By Lori Calabria
She was awoken from her dreamless slumber by the irritating sound of a cat meowing over and over again. Grumbling, she hit the pink bow tie of her feline alarm clock to stifle the soulless crying. The flashing green eyes of the clock always sent a shiver down her spine. Yet, she loved the damn thing. It was a present from her deceased favorite aunt.
She greeted the real world with a supreme fatigue and emptiness within. She never particularly liked or "had fun" in the real world. In truth, the girl believed that reality was only what occurred in the mind alone. Of course, she was alone in this theory, so she kept her mouth shut and assimilated a sufficient fa�ade for the world while she toiled away in her spacious dark mind.
She lingered in the shower, applied after-shower conditioner to her hair, and dressed as quickly as she could. She thought she would have made a better three-toed tree sloth than a human being. The girl finally got all her school shit together, took her meds, and then headed out the front door to impatiently await the arrival of the crowded school bus. She smoked two more cigarettes.
The people on the bus consist of varying degrees of miscreants, which practice idiotic gestures and laugh in annoying pitches. She pumped up the volume of her MP3 player and buried herself in the music.
Ah� school. Hell. The Dungeon. The Torture Chamber. A place brimming with Societal Imbeciles! A place of �learning�, where there are no boundaries to stupidity.
Thank Gaea that Latin was her first class. It was one of the few classes she genuinely enjoyed and was actually educated in. The girl could stay forever in Latin class and be content for the rest of her days. But, I digress here.
The rest of her school day goes downhill after first period with only two highlights throughout the day: CR/CP, where she also learns relevant information, and Phys Ed., where she can subtly beat the crap out of preppy teenage girls, i.e. her enemies. In between these two classes, she gets a slight reprieve from Hell to go to lunch. Lunch = 3 more life-sucking cancer sticks. She allows herself to be dragged into a car with her so-called friends and to be driven to wherever they decide on today. Burger King�again. While the others rush to the door and out of the cold, the girl breaks out her cigarettes and her MP3 player. She enjoyed this part of the day. She was relatively alone, smoking, listening to music, and sitting down on the sidewalk in the freezing weather - perfect. She was able to think, and separate herself from the outside world. The girl eventually gets up to buy a Coke and comes back outside, completely forgoing sitting with her friends, to continue smoking. Her friends always come out and interrupt her third smoke to make her get back in the car. She resents them for it. But, now back to Hell.
Her lowest point of the day lay in her English 11R class. The girl is repulsed and appalled by the sheer idiocy that increases daily in the classroom. The girl resolves to, at the very least, make herself comfortable during the spontaneous spewing of opinionated and uninformed bullshit from the adult's devious maw. Jackets make for very comfortable pillows, you know.
But, the greatest challenges of the girl's day were the times in between periods in the hallways. She was well known for hating humans, and this was a perfect example why. As it happens, and as it does every year, the girl was once again cursed with a schedule that required her to navigate the entire school between periods. Weaving and dodging the tall and short, black and white, preps and outcasts, relatively smart kids and ignorami, she fought the powerful urges that her Other self was ordering her to serve. Truly, this was a battle worthy enough of a history book. The girl's mind wanted to be let loose on the outside world and overcome her external societal-apt fa�ade. And so, for these five minutes between periods, while she was surrounded by hundreds of pre-alcoholic slobs, she comes ever so close to losing control of her mind. She always wished the world would thank her for having the tremendous self-control and restraint it takes to emasculate her brain.
But the girl knew that she would not be able to prevent her mind from surpassing her glossed over veneer for much longer. It was bound to win the battle one of these days. Predictably, one day, when the girl is naturally in a more irritable mood and the feebleminded sloths of the school are letting their true colors shine more�WHAM! It will seem like she has transformed the hallway into an episode of Batman; POW!, BIF!, OOG!, BOOM! will be all that is heard amongst the screams of pain and terror. She will let all of her 17 year-old repressed, festering, malicious inner rage pour out in those few minutes. It is inevitable. Nevertheless, she does the best she can to hold it off, even now when she doesn't remember why she continues to do so.
For the girl had no memory, or, rather, a very bad one. She was only born four years ago. One curious day, she arose from a bed and looked upon her face in a mirror, trying to make sense of reality. She couldn't remember who she was in her mind. And so, she was a new person, who gradually remembered some of the necessary details of her identity before the rebirth. Perhaps it was all the meds she had been on that affected the memory cells in her brain. She didn't particularly care. It is a bit odd thought that, at times, she possesses a photographic memory. The girl glimpsed into the past that she has already lived four lives in 17 years: her normal infant and toddler years, her obnoxious elementary school years, her repressed middle school years, and now her dreary high school years. So many memories, but so few that are memorable.
