Acknowledgement

I would like to publicly recognize my new friend Y. I started talking to her a few days ago and simply couldn't stop. She actually cared about what I was saying, unlike my friends who are beginning to grow bored of my always-the-same questions for them; she listened to me as I spilled a nameless heart to her in little moments that we had time to spare. It's an interesting thing, looking up to someone. You think they're always right, and they have to assume they are to avoid the guilt that goes with leading someone astray. There is no one to check the balance. There is no way to know what I should do next. So Y, thank you, if I can really thank anyone at all.

GHOS_

If you are intellectual youth in the city and you have never played the game GHOST, you have never understood what a game is. For those of you unenlightened folk, GHOST is basically a spelling game, where a series of players take turns saying one letter, attempting NOT to be forced to say the last letter in a word. I used to be exceptional at this game. Then the deaths; then the double rehearsals, darting back and forth; then the drama; then the night upstate; then everything else - needless to say, I'm too tired to effectively concentrate.

I played with T and L today. Whenever I play with T, three wonderful and very annoying things happen: A) He wins. B) He forms an alliance with the other player against me. C) He knows the etymology of every word. Regardless, I lost. I lost because I couldn't remember the words masculinity, geriatric, and ricotta.

I have to get used to this perpetual sense of exhaustion. I have to become accustomed to losing at GHOST, and everything else. It all depends on who you're playing against. Now I'm in a new environment. Now I'm playing against T.

Curiosity

One of the biggest themes in "Still Life with Iris" is curiosity. I could learn a lesson or two from the main character. Always asking questions, always risking everything for double or nothing. Sometimes I know an answer so well that I am afraid to hear it said aloud, so I don't bother asking in the first place. Sometimes I worry that if anyone has to actually tell me the answer, it will change. I can live with knowing. Or, I could. But now I'm starting to wonder what would happen if I did ask the questions. It's killing me to go day to day basing everything on a possibility, as close and as far as the ground eight floors below me, but nowhere near as stable. What ifs are not good for my health.

Exhaust

I was so tired that when I got up from the thrice-painted floor I couldn't walk in a straight line. I was so tired that after standing onstage for about twenty seconds I had to collapse onto a nearby platform. I was so tired that I couldn't smell the hairspray being messed with inches from my face. I was so tired that I couldn't find the gap between the curtains where I could walk backstage to lie down again. I was so tired that I let myself be a normal middle school for once and gossip a little - don't worry, I wasn't mean! I was so tired that when L asked me what I was thinking about, my biggest secret, and my obsession, I couldn't remember the answer. I could only remember that they were all the same thing.

P.S. Now I remember.

Night

They talked forever on the night hike, into the field and down the road, and I could feel the life flowing away from the area, the magic disappearing, if it was ever there. Even when we reached the hill, they kept chattering and catcalling into the darkness. A few of us wanted the magic. I guided us to the edge of the clearing. The moon was the size of my palm, as smooth as the skin on a baby's. Together we stood and watched it not move. We talked about being small. A said, as M sang "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," that we were all so tiny, like waves in an ocean. "But each wave rises and crashes on its own," I said.

Taconic

We're off on the class sleepover for a year, one night in cabins in the woods to get a taste of each other and the natural world. I've heard so many things about the trip: You'll be bored. Best time of my life. Interesting things will happen. But despite the varied opinion, I have my own cringing worries. The last time I went on a class sleepover, my cabin was composed of me, my best friends, and a couple of popular people who didn't fit in the same cabin with their friends. The good thing: There are no awful cliquish people in my class. The bad thing: I can't stay isolated to one class out of nine forever. Eventually I'll have to venture away from my comfort zone and see the world - or at least the other end of the grade hallway.

E

Taking a math test is little cause for panic on a usual basis; there are no facts to memorize, only concepts to master. But this test was different. The results will determine my math education for the next four years, and possibly beyond. We arrived to the room at eleven, at which time the exam was supposed to begin with closed doors. They instructed us to take out a pencil, and I saw green slips of paper fluttering like dollar bills from my teacher's hand - the Scantron sheets. I realized with a sinking feeling that I had only prepared with a pen.

Back I dashed through the hallway, screaming for a pencil with might. No - no - no - only got one - no - yes. R produced a yellow pencil and I gratefully grabbed it, scurrying back to the exam room. Turning over the pencil, I noticed a small marking on its base - a number three.

It brought me back to the terror I felt at the end of fifth grade when I accidentally did my standardized tests in number three pencil. They were my qualifiers for the school of my dreams. And then I thought about what those tests got me: the school of my dreams, and absolutely no sleep. And I wondered why I was so anxious about not getting into advanced math when I should be worried about the other outcome.

