0144A: The Quasi-Perks of Being Rocky

I just got back home from watching The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a movie based on the book that I also just purchased today. It was the first time in a long time that I opted to watch a movie alone, but it was pretty much the perfect movie to watch alone.  This is my second personal blog entry for the day.

And today, in terms of the local date and time reference, didn't quite start out optimally, and naturally I've had a lot of things running in my head. And that may not seem to be outside of the normal parameters for the life that is mine, but let's just say that my brain was especially noisy today.

In the past I've blogged about how I...disappear, at least in my head. I think it was a blog post on my original blog, but at the moment I don't feel like looking for it just now. But to tell the story more concisely, I've been known to sort of get a little lost at times when I'm alone with my thoughts too long. In my head I find myself pursuing one thought after another I examine chains of events following my internal sense of logic as I go from one idea to the next. It could be like projecting my way into the future and trying to determine the best course of action given the options left to me. Or perhaps it has me running down the near infinite corridors of memory into the past as I examine things that had happened before in the hopes of learning something new.

I know I'm not Charlie - at least not precisely. I don't have trauma as powerful as his nor do I look quite so good in a Rocky Horror costume. But it doesn't mean that there weren't aspects of the movie that I could clearly relate to that had my mind racing during the walk home from Gateway.

One moment I'm back at the old house. It's a long lazy afternoon and I'm alone in my room and I don't know how much time has passed. I've disappeared into my head again and I find that people had been trying to call my attention and I hadn't realized that they had been shouting my name.

It's high school and I'm in the passenger seat of his car and I don't know if I want to go down. I'm already home and there's nothing else to do but get out of the car and yet I don't. And I don't understand why.

It's dusk and I'm on the long walk home from the High School all the way to my house because I was a little crazy and I enjoyed my long walks home instead of waiting in traffic. My mind is afire with different ideas and thoughts and plans and dreams and my only company are the sounds of Katipunan traffic, the smell of exhaust fumes and the flashes of headlights from cars heading my way.

In the gloom I see him smirk and I wonder if I'm really ready for this. But I'm stubborn and the scientist nerd in me wants to confirm if this is really who I am and so I press on and let him take the lead.

They're all laughing around me and yet I feel like I'm in freefall as my mind races and tries to piece everything together. I see him looking at me from outside and from the look on his face he knows something is wrong. He knows that I know.

I'm alone in our new apartment with a single light bulb pushing back the darkness. I feel I have practically nothing. And yet I have everything and my entire life just ahead of me, waiting to happen.

The lights are off and he's taking my hand. He wants to give me my first slow dance and Jason Mraz is playing. I feel elated. I am flying. But he is not for me and it will take me a few months before I truly understand this.

The cards are on the table. My heart is in my throat. It's all so wrong and so right at the same time and I don't know what's supposed to happen next. None of this was in "the plan" in my head and now I was uncertain as to what was going to follow.

He's sitting there and I feel like I'm breaking him. The tears fall but we only sob softly and there is so much left unsaid and already too much said.

It's the ER and he's on a gurney and everyone is rushing about and again I feel the world falling away. It's just the three of us again and yet it's all wrong and it's not how it's supposed to be. I pump air into his lungs. It is the first that I've seen him in perhaps months and it will be the last time.

I'll stop here. We're getting too close to the present and that's something that still needs to be processed - still needs to be examined a million times over from all sides. I need to stop the train and get off for now and prepare myself better.

I'm not Charlie. He had amazing music and I borrowed mine - first from my sister and it sort of grew from there. I needed music to fit in. I needed to be more like everyone else. I needed to build my armor and protect myself and hide who I really was from everyone else. I would hide in plain sight - hide using truth and facts and make it seem that I'm such an open and honest person when in fact I was giving them empty data and keeping the more important things solely to myself.

I'm not Charlie. I didn't have a circle of friends as close as his (and I know they weren't even that close). I drifted through my high school and college years with functional friends but I don't think I ever truly let them get to know me. It's like when I had a "best friend" in grade school when the only thing we had in common was the fact that we rode the same busy to school every day. I have no idea what he's doing now.

I'm not Charlie. And that's a good thing too since I found a way to deal with my problems on my own. I defeated most of my demons, or at the very least  learned to contain them and there they remain in the corners of my mind. I have push them so far back into the darkness and for now that's enough.

And that's why I had to write this blog post. Because the words are there in my head and never on the page when I want them to be there. When you finish reading a good book or you watch a fantastic movie that sends your mind racing like this, the creative in you both loves and hates the fact that someone was able to so beautifully capture an aspect of the human experience in a select work

And you wonder why you still haven't been able to do the same in so long. And yet you yearn to - you ache to do precisely that.