prattlepeach

dominoes and Dostoevsky

My god, a moment of bliss. Why, isn’t that enough for a whole lifetime?
Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

I feel like I spent the past year setting up dominoes for hours and hours (read: months and months) and now it’s finally time to knock the first domino over and watch everything that I so carefully planned fall into place.

Some things aren’t an explosive firework result, but more like a steady match. Maybe most things. A slow and steady burn yields better results than a wild blaze.

It’s easy to come up with dreams and live them out in your head. But how revolutionary it is to bring them to fruition and see them manifest.

Now, after waiting and plowing and sowing and watering, I feel like I’m seeing the sprouts grow. The foundation was laid, the work is done.

I think I’m going to let myself be excited. Let myself get my hopes up because I worked for it, goddamnit. I worked so hard for so many months and then I got to rest for a bit and now we’re back with new challenges but I’m excited to face them because I know I can. (read: I KNOW I CAN.)

I just finished my to-do list and it’s time to make a new one.

warming my hands on bridges I’ve burnt, and why that’s okay according to Aristotle

I lost a couple friends this past year and I didn’t give a shit.

And I thought,
Am I sad enough about this?

I thought,
Did I really care about those friendships or did I waste my time on people who I shouldn’t have for too long?

I thought,
Am I being heartless?

I thought,
Will people think I’m a bad friend for being honest about not caring that much?

Then I remembered one of my favorite philosophy classes from college about relationships, and how different philosophers have defined them.

Aristotle said there are three types of friendships: one based on utility, one based on pleasure, and one on mutual appreciation of each other’s values.

A friendship based on utility is basically a relationship that lasts as long as you’re both getting something out of it. Like a transaction. Sort of like a coworker who you’re only work friends with for as long as you’re at that job. Once you leave, you don’t see them again and they don’t see you again but you mutually benefitted from being positive to each other while you were at work. Aristotle said this is popular with older people.

A friendship based on pleasure is more emotional and supposed to usually be the shortest relationship. You stay friends for as long as you both enjoy the same thing, and you break up as soon as one person doesn’t.

Aristotle said the pleasure friendship is more common between younger people because as we grow we tend to change our interests and values, so we grow out of pleasure friendships quicker than the other types.

The third type of friendship is based on virtues, and it has the strongest connections and lasts the longest. The best friendships should be based on appreciation of character — not on a transactional (utility or pleasure) value — and shape our lives for the better.

I think this really explains why I wasn’t sad about the friends that I lost this year.

One was a girl who I went out drinking with and talked about guys we were dating. We would meet up and both hop on dating apps and squeal about who we had matched with, who we’d met, and who we were dating for a while, but once I stopped caring about those things we ended up really not having anything else in common. We didn’t even like the same music or shows. Our friendship was a pleasure transaction, and as soon as I stopped using dating apps we stopped being friends.

I ended up not missing her at all as soon as we stopped being friends because she didn’t really add anything else to my life. Our values weren’t the same at all: we couldn’t relate about our jobs, our education level was different, and we had different political views. The death of our friendship was short-lived and unmourned. I actually felt better knowing I didn’t have to talk to her again, because I didn’t want to talk about the same things we used to.

Aristotle said that when you have a friendship based on appreciating each other’s values, the other two types of friendship naturally combine into it, too. Thing of your diehard BFFs that you’ll drive to the airport, invite over to watch 90 Day Fiancé, and help out during a hard time. They’re beneficial and pleasurable, and you also respect and care for them.

I’m extremely thankful for all of my top tier friends and I’m cool with warming my hands on the bridges I’ve burned with my limited time only buddies.

I think a butterfly just flew out of my mouth

I can’t stop thinking about the butterfly thing, where he really said I think a butterfly just flew out of my mouth. And it doesn’t make me feel how it did at all any more, but it is so easy to remember how it used to make me feel. Like I’m watching myself act it out in a little movie.

I remember how much I reread that text over and over and over and over and I could have survived off of just knowing that someone felt that way about anyone. I only need three hours of sleep and a daydream when I feel like that.

