White Flowers (Listening to: A Dustland Fairytale, The Killers)

I don’t really know what to say. Maybe I’ve lost sight of words. They haven’t come as easily lately.

I don’t want to regret anything that has happened.
I’ve got a box of treasures in my room. Pictures of my sister. Folded paper from my first boyfriend. Airplane tickets and the broken pieces of an old pearl necklace. It’s a trunk for doll clothes from the fifties. It was my mother’s. Dusty white with red trim. Brass corners and rivets. So very dusty.
I get tired. I am tired all the time. And I don’t really know what that’s about.
Maybe I’ve been focusing for so long on what’s inside that trunk that I’ve lost sight of the trunk itself. Maybe I was worried over details and I forgot about my life. The big picture. I feel like I don’t really know anything anymore.
I know I’m not who I was. I know I’ve changed. And I don’t know whether I am not myself or whether who I am is changing. I don’t know whether to push ahead or turn back, tail between my legs.
I know it’s a pattern I should recognize. Innocence is always corrupted. Good girls never last. They never do. And being good never really did me any good, did it? Maybe I’ll be better off.
I see it as white flowers. Dusty snowy petals scattered in that trunk. And lately they’ve withered so quickly. Dried up. It happened so quickly. And I know it always does, and that that’s no excuse.
I never used to do things. And now I find myself doing things when my body is not my own and seeing things happen that I don’t want and don’t not want and I don’t know what to think. Before when I wasn’t sure, I’d do nothing. Hole up in my own head. Get tied up in thoughts until the moment for action passed. I’m acting and I know they’ll tell me that’s better. Action. Doing instead of thinking. Empowering. But I sometimes feel like, with this little nagging doubt, like I just wasn’t looking ahead. The girl I know would never do these things.
I am not that girl these days. I don’t know what caused it. And it’s fun now. Parts of it are really fun. The not caring, the recklessness. The recklessness I never would have done before. But I’m scared I’ll find out too late that those dirty white petals were my soul, my real and actual soul, and that when I realize it, they’ll be gone. Only dust.
My pearl necklaces break, one by one. My first boyfriend broke one. Clean, straight in half. I saw it coming.
The others are harder to notice. Maybe a bead chips here or there, or a strand falls away. But slowly they all decay. It’s a pattern I do recognize.
People tell me I’m smart. I don’t feel that way. They tell me, you are so smart. You know so much. Don’t sell yourself short. And I feel, I feel so much, like I know close to nothing.
Because I never used to make mistakes. And getting caught at lying and playing games I never used to play feels so foreign to me. I don’t recognize myself sometimes. It scares me when all I have are little pieces of a night. And I can’t remember parts that scare me most of all.
And it scares me that I can have wanted contact so much that I wouldn’t have refused.
It scares me that I am that alone.
Because it doesn’t last very long, that temporary high you get when someone tells you you’re beautiful. I’m worried I’m trading my soul for that drug.
And it scares me because I know one day I’m not going to have anything left to trade.