You Are Beautiful

There’s this nail in my room. It sits on the top right corner of my closet doors. And it fucking mocks me. There’s a little piece of rope that hangs off of it. Adjacent to my closet doors is the door leading out of my room. Which has a rack of scarves. The nail and the scarves, less than half a foot away from each other mock me. And all I do is sit here on my bed, listening to the screaming and the yelling, watching the nail and the scarves. Trying desperately not to reach for the razor hidden in my desk, and trying even harder not to cry. Threats of his own suicide spill out of my fathers mouth. Threats of not paying for college, keeping me in this house for the rest of my life. Useless, piece of shit, better off dead. And I’m stuck here watching the nail and the scarves. I can’t leave my room. They’d hear me. I can’t do my homework, my books are in the kitchen where everyone is screaming. I can feel the tempered breathing, in and out and in out threw his nose, all the way upstairs. My stomach growls but the dark voice in the back of my head says: fast. You’re too fat. So fast. Don’t eat. My eyes glaze over as the words repeat themselves over and over and over again. Worthless. I don’t deserve anything. I don’t deserve to smile, to laugh, to feel anything. I don’t deserve an education or any chance at getting out. If he feels like he would rather be dead, diagnosed with cancer or confronted with a gun, so should we. We’re all pawns. Every day Sarah becomes more and more of a she. There is no I. I do not exist because I do not deserve to exist. I feel nothing and acknowledge my body as some outside force. I bury myself in words, bury myself in books, bury myself in music. As long as I don’t bury myself in the ground. Because that would be too easy now, wouldn’t it?

I have so many thoughts racing through my mind. Maybe I really am bipolar. I feel like I have more manic episodes than humanly possible. I have so many thoughts about college, about boys, about my homework, about school, about prom, about my friends. Every time I open my facebook page I have another add or friend request from someone from Wagner. I don’t feel like I’m done with this part of my life yet. I feel like I’m not ready to move on. I’m not ready to leave RCA and take that step into adulthood.

But looking at Elissa today sitting in the chair, with her head-set and all, it made me think. Life goes on. We grow up, we graduate high school, we go off to college, we graduate college, and life goes on. We continue. But we don’t have to leave behind the people and places that were so important to us a few years earlier. I don’t have to go to college and forget about all my friends.

I don’t have to leave my best friends behind. I want them to be the unofficial aunts and uncles to my children. I want Aunt Kayla and Aunt Carly and Aunt Colleen and that distant Aunt Becky to continue being a part of my life. I know statistically it’s unlikely that we’ll continue to be friends throughout college and into our adult life. But it’s possible.

There aren’t any rules or guidelines that state that everything from your past has to disappear when you move towards your future. We don’t have to erase everything that happened. We just keep going. Because it goes on. The end of a show does not mean the end of an era. The end of a school year does not mean everything is over. Graduation will not mark an end, but a new beginning.

I feel as if I’m trying to convince myself more than anything. My best friends will not become friends and then distant friends and then acquaintances. And finally strangers. They will stay in my life as long as I, as well as they, put in the effort to keep in touch. There is no reason why that can’t be possible. When I see Becky it doesn’t matter that we haven’t talked in months, or that I have no idea what’s going on in her life. She is still one of my best friends. Though every conversation ends with “don’t be a stranger, come back into my life” and it rarely changes, we are still a part of each other’s life.

Maybe this is just emotional rambling from a show that lies incomplete in my heart. Maybe it’s my fear of growing up. Maybe it’s just maybe.

It’s the uncertainty that the future holds. The possibility my friends will no longer be my friends. My guardian angels will be torn from me. But it’s the indefinite that serves a purpose. Everything feels unpredictable and incomplete. But I guess that means there’s more for me to do with my life. And more outcomes than I could ever imagine.