The Thoughts of the Still

I can't write with music on. I just learned that, because I tried to write while listening to Arcade Fire, but I couldn't form a cohesive sentence. I don't do that anyway, but I like to think I do.

.........

Numb, my head is, and vomit threatens to rise through my
throat.
If I could only feel the air from my house when I was young,
If I could look out the neglected window with the same ambivalence,
If I could hear my sister coming through the door that she no longer opens,
If I could meet all my friends who have gone away at the church where we used to be blissfully unaware of everything but our feelings,
If I could find the boy who plays tennis and is scared of juniors and likes to laugh and is content with himself and ignores the future and knows not of his days ahead.

If I could go back, I would. Would the happiest time in your life not make you yearn with unquenchable sadness for the days that held it, that fleeting span of life that lasted forever but will never again be seen? Only in the eyes of those who remember does the past still gleam.

.........

I have concluded that deep down, I am sad. I forget about it when activities distract me and life is so quick that I don't have time to evaluate myself. But when I sit still, I find the familiar, stinging sadness about a life that is now lost and the new, foreign life that replaced it. I have been in mourning over the death of my previous life for two years. And I don't know how to move on. How do you move on? Do you let go? Let go of all the friends, all the memories, all the places that once were the center of your happiness?

My happiness was rooted in something that no longer exists. That is why I am sad. I haven't found something else in which I can derive my joy. My upbringing keeps screaming at me that God is the only place one should rely on for happiness. But I instantly reject that notion, out of habit, because it is too cliche for me to try. I assume it might be true, but I irrationally run from it because I want to find happiness on my own, whether it be in God or something else. I want to find God because I found him, not because my parents walked me to His front door. I want to have a reason to love Him. Right now, I don't, at least, not one that I can found a relationship on. Maybe the fact that I live in America, the richest nation in the world, should make me thankful enough to love God; or, maybe that I was raised in a loving home with parents who worked on their marriage and stuck with it; any of those reasons should be enough--but for some reason, they don't work for me. I'm a selfish, narcissistic child, I know, but those reasons don't motivate me to love God. I hate it, but they don't.