Category: Junior Literary

I think love is ridiculously over-rated, but I can’t seem to find my way out of the pit I’ve let myself fall into. It sounds dumb (and it is, mind you) but what can a person do?

I think of myself as someone with reliable decision-making skills, and given the problems this predicament is causing, I would think I could make the appropriate decision to let this person go.

It should be easy.  Factors out of my control enter the equation and butt their way into my life. There should be little to consider about the situation, and that is what I have been telling myself for almost a year- and a year is a long time to pathetically pine after someone who doesn’t care about your existence. Take my word for it, and just trust me.

In fact, I had called myself getting over this person, but the moment I lay my eyes on them, I knew I was screwed in a sticky place (possibly forever).

What do you do when you see them smile at someone else the same way they used to smile at you?

Or what about how their hands find the other one’s waist on a slow song?

Heaven forbid you watch them disappear from the after-party to be alone together.

What do you do then? (Don’t ask me)

(I don’t have it all figured out)

Get angry is my usual response to things that would make a functioning human begin cry, or whatever.

Smoking  a pack of cigarettes is easier than crying, lung cancer and all.  Anything is better than crying in front of them.

What about when the cigarettes are gone?  I don’t know- find another pack.  Jump off the back porch, it’ll work for a few minutes. Or, until  you realize the porch is only about three feet off the ground and the only thing that hurts is your wrist from trying to catch yourself on the fall down.

Perhaps, try non self-detrimental exercises to cure your heart of its  harrowing illness. Eat two salads a day. Drown yourself in hydration. Run three miles in the morning and three more at night. Go out on ‘adventures’. Meet and use new people. Try to feel anything but the them-sized lump stuck on your heart.

If, by some terrible happening those things don’t work, resort back to cigarettes.

(This post, in no way, endorses smoking cigarettes- this is all metaphorical)

people are going crazy, god’s back and he won’t stop humming.
he’s trying to show mary he still remembers her favorite songs.
humming, humming, humming all day and every night,
knocking on doors and asking for mary. no, i say.
this is the fourth time you’ve been here, you’re going in circles.

everyone is stumbling, it’s a scary time to be alive.
the rocks are screaming tchaikovsky and puking,
the trees are bumping their roots to the tune of war
and blocking out the sun. the oceans have been crying all their life,
they stopped today. no one can tell whether or not it’s a good thing.

the fish stopped sleeping without the sound of sobbing,
they’ve got red-stained eyebags and everyone’s telling them wow,
you look like crap. those fish are growing teeth and spitting ‘em right at them,
saying wow, thanks for telling me that. how nice of you.
i hear they’re looking at fisherman straight in the eye these days.

the snakes are eating themselves. everyone’s asking them why,
but the snakes know it’s impolite to talk with your mouth full.
frogs are growing into tadpoles and the tadpoles are too scared to grow up,
octopi are climbing mountains. it’s a scary site for hikers,
but it was on their bucketlist, so why not? the world is ending, after all.

every cow turns into a bull. it’s that kind of world now.
the birds stopped chirping. they only scream now,
watching their babies cook in their own eggs. everyone is comforting them,
wow. that must suck. the birds laugh, only if you have bad seasoning.
snails are killing each other for shells. everyone is just looking for a home.

there’s a leech who claims to have fed on every god,
he’s big as can be and old as the heavens, laughing
like the screaming of a thousand gods. he glows at the edges.
we ask, what do we do, all mighty leech? run, he says.
run before it kills you. the milky way is curdling.

everyone’s scrambling for the spaceships, let’s leave
and never come back. elton john, you’re in front, steer the ship
and we’ll pray to the devil, gather all the rocks you can
to cover up a bit of the humming. it’s no use. it’s in the brain.
god shakes us like a bottle rocket, is mary here? no mary here.

he comes into my room again that night.
is mary here?
yeah, i say.
how’d you know.

so we all wrote about the songs we can’t live without back in like august, right? and i did that list about my top ten all-time Favorite Songs, right?

well, i changed my mind.

my music taste changes a lot, what can you do?

but these songs make me feel the same as i did the moment i first heard them. they also make me cry sometimes, so maybe there’s some strange correlation between my favorite songs and whether or not i’ve cried while listening to them. anyway, here’s a Revised conclusive list of my top five, end-all-be-all favorite songs in the known and unknown universe (plus some neat lil explanations if that’s something you’re into).

