Southern Death

It's too bright here.

The south, I mean. 

The white-washed walls and the faded red roofs and the crunchy pale grass- they all start to blur together, after a while, mixing with the stark white of the clouds, until it seems like the entire scene was doused in bleach. 

It's too white, too faded and dull- the roar of the cicadas a constant thrum in the back of your mind, the kind of noise that you hear echoing through the house as you stare up at the ceiling and try to will yourself asleep. 

It's hot here, too- despite the fact it's August and, y'know, Fall should be kicking in right about now. You walk outside and you're drenched, cheeks flushed and breath a harsh pant and your knees stick to the backs of your thighs when you crouch down onto the grass. When you walk barefoot along the hot asphalt, it burns your feet if you stay still for too long. 

So you run. 

You run until the sweat-soaked locks of your hair go flying out behind you, until your shirt ripples in the non-existent breeze of the dry air, until the soles of your heels are stained and callused and burnt and you feel the oddest sense of satisfaction later - when you're in your house and the air conditioning is turning the sweat on the back of your neck into a chilled sheen - you feel pleased when you trace your fingers along the thick, burnt-brown skin of your feet, and you smile. 

It's hot and dry and lazy and after a while all of the gas stations and strip malls and Wal-Marts turn into a continuous line until you have no clue what intersection you're at anymore; they're all the same damn thing anyways. You could loose yourself here, amongst the Spanish moss and tanning oil and the condensation that drips down bottles of Diet Coke. 

It's so easy. 

Just drive and drive and drive until you're at the very top, until the state lines blur and you're 3 states away but it still looks the same. There's a 7-11, a Waffle House, a Publix. 

It all looks exactly the goddamn same. 

And it could kill a person. It could, I swear. The bleached asphalt mazes and the gas stations and the palmettos could become the sort of prison that winds itself slowly around you, the kind of death that is long and subtle and sickly-sweet until one day, your last day, you look around and realize what's happened. 

You could die here, could sink down underneath the palms and just wait until your eyes go unfocused, and the little brown anoles come to perch on your waxy calves, to sunbathe on top of your unmoving lips. 

But maybe that'd be for the best. Maybe I should wait for the tendrils of Southern death to come curling around me, maybe that's better. 

After all, it's too bright here.

John Green, Pasta, and Crumbling Pedestals

The problem with John Green is that, while I regard him as one of the greatest men of my time, he never fails in making my mind swim with philosophy and human nature and mirrors and windows and gigantic white cows.

So that means, to be blunt, that I end up writing another silly thing about love and humanity and so on and so forth.

Living in The Blur

A lot of things happened last night, and it only makes sense for me to make note of them. My mother went to her first mediation session yesterday, and it lasted for the majority of the day.

 It went surprisingly well, actually. To compress a lot of legal jargon that I don't fully understand, my mother has full custody and he'll be paying us child/partner support, along with alimony. Which is fabulous, to be blunt. While celebrating last night, we talked a lot about topics we've already gone over. One of them being why the three of us did such a "180" when we got back from our road trip, back in the Spring. Considering the fact that we moved out almost immediately after we came back. It certainly looks bad; two impressionable young ladies, left alone for a week with their mother and returning visibly anti-dad. 

My mother is concerned about it too, always asking if she had actually "brain washed" us, as my father constantly claims. It took me a while, but I came up with a decent way to reassure her.