31 Days of Amelia

Day 7 [redo]: Feeling Empty

Sometimes I like to torture myself. I go on the internet (“interwebs” Mishi calls it – used to- call it) and search a random word with “tumblr” after it and all those amazingly gorgeous photos come up. All those girls with the perfectly messy hair, and those big glasses and the even bigger sweaters that I am in love with come up. I can just sit in front the computer, my small little screen, for hours, no television, no music, nothing. I just stare at those pictures, and I think about how perfect they are, even though I know about a hundred different effects were put on them and that those girls are probably the same ones.

But it hurts, because all of those lovely little photographs are everything that I can ever hope to be, all in one little five hundred by five hundred pixel square. The sheer perfection and imperfection just builds up inside of me until I feel like I need to go something worthwhile right then, or else I’ll burst. It usually takes me an hour or two afterward, and, by then, about half of my inspiration is gone, and I end up churning out something so far under par (for me) that I exile it to the Endless Folder on my desktop that has the maximum number of folder chains. And I never look at them again. 

Sometimes I like to torture myself. I go on this one site, called dear blank, please blank, and look at all the posts under “I like this.” The worst ones I copy and paste into a word document for later. 

Dear world,
           

Can you please stop screwing with my friends’ minds? Enough’s enough. I’m sick and tired of watching them fall apart.
                     

           Sincerely,
                                   

                           Tired 

Dear society,
           

I wonder. Is there a point at which you are so fucked up that you start becoming good again?
                      

            Sincerely,
                                  

                            The imperfections

Those are just the ones that I wrote. I hate them; they’re not as good as the others on there, but it’s a start. It’s always a start. Never a finish. Just a start. And then as soon as I finish those ones, I never submit them, but save them in a document and exile them to the Endless Folder. 

Sometimes, when I feel especially down, to myself feel worse, I play Cough Syrup by Young the Giant on repeat for hours while looking at those pictures and at those dear blank, please blanks. It’s like a hobby, and favourite pastime of mine. Not even watching old shows on Netflix can compare.

There’s this one quote in this one song; Iris, by the Goo Goo Dolls. “And we bleed just to know we’re alive.” And I feel just to know that I can die. 

If you go online, and search the phrase “winter girl,” and go to the tumblr tags that pop up, and scroll through the hundreds of thousands of posts, you’ll see that it’s all about the book Winter Girls. Almost all those posts are written by girls. Almost every one of them is tagged with “trigger.” 

“I just read Winter Girls, and I feel triggered.”

“Thinking about Winter Girls; feel triggered. Throwing out all the shit in the cabinets.”

“Felt triggered by Winter Girls; a finger down the throat should solve that.”

If you really look through all of those posts, it’s absolutely horrid.