Where you keep starting to do something and just forget right in the middle of it because he said he got butterflies from thinking about you so you drop everything and lay on the floor to ground yourself before you go flying into the Milky Way. And every time you pass by a mirror you go !!!! She Knows Something I’m Afraid To Think and you give yourself that little smile and can’t even let your own eyes meet or you’ll lose your grip on gravity yet again.

How strange it is that we can even get to that point. Where all you feel is !!!! and the butterflies in your tummy fly up to your heart and out of your throat and out of your mouth right in the middle of the airport and everyone’s wondering how did a monarch butterfly land right here in Terminal 3? But you hardly even notice because of all the butterflies still trying to make your feet lift right off of the ground so you swallow a thousand times until you feel about 60% certain that everybody can’t tell you’re in Big L.

He sent it from the airport. We weren’t texting before and I didn’t know how to reply. I probably read it a hundred times before I even thought about how to answer and the funny thing is I can’t remember how I answered at all. Some memories are like that. I remember exactly how I felt and how I pictured him sending the message and how it made me feel for the longest time, but I don’t know what I said back. Probably something mediocre because how can you beat a lyricist at the word game and in general I never know what to say just that I feel too much of it.

The picture is from Jude Guench, from a short story called The Butterfly Eater. I feel it is much more appropriate to how I feel now and in a way I feel like our stories parallel each other’s.

your ego is not your amigo

When you talk to me, I often feel like I am a veteran birdwatcher observing a rare species. Your chest puffs out so far I fear your lungs may never fill entirely with a complete breath. You speak so much that it’s possible the air you inhaled when you first uttered a single word never completely exhausted so you’ve continued to run on the same fumes since Day One.

Do I want to be with you or do I want to be like you?

hasta la vista baby! enjoy your dream life

I wish someone would tell me what to do sometimes. Like hey, we reviewed your file and decided that based on 100% reliable facts and science that you definitely should stay and be safe. The world is your oyster and will deliver you all of the opportunities you want and you will never want for anything more. Here’s a coupon to Bath and Body, go get a nice relaxing candle because you deserve it!

OR!

Hey, we have predicted that you’re going to zoom up up up in life but ONLY if you leave now it’s a one night only blowout sale for your amazing future the prices are unbeatable everything must go and everything means YOU! Hasta la vista baby enjoy your dream life! You are a fucking monolith of immutable force, eat up the world and consume the stars.

It’s supposed to be the time to grow and I don’t want to mess up and shrink.

rumpelstiltskin

A wedding ring is just a thing that weighs you down and occupies your finger. I know it sounds a little down, but love is all I’m really after.
The Young Veins

I think secretly we can spin gold. We have silver tongues coated in pink. We’ll never admit it but we always get exactly what we asked for.

We continue to stay precedented. It ended how I thought it would.

My birthday was spent in two halves. The part in the east where I main charactered the party until leaving the day after to the west to have a pike place, fish market dinner. Is it the day after if the clock rewinds in the west? You were the main character of this trip, although it was my birthday. Sushi is only good on the west coast.

We settled the score somewhere between Portland and Seattle with the end of an era coinciding politely with the boredom of being stuck on a train.

I want still to lay on a chest as wide as the Atlantic ocean and to match the tide of a man’s breathing to mine.

2016, the first entry of a new journal

Friday, October 7, 2016:

It’s always difficult to start a new journal. I guess I’ll begin this one by explaining what is happening in my life at the present moment.

I just turned 19, which is not particularly interesting or significant.

And, I am the happiest I have ever been.

I am still a Communications – PR major and I still love school. I want to learn everything I can. I’m very interested in Stoicism and the relationship between finances and psychology. I love reading, and the last book I read was left at the ice cream shop I used to work at. It’s called The Crimes of Love by the Marquis de Sade, translated from French.

I am also very much in like. I have said I love you to him, but between you and me (and me and me and me) I don’t know.

His name is ____ ___ and he is human incandescence.

All I ever wanted was to be in love, and here I am, nearly there. We are very good and happy enough together.

