Entry tags:

kostya, psyche, show and tell

Week 21: Monday -- Journal & Polaroids
In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative...

That said, I tip my hat to the Master of Mad Ends and Long Adjectives: Thank you for making my childhood that much stranger. Speaking of horror, I have to A) finish the show paintings this week or admit defeat and B) start pounding my research into a palatable thesis for the Headmaster. Sure, it'd be nice if that research was something more than polluted hearsay and recycled biology notes, but--

Also, both Dr. Quinn and Kostya called last weekend. It's becoming a cozy little tradition, really, them calling and me not answering and all of us pretending Halcyon was my personal decision. (It was a choice, there’s a difference.) I warned Kostya that if Josiah calls I’d put my cellphone in the microwave. Tori, though…her, I miss talking with.

Sometimes this feels so much harder than I thought it would.


[taped outside Sasha's door]

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[sent to Dr. Gideon Quinn]

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[for Tori]

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[for Kostya]

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[Excerpt from e-mail to Dr. Gideon Quinn]
I’ve never bought into the different worlds/different rules theory that plays popular with too damn many. I don’t say “humans” when I mean “people”. But sometimes...sometimes I look back to the crowds on the T, the lines at Dunkin’s, the grandmothers and skaters and lawyers lunching at the Commons, and I’m tempted to think: that’s easy. That their worries are normal. That no monsters visit his dinner table. That her mother didn’t have centuries of baggage. It’s the Anna Karenina cliché at work, thinking happiness makes things uniform, while sadness is unique. It’s petty, I know, but some days are dim enough to make you believe it.

No person has it automatically easier than the other. Money, position, beauty, talent—whatever helps, helps, but none is an instant win. The people in the park struggle and fear, and own lives no less powerful just because there are no basilisks in their basements. I’ve peeked into their childhoods, their marriages, their Saturday mornings and Sunday dinners, sneaked glimpses of pleasure and tragedy like a thief—I know the man who got off at Lechmere has a boyfriend and a wife. I know the Pomanerian’s apple-cheeked owner has blue numbers on her forearm. I know the girl in my ballet class hid pills in her piggybank.

Only with family can one be “lucky” enough to own a free advantage. Whether bonded by blood or united by experience, what your family gives can’t be acquired anywhere else. But neither can it be replaced by anyone else once gone.

Maybe that’s why family is hardest to forgive.

(So quit preaching about what he didn’t and did mean to do, or how he changed, or why. I don’t want to hear it, dottore, and even you aren’t qualified to say otherwise. You think I’m using him? Fine. I’ll spend his money, I’ll boast his name, I’ll squeeze every drop of oil out of his old hide to fry my breakfast. But make no mistake, Gideon, I won’t be satisfied with that. What Josiah Hattington owes me is blood.

And love him or not, I’ll have it.)