secret for the mad / dodie (music video link) – this song is simple, but it is truly one of the most beautiful things i’ve ever heard in my life. this song is one that i turn to when my days are more down than up, and i just need to remember that the up is coming soon. favorite lyrics: 

sprawl II (mountains beyond mountains) / arcade fire – see this is where the new stuff comes in because when i first made my favorite songs list, i’d never heard this song before. everything about this song is stunning (and the music video is mesmerizing), but i think the best part is how much of myself i can hear and see and feel in this song. favorite lyrics: 

hey jude / the beatles – i’ve grown up listening to the beatles, so it only seems fair that i have a beatles song somewhere on this list, and while there are plenty of other beatles songs that i love dearly, this one always sticks around. i still have a video of this song on my laptop from when i saw paul mccartney in concert in 2013, and i have a lot of other nice memories tied to this song, so maybe that’s my soft spot. favorite lyrics: 

starlight / muse (live version that makes me Cry) – i’ve adored this song for as long as i’ve listened to muse, but my love for it didn’t quite cement until i was listening to a live concert performance and casually started crying in the middle of a target. i spent a really long time thinking i’d never hear this song live, and trust me, when i finally did, i sobbed the entire time. favorite lyrics:

i wanna get better / bleachers  (music video but watch the other one first)– this song, without a doubt or hesitation, is my favorite song of all time. from the moment a first heard the words “i wanna get better” in july 2015, i knew this song (and this band) would change my life in ways i could never have even fathomed before, and it continues to change my life every day since. all i want is to hear this song live, and who knows? that day could be sooner than i think. favorite lyrics:

with the way i listen to music, favorite songs are always subject to change. everything shifts around with every new song i discover, and even with every old song i rediscover. but these five, these are sticking around for a long time.

These small pieces of prose are inspired by pictures I use for my daily wallpapers and collages I have made in the past.

(Angelic provision of Jesus Christ, O Lord, be with thee!)

My blood’s got it’s own pair of eyes now, Christ. The only blood I’ve got left.

To Death, my personal angel:

To the one who got rid of the babies and the broken bottles. I’m listening to trash indie on a speaker in the shower, shaving horizontal with the bloodstreams and the veins and watching green vines overflow on my hips like milk in the pitcher. And yeah, I’m angry.

 

 

 

I’m pissed, this sloppy red mess is all I’ve got left and the bottle hit me on the jaw and threw me in the kitchen at three am, in a puddle of my own spit. They tell me I’m a daughter of a man with stains on his hands and I believe them. They tell me my rigor mortise is setting in a few decades early and I sit back to watch the dog tags slip between my broken left tooth.

In Luke 22:43, we find Jesus in the garden again, but this time,strangling the roe bushes. The angels it on Calvary’s tree, letting apples fall from the stem to rot.

Lazarus was escorted to the snack machine when the commercials rolled, he passed while eating a corn chip. I hear the understudy is taking the job quite nicely.

Some songwriter is going to put it like this:

When there’s nothing in your face screaming

hell is the enemy,

who’s to judge when you leave this town?

The gate is open and burning, but so too

are you, and again,

the circumstantial crucified by prophecies and the

provisional holy one.

 

 

 

 

Minecraft is an okay game that I played years ago.  I still find nothing wrong with the game.  It’s a simple and fun.  It’s fun to build in and track your progress as you go from a little hut made only to escape the night to a mansion.  I want to make it entirely clear that I have no problem with the game.

I don’t even have a problem with the community, to be honest.  It’s mostly just kids that have fun playing the game.  Yeah, they can be cringy, but every kid does some cringy things that they’ll do their best to forget as they get older.  They might as well spend their time playing a game like Minecraft which is harmless enough.

Where my problem lies is with the YouTubers that blatantly lie to profit off of the ignorance of these children who want to watch videos about their favorite video game.  This was brought to my attention when I typed “how to make a spongebob po” into Google, hoping to find out how to make a Spongebob popsicle.  As I typed, I found that something very different was suggested to me, “how to make spongebob portal in minecraft.”  Needless to say, I was intrigued and had to find out what terrible garbage this was.

As it turns out, it was just what I thought, absolute garbage made to fool children into clicking videos full of lies.  I found videos that claimed to inform people how to create a portal in Minecraft that would take them to an alleged Spongebob dimension.

Of course, this makes absolutely no sense.  Spongebob is owned by Nickelodeon which is owned by Viacom.  Minecraft is owned by Mojang which is owned by Microsoft.  Unless there was some sort of licensing deal in place, there would be no way for Spongebob or anything related to Spongebob to exist within Minecraft.  A child doesn’t think about such things however and is simply excited because they believe that their favorite cartoon is now in their favorite video game.

These lies do not stop at Spongebob however.  There have also been videos made describing how to make a portal in the game that will transport the character to a Mario dimension.  This claim holds slightly more water because a version of Minecraft was released on Nintendo’s Wii U which included skins based on the Mario world.  There still is no “Mario Dimension” within the game and no portal that can be built to access one.