I feel almost adoration.

There isn’t a word that I can bring to mind to describe the incredible amount of trust I have invested into this man. I hope, with an arms’ length of distance between hope and faith, that I can end up belonging to him. In a way without the almosts and enoughs and very muches.

What I do know, is that if I could wrap myself up in a smell, it would be his.

I don’t think he knows or has ever known how I feel.

He said he loved me three times before I could bring myself to say it back, but I hope I can really really say it back soon. I am excited for a future where I say it and mean it.

For my birthday, he wrote me a song and gave me a purple orchid. More of the flowers are blooming and I think I am closer to being in love. It’s been three months since we’ve been a couple, is that enough? I see a lot of opportunity and I feel optimistic. I could.

What is for certain is that an old friend called my dad and offered him a job in Colorado. It’s kind of perfect/unique timing because of my grandma’s cancer, and she lives close to where the job would be. My family is moving to Colorado, and I am staying behind.

I’m scared. I hate feeling so helpless, even though I fought to stay. I want to be near my friends and my boyfriend, and I can work harder. I can finish school a semester early or something, and get another job to pay for the rent of me staying.

I made an excel spreadsheet to convince my dad that it would be more cost-effective to let me stay at my current school and pay up to $750 a month for my living expenses than to make me transfer to a Colorado school. The closest school is Boulder, and it’s nearly three times as expensive. I could stay and figure things out and it would still cost less.

I am scared to be by myself, but I have people. I’m also kind of excited. I wonder if living along (with roommates) will change me?

So I am apprehensive. Almost in love. Excited.

This is 19.

A response, at 23:

You should have dumped your boyfriend (that you didn’t even like) and moved to Colorado. You would have loved the snow and the mountains, and the house was amazing. Boulder would have been fun, and maybe now you’d be working for a cool PR company in Denver.

Living alone was lonely, and it really doesn’t affect your friends when you break up with your boyfriend. They kind of hated you for dropping off of the face of the earth and thinking some loser who was adequate at playing piano was ever worthy of your time. They came back though, and now you view maintaining separate friendships as a necessity in a relationship. You are you, before you are (almost?) anyone else’s. You will never belong to anyone else.

So yes, you did grow, but not in the way you thought you would.

He asked you to move in together, shortly after this, and you said no. Even though that’s supposed to be a critical moment, and even though that was supposedly everything you wanted. You. Said. No. Because. You. Didn’t. Like. Him. ~~He really did smell so good in the beginning, though.~~

Who would we have been if we had gone to Colorado? Better? Worse?

The Marquis de Sade book was a good find.

as long as he looks good singing

I don’t need the sun and the moon to tell me what to do, as long as I have you.
Jon Walker

Is it foreshadowing or is it the end of an era?

The sound of the music is split in two with my headphones. One ear is always focused on the background and the other ear is all of your replacements.

I miss the crows on your face, the roses on your vest, the smoke in your eyes. Crosses where lips should have met, and stealing fake kisses in front of very real crowds.

Can we go back to drinking smoothies and playing for tips, taking vocal lessons and only singing very quietly, late late late at night. It was always one of those nights. It’s never one of those nights anymore.

Remember doe eyes and pet salamanders and being too good at writing words. Someone made me fall in love with anagrams and pseudonyms. Someone else made me fall in love with accents.

That time he wrote, “I think a butterfly just flew out of my mouth at the thought of you,” and she just agreed.

clumsy knees

Mount Everest ain’t got shit on me.
Labrinth

I have two cuts right about both of my knees and I don’t know where they came from. I have two ugly scars on both of my kneecaps and I do know where they came from.

I fall, bandaids, fall again on the scabs, riptearbleed, bandaids again. It’s a lot but what are ya gonna do.

I need to rip off my acrylics so I can play the guitar but not before I write a children’s book and apply to grad school and go to work tomorrow. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I listen to Hozier sing and play guitar and I just want to sit down for an hour with my eyes closed and figure it all out.

But my AirPods don’t fit my small ear holes so I can’t get the full experience.