Her infant years were as normal as can be. The girl had no recollection of anything that happened at these times. Normal, I would suppose.
In elementary school, the girl started to develop her personality. Bringing herself back, she remembered that she was absolutely oblivious to how others reacted to her. She was an arrogant jackass. Thank Gaea she changed.
In middle school, everything changed. Her first year was a tremendous disaster. In May, her grandfather drove himself into a telephone pole while having a heart attack in his car on the way to the doctor to have his damned heart checked out. The girl loved her grandfather with all her heart and was beyond devastated by the tragedy. A large part of her "mens sana" vanished when her Poppy died. As anyone might guess, this was when a major depression took root in her and has stayed there ever since, continuing to grow and thrive. But the absolute worst part of Poppy's death was that it was so unexpected - his wife was the one with breast cancer, after all, with two months to live, at most. But, he was gone, and the loving couple was torn apart. Her grandmother, half-sane, half-morphined to oblivion, was now alone in a hospital. The girl always wondered if her grandfather purposely drove into that telephone pole because he couldn't withstand the bereavement of his wife's condition. The autopsy results were inconclusive.
During all this horror the girl was still mindlessly a Roman Catholic, but she soon started to question God and his cruelty. The final catalyst to the chucking out of "God Almighty" from the girl's life was her grandmother's breast cancer-induced death a month after her grandfather's. Finally, she said to God, "Fuck you!", and that was that. Voila - the prick was gone. For a whole three months, she was free from religious services until one of her favorite great aunts suffered a heart attack while cutting the lawn with a push mower. Once again heartbroken, the girl did the best she could to cheer up those at the wake, especially one of her great aunt's brothers, Uncle Joe, who always had a toothpick in his mouth. Sadly, even he now is in a nursing home, eating his Jell-O and fluently singing 50 year-old Spanish songs, reliving his youth because he can't remember recent events.
Finally, high school rolled around and she once again changed. She came out of her shell for a little while, only to remember why she had retreated into it in the first place. She happily crawled back in. This was a time of great reflection for her. She would be up at three o�clock in the morning with the window open near her bed in mid-winter, smoking a cigarette and pondering life as it is not known. She came up with a whole slew of far out ideas, including her own religion, Gaeaism, whose sole theme was serving Gaea, the entity of nature. This became an obsession � nature as goddess. This was the time when she began to hate humans. Her mind kept telling her humans were evil. The potential for a human being was astounding, but the realistic outcome always conquered the ideal. Humans were indeed very evil. The girl saw them as demons that should be obliterated from Gaea�s realm. She began distancing herself from her humanity, resenting being humans now.
The girl knew she had the potential in her to kill. She thought, if given the chance, killing would come naturally and unapologetically to her. She would be fulfilling Gaea�s needs. With no humans around the pollution, mindless hunting, abusive farms and mills, and all the misuses of nature would cease. Then Gaea would be able to restore herself within a few centuries. Gaea would never be the same � she would always possess the scars from human interference � but she would live a longer and happier existence. The happiness of one being of the Gaean territory is irrelevant if Gaea herself is not happy. The girl wished to make her goddess happy. She wished that she had a means to kill all humans at once.
The girl was so wrapped up in her own thoughts and worshipping that she became hysterically furious whenever her humanity tried to reassert itself. Her mind would become a vertiginous vortex of thoughts. Torn between her humanity and her suppliant state under Gaea, she would have nervous breakdowns. She would begin to doubt all the knowledge she had come to acquire about life. The girl would tumble down into a mindful oblivion to everything in the world. She would recede into her mind, now a potently active mixture of Gaea and humanity - trying to combine the two into a harmonious duo. After days of continuous thought, she would return to her Gaean reality convinced that the two could not exist simultaneously.
One of her favorite authors was William Shakespeare. He once wrote, �All the world�s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.� One day, long ago, the girl was pondering this thought. She concluded that she was not a player. Upon further consideration, she decided that she was a prop, lost and forgotten in the storeroom.
She was insane, she knew, which made her the sanest of all insane humans. Or perhaps, she was the only sane person in a worldwide society of an insane species.
Is this even real?
She lit up another cigarette and gazed outside the window at the stars.
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixturae dimentiae fuit. � Seneca (the Younger)
(No great talent has been without a blend of insanity.)
