me move the ball up the field. My body tightened as the word left my mouth. Words have always had a huge affect on me, the verbalization that can never truly express the emotion they emerge from. The rush. My team formed a line to the goal. Release. With all the energy I had left, I passed the ball up the field and left it to them to make the goal.
“Good game girls.” Michelle told us as the bus drove off of the gravel and onto the pavement. “You worked hard out there.” Everyone was quiet on the way back to the city. Sitting alone curled up in my seat with my headphones on and the sun beating through my window, I trace the scars on my arm with my finger. 7 ground balls, 1 steal, a goal, and a loss. “She don’t know what it was like for people like us growing up.” For once I wished we could compete but sometimes his lyrics were all we had: his lyrics and our own scars. The pattern of red lines on my pale skin is only evidence of what goes on in my head. My eyes raise, scanning the variety of emotions on the faces of the people around me. How can fear make something, someone, so misunderstood? I’m so logical, so level headed in every way and yet it’s so irrational to see beauty in this, in pain, in who I am.

Week 6- I worry about my sister. It’s weird to see the contrast between us and yet such similarity. I wonder if it’s my fault that she feels so much pain; if Im the one who taught her. I hate time and the way society works. I despise change yet it’s what defines my life. I yearn for it, for the familiar and ability to stay connected. But at times I desire the future and at others wish time would stop. But how do we know if it ever starts and stops? And if it does how can we make every moment we’re given unforgettable and still be guaranteed happiness in the future?

The chaos of lines on the next page jump off the paper into my head; that feeling of chaos that had been poured out onto the paper that day in math class fills me. Lines that started, calculated, lead pulled slowly creating the strait parallel lines. Around me my classmates were excited for the prospect of summer while I created pictures from the shapes on the dry erase board, numbers adding to the chaos in my head. My body shook as the lines became crosshatched, faster, filling white lined paper with a darkness that has always been there to remind me of who I was: a pattern of frantically scrawled lines with more meaning than words could ever portray.
That’s how I spent my last day of 9th grade, my last day ever at Chelsea high school. A constant war was being fought inside my head. There was no emotion behind my accomplishment of getting into Deerfield Academy. When my body was weak from not eating and my mind was tired from fighting so hard, my love for the people I was close to was what drove me forward, even as I felt like I was being drawn into that hole more and more. Standing on its uncertain edge, wavering, knowing that I was leaving them all behind for the best private boarding school in New England, and knowing that staying would only be surrendering to a strong gust of wind, I waited for the moment where I would fall into complete emptiness, physical and emotional.
Am still the same person who filled these pages; the person who tried desperately to control her shaking hand, the only means of letting everything she kept bottled inside her out?

Week 8- Its all come to seem so normal. I remember the fear now. The drive to keep everything hidden but most importantly the reason for it. The perception of society…the misunderstanding that creates oppression. The need to be understood and yet have something that’s only your own that no one can take away. Until you realize that they can. That society has that ability, literally.

There are voices outside my door. They take me back to sophomore year, to study hall, when the chaos inside my head would spiral out of control just like it did at Chelsea High. Confined, I was overwhelmed with the urge to break free from my body, knowing, the whole time that I was miserable, that it could always be worse. I knew worse, and I knew that once I had made the choice to leave it behind I could never go back.
The last page has a drawing of a pillow with holes in it, like it had been sliced up with a knife. I look over to my own pillow, around my room. I have one poster of Eminem in this room, one lord of the rings calendar, one poster of two female vampire lovers, one photo of a sunset through the silhouette of tree branches and a bunch of pictures, pictures of my friends, pictures of me smiling. My mouth curves upward looking at them. I turn back to my notebook remembering all the nights I spent at home wishing that I could sleep forever, all the nights I spent in study hall sophomore year trying to convince my sister not to kill herself, all the nights I spent at the mountain school gazing at the stars. I close both of my notebooks, my past and my present, before climbing into bed. I run my hands over my pillows smooth surface and then place them under the cool underside searching for Raja. I wrap my arms around the stuffed tiger and close my eyes noticing that the darkness still surrounds me but it isn’t in me anymore. Still am I the same person?

Week 10- “Now your eyes see right through me.” Its sad how the knowledge of one small thing, concealed but always present, can alter someone’s opinion so much…to the point that identity is forced to be concealed…forever unexpressed.