To the Renard.

You're not okay.
I know that now.
I'm sorry.
And.
I wish I knew what to do.

DARING to do nothing at all...

Depression is a nasty nasty little business.

I'm not saying I suffer from it. Not at all, I actually find depression rather unappealing. My friend, The Renard Noir, recently lost his house in an unexpected flood. And I'm not kidding when I say unexpected, We live in New Mexico, thus insuring that a flood is the last thing on our minds, but flood it did, and it flooded like the end of the world. First came the rain, which caught us off guard. "What the hell is this?" Said all the locals, peering up at the sky with a confused expression. "Water, coming from the sky? Who ever heard of such a thing?" Needless to say, this exotic water-coming-from-the-sky thing continued for weeks. The city was, naturally, totally unprepared. I mean, in a city that usually gets less than two inches of rain a year, two inches of rain in an hour can cause some serious ass-whoop to the local roads. Buildings flooded, levees broke, and all in all, we were honestly considering building an ark.

Anyway, All this rain caused the usually shallow Rio Grande, a river by the kid's home to overflow and kind of destroy his house.
Admit it, you'd be pretty pissed off if this happened to you. And pissed he is, at least as far as I can tell. I don't talk to him much anymore, but when I do, all I get is "goddamn water wrecked everything" vibes. What am I doing about his? N-O-T-H-I-N-G. "That's too bad." I'll always say. Or, "Sorry about that."
Do I feel bad about this? Not really, because as far as I'm concerend, it doesn't matter to him one way or another if I still exsist. It's a mutual feeling, however. Sometimes I miss the kid's smartass sense of humor and/or existential intelligence, but then I remember, "Wait, I'm mad at him. Oh yeah."

So.
That's all.

Today I am on the brink
The brink of what, I do not know, but the brink of something it is. I have that unusually brink-ish feeling, the feeling you get when something major is going to happen. I feel as if I am standing on the edge of a huge glass of water, peering down and it and wondering what that water is going to be like.
I realized today that I am not very good at communicating. Why do I fumble and trip with words to express what I'm thinking? Sometimes, with my most powerful emotions, there are no words at all, just weird scramled up feelings like static from a radio. There are a hundred different signals coming from different places and I don't know which one to tune into.

One More Day

I open the door, and it's a grumpy looking morning, the sun reluctantly coming up with a surly expression almost equal to the one on my face. School. I sit in a desk, and wonder why I'm still in school. I'm playing with a pencil until I decide I value my future, so I sit up and squint while fighting back a really vicious yawn.
I must have missed a question, because the woman at the front is looking around as if she expects something from us. She is gesturing with the marker as if it was a gauntlet, challenging us to come up and take it from her, and I assume, use it to solve whatever problem she presented.
No one moves until I hear a chair scrape in the back. If I had more engery, I would turn around and see who just got up, but I don't and I see her anyway as she comes up and takes the marker with a smug kind of look on her face. I raise an eyebrow as she sighs like she has to do everything, pops her gum, rolls her eyes, and starts writing on the board. She cleary has this memorized and well rehearsed. The girl has parrot-green eyeshadow that matches the slightly too small shirt she's wearing. She's got a very pale complexion and her hoop earings are bigger than my fist, not quite hidden under thin, dyed hair.
She proceeds to not only make us all look like idiots with a clear yet complex solution, but to do it in a tone of voice that sounds like she's a spy in an action movie rather than a overweight, acne-ridden student in a sleepy classroom.
She smiles at me as she passes me and the corners of my mouth instinctivley go up in return. As she sits down, I wonder what it would be like to be friends with a person like her. She cleary lives and breathes math, but I can tell that she's trying her hardest to fit into some unnamed clique. Her clothes are a uniform, finely tuned to the smallest detail, from the rubber braclet around her wrist and her spotless white shoes with wide pink laces. I forget about her quickly, but as I leave, my extreme lack of coordination causes me to drop a calculator and swear loudly. She picks it up and hands it to me, smiling again. I mumble a thank you and yawn out the door. As I walk to my next class, I spot her on the stairs and find myself waving, even though I don't know her. She waves back and beams, but I step into my classroom and forget about her again.
Sitting down in my next class, I make small talk with the guy next to me. He's opening his binder, and on the cover is a pencil sketch of a girl in a bikini with a suggestive expression on her face and her hands on her hips. "Did you do that?" I ask. He nods. "It's my girlfriend." He replies with a smile. I look closer while trying to remember what his girlfriend's name is...some "A" name, Anita, Alica, Anna...and realize that the girl in the picture looks nothing like her. The girl he's dating has curly hair, glasses, and braces. The facial features of the girl in the drawing look just like his girlfriend, but this one has straight hair, no braces, and noticably, no glasses.
I point it out. "Doesn't your girlfriend have curly hair and braces?"
"She straigtens it sometimes." He says. "And that's what she'll look like without braces. And with contacts."
"Uh-huh..." I say skeptically, but I don't say anything else.

Confusion

This damn piano
I am resting my head on the keys. The intricate instrument feels cool against my face and the keys seem like they go on forever. It's like my own little yellow brick road, a road of black and white that will take me to strange and wonderful places. Today, it is a challenger, and I am dizzy from something I can't seem to remember. What was it? Why am I dizzy, and why do I have such a fierce knot in my stomach, like something bad is lurking at the back of my throat? I'm alone in the house, and when I stand up, the room in front of me goes black and I spin like a top until I hit something, be it wall or floor, I don't even know, all I know is that I strike it with a muted thud, like I'm hearing it from far away. Wherever I am, I lie against it and sigh until I open my eyes and see a fuzzy line in front of me. It is the floor, dusty and covered with books. There is a book in front of my face, and silently, I squint in the dim grey light pouring through the windows to read the title. It's called, "Guiding the Gifted Child."
I stare at it for minutes on end until I realize why the book is here. My parents bought it when I was in elementary school, a blurry four years of my life. "She needs a challenge." They said, as I looked out the window at my class on the playground. "That's why we think full advancement would be the best option for her." Three days later, I piled the supplies I bought for a grade I would never attend into my backpack and left a school that didn't, it seemed, want me.
Now, years later, I reach for the book and stare at it some more. Am I "Gifted"? Do I need to be "Guided"? to avoid certain insanity? It would seem so, I suppose, to those who knew me at the time, a silent but violently moody child, who either tried far too hard to fit in or didn't try at all.
I look up at the ceiling fan. It seems farther than the stars, moving lazily in languid little circles. I squint again, and the fan blades blur soundlessly, nothing is making sound on this silent little day. I feel like the sugar in a cup of tea, dissolving away, unaware of anything around me. I know I should get up, but I don't quite want to enough.