somedays
I am getting older, but I'm still trying. I am swimming through dark waters, something mysterious, this world after college where I am struggling for money or food or direction in my life. Where will I end up? Who will I be? And the overlying question: Why don't I already know.
I was a reader, and that was all I knew. Maybe I couldn't talk to people normally, couldn't carry a conversation or be funny or witty or headstrong. But i could read, I could open up a book and be inside it, breathe it, in a way that many other people could not understand. I could see the words and become them, wrapped in them, and be taken away into a world that I was not, could never, be in. Maybe I was awkward, plain, whatever. But I was a reader. If nothing else, I had that.
I stepped out onto the stage and stared out at all the faces. I could hear my breath in my ears, so loud against the hum of the audience and the light in my eyes. My face burned; i had never felt so hot. This is your time to ruin everything, I thought. This is where it ends. I stepped forward, moving to the music, feel wrong, feeling achiness in my limbs, feeling that everything was wrong, ugly, over. I should never have come, never have danced.