If you can't understand this scripture, throw it away.

I insist on your freedom."

- Jack Kerouac (The Scripture of the Golden Eternity)

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Today the world rolled out of bed, decided it'd had enough of spamming N.K with nukes and mocking Ris Low for the week, and decided to make it Hey, Let's Make Cara's Life A Living Misery! Day.

I don't usually speak in absolutes but almost everything about today was cloudy; almost everything.

Waking up, mornings, words, pictures-that-never-were, voices, legs outside libraries, ominousity...everything. I know I sound like a little coked up whiny emo kid and maybe I am but maybe what I'm feeling is real because I don't feel like this very often. Believe it or not behind the moody fringe is actually a very optimistic person who actually loves life a fair bit.

Today she kind of got trampled on, though.

...And...how could I be so stupid.

Now they'll see and c'mon Cara, who're you kidding, nobody buys your little excerpts about gates and rusty bars and antiseptic any more. You've got to kick this new-old habit before it comes back and takes you the way it did before.

Lately I've been thinking about big things, too; Big things, Scary things, Future things.

Like how I set too-high standards for everything and how the world I want only exists in black and white, and in this world of 40, 075.02KM polaroid film it doesn't work that way.

I don't want to marry if this is what it's like. I don't want to settle for the box if they're what it's like. I don't want to live past thirty/forty/whichever age the mental decreptitude, the weariness in the soul takes you because I overhear him telling Daddy how he's gotten tired, so tired, and how he's thankful for what he's been given but sometimes he just looks to the sky and asks God, why won't you take me? I am exhausted...

I don't want any of it.

But there's years to go before then, and hope to have, and smiles to keep. I need to start drinking more coffee and stop with the mental medication.

I have people to be thankful for.

I have a voice of warm gravel to turn to- unlawfully familiar despite the 7000mile crevice; his voice and his strength and the Tomorrow flame he ignites when he speaks. I have a laughable January, and an indelible summer, and a Christmas that promises immortality.

And I have good friends. True friends. Friends who would push strangers out of their cars at 3AM in the morning and drive like fiends to get to me if I needed them, even though they're a few months short of 18 and can't tell a car brake from a windshield wiper.

Friends hanging from a cliff with one finger clinging to the Cross; who would let go so they could stretch out that hand to point God in my direction.

So life can't be all that bad, right?

Right.

Chin high, little girl- stand up and fight.