Additionally there are videos claiming to show how to bring characters like Pennywise the Clown, the Hulk, Robin from Teen Titans Go!, and Freddy Fazbear.  I personally do not play Minecraft, but the way that these YouTubers are deceiving children for their personal, financial gain really bothers me.  While I still wouldn’t watch them, I feel like it would be much more respectable if these creators instead made entertainment based on these properties that children like as opposed to deceiving them.

now, we have the phases of high school’s past.

9th grade was relatively harmless. i’d say it was a mix of the tail-end of my emo phase that gradually morphed into that tumblr-esqe, black grid patten skirt and choker number that was 2015 in a nutshell; the only difference was now twenty one pilots and halsey and bleachers got thrown into the shuffle. sorta weird and confusing, but still harmless (i also met dan and phil the summer after freshman year because unlike most people who started watching them when they were 13, i didn’t stop watching them and start hating on them and their fanbase). this year was pretty boring, but i wasn’t nearly as melancholic and miserable as i was in 8th grade, so i guess it’s an improvement.

but i think 10th grade is when i truly came into my element. the summer before, i went from a good four years of wearing the stereotypical nerd glasses and found my way to these beautiful horn-rimmed ray bans yall may recognize from my actual face. oh, and those bands i hated in middle school? LOVE them. this was the year i truly indulged in thrift store sweaters and photography and writing and every other association that typically comes with coffeeshop hipsters. granted, this stuff existed in my life in some form or facet before they truly became my hipster tendencies (for the record, i was all about space before that galaxy trend in 2013), but now they’d all accumulated into this mass of pretension. i’d also made a spotify account, which meant my taste in music was finally expanding beyond the emo remnants of middle school. mentally, it was a bit uppy-downy, but i was doin’ pretty okay.

and now we’re reached 11th grade. the style aesthetic of sweaters and other comfortable, typically warm clothing has stuck around, but now i have jeans with holes in them and i’ve made my way back around to black jeans which is fun i guess. i need to get new glasses, but i’m most likely gonna stick with similar frames. i still love bands like fall out boy and panic! at the disco and muse and all the other bands i discovered throughout middle school, but i’ve also come to embrace the softer, more obscure side of alternative (aka, i started listening to indie folk). i’ve fallen in love with bands like ok go and arcade fire and bright eyes, as well as artists like st. vincent and tom rosenthal. it’s definitely a shift from the music library on my old iphone 4.

phases are weird. the person i was just four years ago and the person i am today are two very different people, but some of our edges still line up. i still love doctor who and sherlock, i still love dan and phil, i still hold on to fall out boy and panic! at the disco, i still hold on to those formative obsessions of my youth. they made me who i am, and though i may cringe at them sometimes, i’m still grateful for the person they’ve helped me become. the things we love help up grow, even if we only love them for a little while.

but at least i never had a horse phase.

Truth is, I just don’t believe that  i’m cut for your average day love story and relationship. I don’t think i’m cut for any kind of romantic relationship really. I am able find comfort in platonic relations but that’s it.

These are are self realizations and I am perfectly fine with that because I know myself. I know that I won’t allow myself to “belong” or compromise because of how free I am. 

I don’t see myself being able to be in a stable relationship because I can’t seem to care, or make myself care, for someone on that level. I do love people though, my family, my friends, myself! I have a lot of love to give but the selfishness of those who are in a relationship is not good energy in my opinion.

I do not like possessiveness and I surely do not want to be a possession. As the saying goes I am “cut from a different cloth.” I believe that I am free in every aspect, that I don’t belong because I am not rooted in anything, but to the earth itself. I know in my heart that I would like to feel the way others feel about their significant others but I also know that I am not made greed.

I feel as if I belong to the world, that I am one with the universe and many seem to not be able to understand that.

I also have had a bad relationship, which lasted for a year and a half,then ended terribly. Here I am, a better person, and now that I look back on it, it was extremely unhealthy. I knew then that it would end, but I tried to hold on. He gave me no reason to, choosing glitter over saffron. Although being with him helped me gained knowledge as to how and why I don’t work well in exclusive relationships.

I would much rather sit on my own and learn about people from wherever standpoint I find myself, as long as it’s not in the middle of some chaotic high school and 20 something era relationship.