Green Space

There's a spot a few blocks from my house, right by the subway station, which looks out at the most gorgeous building in my neighborhood, old and crusted with detail and rented by all the big names for film shoots, and sits beside the Hope Hill, as I call it. The Hope Hill is planted with the daffodils Amsterdam sent after 9/11, and each spring they bloom among the ivy and trees. The canopy of leaves ahead blocks out the sun and forms a little cocoon from the outside world.

Waiting for my father, I sat down on the bench. For the first time since Janet's death, I took a deep breath and let the muscles in my stomach, in my shoulder, in my heart relax for a second. Science fair is over. I've done what I can for the math placement exam. Now it is time to breath in daffodil smell on Hope Hill.

Collective

My cousin E told me about the fainting incident in Texas when I told her about the meltdown series. (Last week in my class, about three quarters of the girls broke down sobbing and were inconsolable. Five, including me, cut English to go to the guidance counselor. Even though she forced our teacher to excuse us, we were given a pop quiz the next to make sure we'd been paying attention in the class - that we had missed.) Apparently, around my age, girls are extremely social and look to each other for guidance on what to wear, to say, and how to act. In Texas, a girl fainted at her school. Suddenly, all the girls were fainting. Physically fainting, although medically there was no explanation. It went on for months like this, the girls' minds forcing them to faint inexplicably. This, E suggested, was akin to the meltdown series.

Sometimes it feels like it's over. We no longer cry during lunch. We manage to finish our projects - or at least hope we will. But I still feel the perpetual sense of helplessness throughout our little group. Wednesday is looming: Science fair in the morning, then performing our melodrama, the math placement exam, callbacks for the school play, rehearsal for the other school play, lacrosse practice, and a baseball game. We cower and try not to think about. That's my explanation for the calm: No one is thinking about it. If we were all thinking about, we'd all be fainting, wouldn't we?

Boy

You don't have to say it; I know I missed another day of blogging. Sorry. I was distracted by all the people at my aunt's baby shower asking me about my blog. (They like it.) I was distracted also by the enormous stork balloon tied to a chair, and the miraculous bump in her belly. Until three years ago, I was the youngest of my twelve cousins. I always read the Four Questions at Passover. Made sure to leave the note for Santa on the table. But all that changed when O was born, then C3. Next, who knows? A miraculous bump that grows and grows and then disappears again, although somehow, the matter has multiplied. It happens all the way. A little bit of knowledge becomes an encyclopedia, a little bit of talking becomes a speech, and a little bit of love becomes an eternal adoration of the little thing.

Silently, Not

Today was the National Day of Silence in support of LGBTQ individuals who are silenced in their everyday lives. Although my school greatly supported this plan, even excusing participants from participating in class, one girl in my class - J3, I believe I called her - was very pointed about the idea before it was announced school wide. Several emails were hustled around about the purpose, the means, and the verdict: Yes, I'll be a good person, or no, I'm too lazy. I said the former and did the latter.

That seemed to be everyone's problem today. It's crunch time, like we're all stuck in a room with a bomb in it and we have only a little time left to crack the code to survival, so we can't afford to make another mistake. Not being able to ask questions about the major project in science? Being forced to play a game in Health without making a sound? I gave in. Pathetically.

Today was like a boysenberry. On the outside, they look quaint, docile, and ripe. One bite, and you'll stop eating. Unless someone dies first. So I'm sorry to all those people who will eat the boysenberries of hatred and abuse because I couldn't keep from saying, "Sorry."

Words Fail

People say a picture is worth a thousand words. If so, a word is worth a thousand more, in and of itself. A picture can show you the colors (as the lens portrays), the people, the backdrop. But a picture can't show you what your cousin said right afterwards, or the wave that splashed your sister's feet. A word carries more than an image because an image lays out everything, and a word is different for every person. The faucets keep on flowing until all our memories are piled up like bricks and then we start to build our world.

Computer.

For my dad, it is a way to beat my mom at Scrabble.
For my best friend, it is a tool for posting her artwork.
For my cat, it is a bed, as much as we yell at him and try to get him off.
For me, it is my journal, the one place I can feel like I'm talking to myself and still let everyone hear me.

You, you person I've been writing about recently. Hear me.

For Naught

Things are starting to seem to matter again. Slowly, the feeling is coming back into my fingers, flopping around without rhyme. Even though this worry - for naught - this outfit I'd been saving - for naught - confessions to the world, and to myself, and to fate - for naught - I remain intolerably here. You just can't get rid of me.

Try everything, I beg. Poison my water or blood. Stab me straight through and leave me screaming. Indent your bullet in my thigh. Blow up my world, my street, my city. I plead with you to starve me of sufficiency. To leave me as cold as winter's showers, or as hot as the fires of that burning afterthought that some call hell. It's my Groundhog Day, and I'll always come back. Don't count me out. I'm not leaving in so many words.

Boston

I had a breakdown in the middle of art class. And I had reasons.

