4: the deal

man·u·mit
to free from slavery or bondage; emancipate.

I get it, I do. I know why you chose him. He gives you comfort, security, routine. He cares for you the way you wish your father had; he provides you the space and support for you to live your own life, find your own identity. Someone who's been there. Someone to teach you maturity. Something to schedule into your life.

What I want to give you is something to schedule your life around. I would put you on a rollercoaster, to take you to heights you could never imagine, and drag you down into depression you've never dreamed of; I can give you happiness and pain that will put poetry in place of your simple life, that will shatter your "identity." I haven't been there, but I can learn with you. I can give both of us something to live for.

Stay with him in luxury, or come with me on an adventure. Whatever you want - it's yours, or it's ours.

3: right hand meets left

ver⋅e⋅cund
bashful; modest.

I was seventeen the first time I saw the girl I loved nude. It must have been close to midnight; the moon shone pale on her slight shoulders and stiff nipples. When her swimsuit fell on the ground, there was a sort of breathlessness - prolonged by my mind perhaps - where the only sound was the waves lapping the rocks below. She wasn't elegant by magazine standards. But what the hell did I care if the five guys with us thought her contours weren't rounded enough? I was in love!

It's hard to describe what a gut full of bile feels like. There are experiences that I imagine I could compare it to, but I haven't had any of them, so I don't know whether they would fit. There was the immediate feeling of one-to-the-gut shock and amazement. But after that? Blackness. Horror. A hollow pit in my abdomen sucking everything inward. I'd never known something so fully beautiful and so fully wrong than in that moment. Not to mention the guilt - who was I to judge? What say did I have in her life? And why couldn't I just treat it like nothing, treat her like one of the guys, like they all did?

I retreated back to the car without a word, my wet trunks sticking to my thighs, while they all dove in. All the sentiments I'd planned slipped away. It was hard to look her in the eye after that.

2: all's fair in love and journalism

pro·bi·ty
integrity and uprightness; honesty.

It was that gruff voice that belonged in a theater with a bag of popcorn and a girlfriend who'd begged to see a chick flick instead. "Welcome to hell, kid," it parroted unapologetically. Then it turned away from me and started slinging bullets down the Baghdad street at whoever was keeping us pinned behind the cement barrier. At the time I thanked God for the ample muscles tensed against M16 kickback, his absorbed expression, the reassuring roar of friendly fire. I'd never been shot at before. I'd never done any of this before in real life.

Like the girlfriend who had to suffer through all that gore, I wanted to cry. But instead my shaky hands found the trigger button on my camera, and weeks later I plastered that black bastard's face all over the internet, with an angry headline that blamed him and his military for everything.

People praised me for having the guts.

1: here's to growing thin

ef·fete
1. lacking in wholesome vigour; degenerate; decadent: "an effete, overrefined society."
2. exhausted of vigour and energy; worn out: "an effete political force."
3. unable to produce; sterile.

Every youth gives up its ideals eventually. In younger days, I had cataloged my beliefs: there were those that I could indulge in until some grim revelation tore them from me, and those that would no doubt persist into my later, cynical life. It helped to know that it was coming, but it was still a shock to discover what needed to be surrendered. I lost everything, even what I had thought was cautious realism. I suppose it would not have been innocence if I had been unsurprised when it died.

Maybe I was unusually unfortunate; after all, people twice my age still believe in human decency. There's a thin line between acceptably narrowed eyes and a jade complexion. Perhaps I've fallen too far, but in any case, I cannot be a judge of that.

Rational dialogue - what a silly concept! In a world of prisoners faced with the chance to denounce a friend for a shorter sentence, no one is interested in working things out. Talk? Compromise? In what paradise? Too much perspective is apathy; apathy is weakness; weakness breeds dominance. Better to side against a common understanding, and to fight to death or victory, than to talk while no one listens. What is truth but the triumph of one idea over another? What is progress but the freedom of the oppressed to oppress someone else? And we talk about morals as if the cosmos gives a damn.

Will we delude ourselves with visions of kings and philosophers, when we're all just squirming in the mud? That willingness was what I expected to discover. But I believed that there would be a place we could all escape to. Somewhere we could bathe, and rest our tired limbs and tear ducts, before we expired in each others' arms.

I took a look outside, and the mud goes on forever. There is nothing but this. That was the innocence I lost.

Chapter 2

refocillate
to refresh; to revive.

A long time ago I was in eleventh grade physics. We learned there that if you attach a pencil to a weight on a spring, drop the weight, and move a paper along beside the pencil, you observe a sinusoid. Gravity and restoration act as twin brothers, tugging fruitlessly on a rope. Given a frictionless environment, their conflict will continue, undecided, forever.

A frictionless world may be impossible, but the bearings of my life are well oiled. I doubt my own oscillations will end before I do.

It's been two months since I gave up writing each day, but I feel compelled back to it. My small thoughts here built one upon another to a maximum, attained halfway through the story of Heliodoro and his demon, before my enthusiasm petered out. The curse and blessing of a middle class North American youth is an inability to focus on any one passion for long. Hopefully that will subside as adolescence does, but only time will tell whether I can finish a novel.

I have since made it through the downward arc of the harmonic and (I hope) am heading back up toward the stars. A friend to whom I owe a great deal told me to do something that makes me happy with my break from class. I would not dare disappoint her.

Thus begins chapter 2 of my footnotes.