I would like to be my own person, doing my own thing, living my own life, and going wherever I see fit. I am my own person through and through. I am also my art and my heartbreaks and my bad experiences and everything in between.

how to be as passive as orange:
which came first? The fruit or the orange?
“oh, I’m sorry. you can go first.”
bring books to the lunchroom
and hide in obscure color wheels
let bully neighbor red claim to be the opposite of blue
piss your pants in stores because you’re too afraid
to ask your dad to go to the bathroom.
cry, but softly. learn that a warm washcloth
will make your eyes less puffy.
make your pillows run away because they want
to be screamed into, someone who knows
how to speak above a whisper.
write all your fonts in size 11 calibri, all lowercase,
because old red’s gotta monopoly on that times new roman.

blue is looking for you
she’s spewing the advice her grandma told her
about how opposites attact.
she smells like her grandma’s old cats,
and she has a new quilt, too
along with a bit of a belly that wasn’t there before.
do you want her? red wants her more,
he’s the one outside her door,
leaning against mustang car doors,
schmoozing her mother with two bouquets of flowers
and giving her father the best goddamn handshake
he’s ever had in his life.
have you ever wanted anything
more than anyone, everyone else?
have you ever wanted anything?
can you even feel her?
she’s burning summer blues
and you’re the rotten fruit on the ground.
she could be the death of you–
aren’t you excited?

Ever since some young age I’ve been waiting for the day I was older. Always pining for the experiences, the new foreign feelings. The emotions, the endorphins, the testosterone flooding my body with the new-found confidence that seemed to ooze from all teenagers. There was a power that came from that title.  Me! A teenage girl in the twenty-first century. It was magical, almost heart-stopping as I crawled my way up the age tree. TV-fueled these feelings, PARTIES! ROMANCE! FREEDOM! Always blasting itself through the screen beckoning me to join them. Sometimes I felt like I could reach out and slip into their world and become part of their society. But every time my hand touched the screen all I hit was tough plastic and glass. And I was once again stuck starring and waiting and becoming less patient and frustrated at the slow progress. You could call me naive, but I considered myself to be a dreamer. Gently dancing through until I could become who I was truly meant to be. Now, this wasn’t all I built up when I was young, I had more. I had ways to boost the progress to speed along things to keep me occupied for the time being. What else were there other than, BOYS, BOYS, BOYS! Boy crazy was what people would call it. You couldn’t be without a partner, a mate, a boy, a man. And I tried. I tried so hard at times I’m surprised the desperation didn’t leak out my pores. I was very shy, almost frightfully so. I fled from spotlight like a rat-faced with a flashlight. Every unfamiliar gaze sent me running like my feet were on fire. Then with some new-found bravado I spoke, though rarely to boys that caught my eye. Looking back on it, it was cringe-worthy to say the least. With my atrocious talking skills always interrupted every few seconds with the feeling to stu-stu-stu-stutter and the need to bite my tongue off from the way too soft words. Though through some magic of sorts, I actually did gain a boy or two or three. Now what did that do to my painfully desolated psyche when things went extremely wrong? Who’s at fault, who’s the culprit, who didn’t try hard enough. I was in grade school; did it really matter? But then again it did matter. Every failed attempt I sulked and tried again, slowly moving up a grade until it was finally time. When my birthday loomed nye and little old twelve-year-old me starred at the clock counting the seconds, holding her breathe. Then finally the stroke of midnight! I was finally a teen a very people starved, sad, lonely teen. Still pinning still feeling like I was less because a few bad attempts and a couple of destroyed friendships. Did that stop me, no it didn’t, I stilled pushed looking for that one person to have and to hold. Now you see, I wish they would have just rejected me because maybe if I was hurt the first times I wouldn’t have kept going. Maybe I would have actually waited. Maybe now I would have a sense of what a relationship is supposed to be. But it did happen like that and I wish I wasn’t so hung up on the maybes and just let it go the second the memories turned sour.

Being mixed feels weird. Really weird. I don’t know how else to describe it. I don’t really fit completely with one or the other. I’m too white to be Latino but not white enough to escape the racist Mexican jokes. I feel like most times I’m only one or the other when it is convenient for other people. I’m Latino when I’m the butt of the joke or on legal papers but then I’m white the second I call out people out on their racist nonsense. I’m always the one who has to apologize to people for feeling uncomfortable about their racist jokes so I don’t get labeled as ‘too sensitive’ or ‘over dramatic’. So I pretended to not acknowledge the tense silence that followed after my friend’s parents asked me if my dad was born in America and I said I didn’t know. So I pretended to zone out whenever my teacher thought it was a good idea to ask opinions on immigration. So I pretended not to think about the fact that some of my friends supported Trump’s campaign. Another thing that really sucks about being half Latino is the fact that I’m not fluent in Spanish even though both of my parents are fluent and get a ton of heat for it. I usually let it slide when a Latino person gets onto me for it but if its a non-Latino person I can’t stand it. People are always saying stuff like “I’m 50 percent Irish, 10 percent polish, 20 percent German, and 20 percent Italian” and then when they find out I’m half Mexican and can’t speak Spanish then I’m “not a real Mexican”. Like, you don’t see me saying they’re not real German or whatever they’re descended from because they can’t speak the language. When you can speak Irish, Polish, German, and Italian then you can come back to me and complain about not knowing Spanish. Go learn your Spanish curse words from google translate.