Man, what a hectic senior fall it's been.

It's really hitting me now that a year from now, I won't be in the place I currently call home, I'll be surrounded by a whole different world of people, and life will keep trudging along at its breakneck speed.

But this isn't a bad thing. In fact, this piece of knowledge is what is getting me through life day to day. All the petty little conflicts won't matter in the grand scheme of things. A single grade on a test won't determine my future. I would add something else to abide by the rule of three and reinforce my point about the non-deterministic nature of anything I do in my life right now, but I really can't think of any examples...

I'm awfully ineloquent today, aren't I? This really isn't typical of me. I wonder where my flowery prose has gone. I can't even dig deep inside of me and find the words rotting at the bottom of my stomach. It's just, well, gone.

Maybe I've finally realized that I can't use words to defend myself forever.

If you peel back all my layers and take the pretty words out of my mouth, what am I? Just a shallow, rotting carcass, a slimy goop that lacks in substance, an excess of pride and ego and vanity and a burning desire to be happy. To be brilliant. To be loved.

I don't really think of myself that way often. I mean, having that sort of self-image is probably quite terrible.

I have to stop using language as a weapon; I have to stop using language as medicine. But that's like asking a chronic smoker to quit cigarettes. How do you stop relying on the one thing you have always depended on, that you would be absolutely nothing without?

I don't know.

Don't get me wrong, I am happy most days. If you observe me in my natural habitat (naturalistic observation), you'll see me burning with the joy of scholarship. Learning about how things come together in Chemistry. Learning how things break apart in Physics. When reading the line "intense fragility" in AP Lit, I get chills, literal chills, thinking about the privilege of seeing your lover fall apart in springtime, sakura petals falling to the ground. Consoling them beneath a perfectly blue sky. Watching their salt tears nourish the Earth.

In Psychology I think about how to think about how to think. In math I doodle flowers in the margins of my notebook and think about how many perfect polar roses I've drawn in my life, how if someone just came up to me as a child and told me to draw a flower and explained to me what r=2sin(2theta) meant I would have bloomed so beautifully. In Orchestra I sit and imagine myself in sunny California when we're playing the somber October and let myself be completely, utterly delusional for one moment.

If I could go anywhere, where would I go?

I would go to a place that shrinks my world. Like the school library after everyone has emptied out. I'd read and read and read and only stop to act out my favorite scenes.

But it would get so, so lonely after a while. How do intellectuals never feel lonely? I just don't get it. How can you be a recluse forever and take comfort in words, words, words? Don't the letters on the page become oppressive after a while? Black irises stare at black markings on the page until they know nothing of light.

I'm trying to say something profound and coming up short. Maybe I just shouldn't be profound at all.

In another universe I'm a Chinese high school student, writing the same angst-fueled paragraphs in my composition notebook, a silent plea to be heard loved reached touched. But she finds calm eventually in the fact that each character requires so much precision to write. If she's too messy she won't understand what she writes at all, and she's a bit of a masochist, likes to look back on her own suffering when she has time because why wouldn't she? After all, she wrote down her experiences to reflect on them later.

Maybe if my world stayed small, maybe if I only ever spoke my mother tongue, I would be a more careful girl.

What kind of person weeps after they are given the whole world?