So, I'm still fucking depressed.

Suicide

There are three completely different conversations with three completely different people within the span of one week, and all mention the s-word in passing. The other participants laugh and shake their heads.
Someone is trying to send a message to you, but you're not fucking laughing.

Drinking Fails

Screw you, world, you decide, and plan to spend your nights in dissolute, wretched-glorious inebriation. After all, you've stayed squeaky clean for a goddamned quarter of a century—hell, one vice might add character.
That night, you could barely finish the bottle.

Surfing

You are soothed, alternatively, by pictures of squishy animals, and tales of blood and gore. It makes for a strange browsing history, but hey, bitch, they all think you're a fucking loon anyway.

Profanity

MOTHERFUCKING SHITHEAD JACKASS DOUCHEBAG CUMGUZZLER SLUTWHORE BITCHES.
Nope. Screaming all the curses in the sanctity of your apartment doesn't help. You've checked.

Glue

Your holidays were spent in isolation, and honestly, half of you preferred it that way. For the rest of the time, you focused your latest “work of art,” slowly stroking the acrylic into the canvas, cutting other people's trash into itty bitty triangles, contorting your body into easel-like positions.
If tears mixed in with the glue, no one should be able to tell.

Women of Fiction I Really Shouldn't Emulate

Elaine, Lady of Shalott

     You're still only half-sick of shadows.
     Half-sick is not nearly enough to venture out of your tower (a.k.a. Fortress of Solitude, despite your never really being a fan of Superman). It is not enough to put down your brush and your pen, to cease weaving wonders of worlds of your own making.
     You're terrified of lying in your metaphorical funeral bower, unknown and unloved, while the future object of your affections goes tirra-fucking-lirra.
     Ass.

Scheherezade

     

     A hundred and one nights, and several years later, her story still fascinates you – woman using her imagination and her guile to stay her execution and win their salvation.

     Then you realize the sultan was a freaking serial killer, and the vizier's daughter a classic victim of Stockholm's Syndrome.

     There goes another one of your fantasies.

Miss Haversham

     You can easily imagine yourself stranded at the altar, the erstwhile groom a schuckster hankering for your parents' money.

     But then again, launching a decades-long scheme of revenge and bitterness seems far too involved. Besides, all that lace would drive you mad.

     Oh.

Ophelia

     Sometimes you think you are turning slowly, inexorably insane. Memories bite at you, tear at you, crash into you like that motorcycle nearly a decade ago. From all outward appearances you have no mouth, but inside, you are screaming. Screaming. SCREAMING.

     There will be a sweet freedom in madness, you think, as you run on the inside of your skull.

Buttercup

     Life is pain. Anybody who tells you different is selling something.

     It should worry you that that line is becoming your mantra.

I want to die.

There.  I said it.

And since no one reads this -- no one who will give a shit, anyway, enough that they'll demand answers they want and think I have, or impose makeshift solutions so that I will continue with that pasted-on braces-less smile -- I think I'm safe.

Talentless Hack

1.Ballet

There's a home video of a brightly lit stage, filled with rows of little girls in sparkly, shiny tutus. The camera shifts its focus to an adorable dumpling, a roll of white encased in leotards. The recital goes well for a while. Suddenly, there's a loud crash, and a similar creampuff girl is seen stumbling at the edge of the frame.

The clumsy girl is you, and the one behind the camera, your dad.

Go figure.

2.Voice
All your cousins have been in choirs. Your friends do theatre, and glee club, and intermissions in school programs.

Like them, you love to sing. You have an entire repertoire that ranges from Broadway to Backstreet to Beastie Boys. You automatically sprinkle your conversation with lyrics. Alas, you are tone deaf, and people wince when you open your mouth.

In this, as in other things, you blame your mother.

3.Horseback riding
Some of your fondest childhood memories were going up north, and riding ponies (nags) while your parents followed in cars. Visions of wielding lances or befriending unicorns pranced in your head.

A few years later, as your father's face turned alarmingly red and he started gasping for breath, you found out why they needed cars.

And there went your equestrienne dreams.

4.Theater

Despite your (absolute)(deplorable) lack of singing talent, you have a streak of melodrama and flair for the fabulous. Sometimes, it comes in handy—you're a far better actor (LIAR) than anyone knows. But it's a sneaky skill that comes and goes, as you found out the one and only time you joined a drama club.

Under the hot lights, in front of your Mean Girls peers, you employ nothing but a deer-in-the-headlights gaze.

5.Painting
Of all the lessons, every summer, the ones that stuck with you the most involved pigment and paper.

Now, ink often stains your fingers, and the smell of acrylic has replaced bygone turpentine and coffee grounds. Every chance you get—which is now, once in every blue moon—you sketch and glue on makeshift canvasses.

Centering your soul on the brushstrokes.

She comes in colors

Purple rain

There was a cool shower outside, the kind that makes you crawl into your blankets and dream the afternoon away. In an effort to remain (semi-) productive, you power up your laptop and start reading your old stories.

Almost immediately you wince, and your fingers twitch, longing to delete the lurid manifestations of your younger self's fantasies.

The prose is so purple, you expect eggplants to start shooting out of the screen.

Yellow fever

Shivery hot, hot, hot.

Against your better judgment (lies–you have no better judgment), you watched “Ninja Assassin,” a film about a Japanese nin out for vengeance, played by a Korean popstar.

It was as you expected–stilted dialogues, wooden chemistry, and decent fight scenes. Still, you enjoyed it, if only for the Korean's pretty, pretty face and dynamite abs.

Damn, son.

Green Mile

As you drive home from school, you sing along with the radio. You giggle, snort, and yell out profanities. You snicker aloud at unknown Freudian slips, but when you tell the joke next day, you receive blank faces.

It's not easy being green.

White Horses

It's almost Valentine's Day, and you brace yourself for the Mushy. All around you, your she-friends giggle over their boyfriends, guys A-B-C, random encounters with the other kind, and the “sexy-eyes” technique, while man-pals talk of reservations, pretty girls on a Saturday night, sans the sexy-eyes technique.

You fail at love life.

Still, you console yourself.

Of them all, you're the only one who can still touch a unicorn.

Red Head

Election season is upon you.

Two years ago, you viewed the circus with a mixture of dread and exhilaration. With friends Left and Right (and those politically directionless), there were always clashes of colors and principles, with you splattered with the remnant pigments. On your part, you were steadfastly orange, slightly tinged with more vermillion.

Now, you look around and see blue. Blue alumni, blue parties, BlueSkies. And you are content.

But sometimes, secretly, your heart beats red.