As you know, Janet passed away on March 27, the first person close to me ever to die.
I have so many secrets it hurts.
The science fair due date is in a week.
I just got a bite plate and now I am lisping. And my teeth hurt.
I lost my script for a play that's in two weeks.
I just learned how Al Qaeda was started.
I hate my art teacher; he insults us and our art, tells us things that aren't true, and yells at us every class, for no apparent reason. He gave us a test today, and one of the questions directly contradicted what he had taught. His reasoning? We would learn the "exception to the rule" later that class. (This was what sparked the meltdown.)

And you, Boston, I cannot fathom what has happened on your now painted red streets. Not patriotically, not in favor of those wretched Red Sox. With the blood of the steadfast and strong. We'll never know if they were brave. They took no risks. This has happened to you with sudden speed. We are in uproar. I have family there, my favorite teacher. Nothing compared to the family of the gone, and the family of the city. The safest city to run your course in has been contradicted.

Even if I have a Boston reader, there is most certainly too much on their mind to respond now. To read. But I love you. I'm sorry I had a meltdown. It was in spite.

Invincible Apple?

I think S was genuinely devastated when E smashed her "aerodynamic apple" to the courtyard tile with foolish ferocity, although it is always hard to guess what she is thinking. It had been enjoyable to watch her pelt the fruit at people, yelling, "THINK FAST!" before letting go, unless I was the target of her toss. As I watched E half-sheepishly slink away, I was a bit disappointed, but the circumstances were clear: S had distinctly said she could have the apple after it dropped into a pile of muck. Perhaps it was a joke; as I say, you can never tell.

Go ahead, I'll smash the way I feel. Or not - no, I really don't want to. It's awfully fun to through it around inside my head, although rather pointless. A pile of muck will not deter. It's okay to love yourself, as long as you don't love yourself more than everyone - at least someone - else.

Oh No

I think I am going to cry. For the first time ever, I have missed a day of blogging. Life has been crazy, sure, like the Queens tornado a few years ago, whipping through the streets and capturing small objects, and my computer is broken so typing takes me twice as long as usual, but that is no excuse. No excuse in the slightest for neglecting the audience I have collected. People in Germany read - many, many of them. A few in Mexico, England, and quite a few in Russia. Not to mention the American thousand. Is this not what I want, to be noticed by the masses and accepted onto their stages?

Spring is coming, and flowers are in bloom. Would that I were.

Lisp

Let'th athume I am writing thith the way I thpeak right now; with a lithp. I cringe to think of how the company will rethpond to thith new development. And tho, I cringe ath well to think of how others will rethpond. Or maybe I thould be thaying other. Thingular.

I dithgust mythelf. Alath.

Fit!

That moment when two puzzle pieces fit together quite obviously, you reach for the one and a small child snatches it from your hand, forces another into its rightful place. With squeezing, the fit is forced at best, haphazard at worst, and the other will not bond with another piece. Its spot has been swallowed up by the fist of a toddler.

So did this actually happen? No, it did not. It's a metaphor. I am trying as hard as I can to make it to where I know I am supposed to be, and yet a stubborn, sweaty grip is pushing back into former place. I do not want to see its matchmaking abilities anymore; I would be glad to simply sink into the satisfying cardboard slot, or take the next best option and force my own fit. Lying on the table, discarded, is a candy wrapper's game. Once so sweet, and now unnecessary, wasting space that could be used for the puzzle.

Jam. Jam it in tight.

Mystery Flowers

When I walked into the lobby, I of course immediately noticed the humungous - in comparison to the tiny space - flower arrangement, wrapped in yellow and sitting on the radiator. Assuming it sat in wait of some elderly woman on the third floor, I continued up the stairs, until our doorman stopped me: "Um, Chloe, these are for your dad." Utterly surprised, I reached for the bouquet. It was, after all, Daddy's birthday, but flowers had never before appeared. "There's a first time for everything," K told me. When I got upstairs, I set them down on the table and examined the card; From my grandmother!

Why did it matter who they were from? Was it because I've never gotten flowers either? My dad always used to tell me he was unpopular until high school. It was something we could relate about. Now, here I am! High school! Did something forget to tell tech to flip the switch? The reality is I don't need flowers. They smell nice, but eventually my cat will find a way to eat them anyway. So I don't need that - I mean them - no, I mean that.

Guilty

I am guilty of the crime of watching the worst TV show in the world almost everyday: Big Brother Canada. If you thought regular Big Brother was awful, the Canadian counterpart is even more ridiculous. I mean, get OOT of here! But then why do I watch it? Because I don't have to think when I watch it. Since starting at my new school, my mind has been on all the time during the day; I come home feeling drained, waning like a moon. And, so I must admit, I enjoy feeling stupid - once in a while. Don't try it. Trust me. It will make you hate yourself.