I want it all, actually

quiet lives aren't for me

To slice life into a crisp before and after wouldn’t show the blurriness of lines that transitioned me from who I was into who I am. Maybe I could’ve been a lot more and maybe I could’ve been still the fifteen year old who saw herself everything she ever set her mind on, but that is not how the story goes so it is not who I am. In every other universe, every other choice- this is the only version that I exist in.

I was always loud. In my laughs and ideas and dreams, forgetting that my little town isn’t built so much, so much life. At sixteen, I’d listed my goals in priority- opening up my own university and winning the Nobel Prize being some of them. At sixteen, I was reading ten to twenty books a month, writing cringey poetry pretentiously on old papyrus style journals. I was topping my classes and posting Youtube vidoes of yapping on books. An art Instagram square field of pencil colours that took hours and hours to perfect. I was the sun and I was ugly, with a little too muchness of weight and crooked teeth of a beaver’s. I was ugly and I didn’t know it and so I would let clothes fit me and my smiles bare a flash of white. I was happy, the world at the tip of my fingers. Mine to shape, mine to conquer, mine to win.

I won because I knew nothing but that I must be the best. That to be any less is to waste a potential I’ve been told I have, that is it limitless and endless and what to do but live up to it? Live up to the unsaid expectations, live up and not disappoint- a mirror ball dancing for all but me. A race against something phantom, something immeasurable and insurmountable. A race rigged always to lose, because you could always do better. Always more, always simply relief, invisible sense of achievement.

It slipped so slow, so soft till I woke up one day unrecognizable in the mirror. I don’t speak in public anymore. I miss more meals than I have and coffee my water. Bags deep and sad under narrow glaring brown eyes. Lightly purpling lips, unevenly cut hair never past my shoulders. A tattoo. Shitty grades and a wallflower, slightly insomniac. A few lines on skin and a few pieces of the heart. Headphones slung around the neck and a waist carefully curated through desperation. I’ve written and re-written, I’ve made this little life into poetry and tales, into something resembling a metamorphosis. Yet.

A small life for a girl with big dreams. Small smiles of a loud laugh. God, I was once the sun- too bright to look at. Time softened my edges, time hardened my heart and time showed that there is no self that demands permanence. Fell in love, fell out of it. Dreamt some unrealized dreams, faded into new ones. Old lives morphed to new ones as did I. I was never whole because the point is to be a lot more. To add and to let go, to again stumble in this little life with its pain and its love, unfair equilibrium, scales tipped like knives. Still there is a stranger’s smile through quiet empty trains and still there is my old journals scribbled with chaos. This chaos I pretend is poetry. This chaos I learnt to live in. Pages signed off always with love.

I am a lot of things. I learnt to be beautiful, with arches backs and pouted lips, flutter my eyes big and wide. Fishnets and sweetheart necklines, scarlet lips and thin waists. With beauty comes the illusion, with beauty comes the realization that I never want to be ugly again, even if my laugh lines had already etched themselves into the corners of my mouth. I pretend to be beautiful because I know it is a lie, that underneath is a frizzy haired, beaver-teethed girl with chubby cheeks and stubby hands. It is intoxicating to hold the power that comes with beauty, with the reins you hold to watch over illusions. It is intoxicating to be noticed, to be desired, to know you hold that damn attention. I was smart once and I was happy, I was so much and I am so much and I think I will always be so much. Ever ephemeral, ever flitting to where my heart sings its songs. Ever changing into endless versions, ever searching for one that feels just right.

Is it the confidently beautiful woman who knows to hold every conversation and coolly ticks off every task wearing 3-inch heels? Is it the girl crying at 2 am because to be so lonely is such a terrible way to be. Is it both, is it neither? Is it all I want to be and is it selfish to want it all?

Does it matter when I do still want it, if it’s wrong and immoral and greedy. To be creating till I die, to consume and swallow all knowledge that I can find, to discover and admire, to be every damn thing?

The artist and the muse, the poet and the poem- I will paint my own canvas and write the words echoing in this unquiet mind and I will be all the things bright I want to be.

Most days- I can barely move my limbs and my mind, to rinse and repeat the endless days of the same routine. Drawers full of medicine I pop, a little skin care and four combs to untangle the mess. The ugliness smarts beneath my veins and my heart has itself closed up. My heart that I once wore on my sleeve, my heart that held both love and hate of amounts infinite and still pumped blood throughout, warm and a little fast. The first time I ever read Frankenstein, I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and the rages of like which you wouldn’t believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other. Love I gave away and respect I demand.

I feed hate and rage and ugliness, my body runs on it, with the spite of my rebellion. I expect it to look beautiful, ruins and bloody cogs running on all things ugly. When I crashed, when the hate fed itself into it, a black hole sucking all in- I had the audacity to be surprised. I haven’t done anything for a week now, I sit down writing this because I do want it all and to have it all, my rebellion must change.

My rebellion of pushing till I break, of destruction and sabotage- it can’t create. It can’t live. When did I start to realize rebellion looks quiet? Learning to stand up a little, learning to love my solitude- learning to smile fully again. Rebellion looks a lot like making coffee on the days my world ended, like the breeze on the open grass over looking a lake so blue, like the scent of old books outside a tree casting dappled patterns on breaking cement. Rebellion looks a lot like the dawns after dark nights, where there was still sunshine and there was still me.

I want it all.

I want it all and maybe this the millionth time I’m turning over another messy page but the ink is flowing and the paper is blank.

Still, the story began when I tell it.