July 23, 2013

• Stay awake, continued

  I don’t know how to say goodbye to this place. I just don’t.

  My friend Kyle and I both like continuity. We just like connections between things. The other day I spent the entire day in my head, and I traveled through memories I’ve never experienced as memories before. It was a time traveling day. I felt startled at who I was, at who I had been.  

  Writing, for me, is the one thing that elongates people. You can never hold so much of a person in your hand as you do when you are holding a book. Books take a long time to read, longer than it takes to watch a movie, and when you close the last page, you are experiencing time more than at any other point. We’re not that smart; you forget mostly everything. We live in a fast culture, always fast fast fast – TV ads, fast food, text them now, as though we are screaming at the world ‘what’s your point?!’ every second. Where has the time gone? 

  (That phrase – ‘where has the time gone?’ – normally signifies someone realizes how much time has gone by. Oddly, I use it to mean we don’t see time at all any more.)

  My weird philosophical musings out of the way, I can just talk. This is my home. I didn’t want one; I was skeptical of anything 9th graders suddenly unanimously wanted, even if I was one of them. But I got a Xanga (not this one: experienceparallax, then sayitloud1) and I have retroactively found that the summer after my first broken relationship, I started writing in the one I had – this one – all the time. That fall, when I wrote Strangers, is I guess when I woke up. Welcome to the world.

  Funny, how the place I come to write because I’m incapable of saying goodbye to anything is now the thing I have to say goodbye to.

  This is my home. I don’t know how else to say it. When I get on here, I’m accountable to Philip all the way back to sophomore year of high school. I can’t say anything I want: he is listening. As much as I feel a permanent stranger to people I meet these days, I don’t feel that way on here. Somehow on here it’s still just me alone on a school night in high school, thinking about my death. At first everyone would go to sleep and that feeling would come, of being alone, of wanting to know God, of knowing I’ll die. Then the first thought, I’d start typing. 

  There is no theme to this blog. I come on here and write sometimes five or six times a day, and I’ll write about anything I think of. For me to post something is to spend several minutes biting my lip, then covering my eyes as I hit the ‘private’ button so that it becomes ‘public’.

  And can anyone believe how creative people are on here? There is no other website on the internet with people like there are on here. I don’t go through the homepage, I go through blogrings. There is nowhere else that has these kinds of poets, storytellers, and humorists, that has such honest expressions of feelings and life. Where else can you find that? Not facebook. The reblog feature on Tumblr drains a lot of individuality out of people on there; living everyone else’s thoughts, not their own. Certainly not cess pools like reddit.  Xanga fell into this weird slot in blogging history where a lot of people moved on from it, and it left a bunch of people behind who felt like they could just be themselves.  To be honest, I try to get life out of fiction, out of conversation, out of news stories – but I don’t know of anything that’s going to replace Xanga for me in reminding me of the depth of the lives that people are living out there. Sometimes you just read someone’s blog for awhile, and it’s fascinating that they’re a human that has a complicated life that has nothing to do with you. I’ve read other blog sites. It’s just not the same.  

  (I mean honestly – where the crap am I going to find another dominic_ville?)

  So I guess this is goodbye.This is the part where I tell you that every single one of you means the world to me.  People who have read and commented over the years, thank you.  I’m at my most introspective on here, so I’m sorry if I seem unappreciative of your responses.  I’ve stored your appreciation in my heart, and I hope you take what I have to give to you now, which is all the gratitude in the world.  I’m still just a kid in my estimation of myself, and every kind thing said on here has been such a blessing.

  Where are we all going to go? What is going to happen? So many people are going to lose their homes and are going to have to go somewhere else and pretend it’s their home when it’s not, this is their home. I don’t like pretending. I like it here.

  However you live, whoever you are, live honestly. Not cheap honesty, the kind that takes nothing seriously. Honesty that fixates on truth, and never looks away. Only by living honestly will you find out what you are, or if you are. What do other people really think? What do I really think? What kind of world should become? What of what I think is true? We will never know unless we just rip it out of ourselves, hoping it makes sense, but ultimately giving it up to the cruel, unsympathetic judgment of reality.  Test everything, hold on to the good. We must not disappear for the simple reason that we forgot to be.  Give yourself up to everything, and see what happens.

  Everything just gets stranger; I suppose the moment before I die will be the strangest one of all.

  I will still be on here for the rest of the week that Xanga will be up, but, even if our connection continues through another medium, I say goodbye to you from this one.  I hope that things will be as good in the future, but here I find we must face that simple, eternally recurrent truth once more: 

  You only grow up once.

  • 10:30 pm
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