choices_adolescence lycanthrope you could say something akward and insufficient like "if they're all happy endings to you, they're also all sad endings" at that party to this girl who was smoking just like you wished a girl would just then and so you imagine will also suddenly turn you into who you'd like to be just then, the movie you've seen or helped write largely because you can't live it. or you could be silent, let it pass, refuse one more distinction. you could go home later, and be AM radio voices blurring by deserted gas stations, or you could stay and look at her room, which opens like a fifth grade shoebox at a open house, for your inspection and approval. you could start at her clavicle, or you could call it a collarbone, using words like a lockpicker, or perhaps you offer your head to be pulled or pushed or made corporal and then the pushing could be inconclusive and hesitant or expulsively fierce like the music she made you listen to. or you could rent six movies, foreign like all films are, and be that modern hermit, wild hair and all, with the modern self flaggelations of societal disapproval that your extensive collection of star war figures would procure for you were you to embrace that dark side. or you could wake up next to her, see small traces inside of her, as if strings were growing, so that when your hand pulls back or pushes forward, you see the slightest flinch in you in her. or leave early, go to the cemetary and sit looking at the grave of a loved one for an hour, say meditations like some monk in a story that's supposed to be prescriptive. you could lose your loved ones when they die or when they are living. you could go find hobbies that tomorrow, to corroborate the stories you have made up all night at this party to appear more interesting. you could find spiders fascinating and repulsive, or you could be largely disinterested because they are smaller than you, or because their interest in you is so conditional as to be lonely. you could look at people the same way, see even their sincerest expressions of hope and faith and wordsworth foreplay as the hungry and ceaseless twitching of spider's treacherous envoy legs. you could think this a tragedy or a comedy. you could imagine this feeling if it is too persistent as some cultural or familial heritage you are cursed with, or else some more universal archetype that inevitably arises in any life. you could go to the bathroom which you noticed had a book by seamus heaney and a gameboy advanced with river city ransom in it, and that would be a subchapter choice to shitting. or else there is this girl who is not with your group of friends marginally, and is an accquaintance of an accquaintance, and so is at an entirely different party than you. and she has an expression like a permanent wince, like a snail without a shell, and so you think, you could be the boy next to her who drives with her everywhere and pictures the way your children would look with her wild hair or patient movements ruling together with your rapid banter and abiding sense of tragedy. and you could be the couple who hopes for red lights to pull faces together at, to bond hard against the world at in a kiss like a cocoon or a pistachio shell. or you could not ever believe any of that. you could look at such couples and think they say things totally disregarding their sordid pasts and sordid futures. as if a wedding vow is only as predictive as any other sentence. the ball might as well be red or blue, or the sun is shining. and you could wonder if their brains really are straining to that moment of togetherness like a field of wheat leaning together, sunflowers to the sun, or if they are rather harangued like snakes exposed to fire, policitcians dragged convulsing and cross aisled into war. no matter, they can't prove it. only you could. you'd become your own truth, if you were that. or you could still feel lonely, not right, not wrong, just something. there are boys at the party too. you could be open to that. you could both like bob dylan or guns or have the same list of favorite movies. you could say something like "shallow is the new deep" and you could incite disease and desire in them. you could go to their poetry reading and you could clap politely like a bathing beauty showing ankle in the 1920s or you could drink beer and watch kung fu movies and roar uproariously until the diminishing returns of complete nakedness. you could tell the nearest stranger you secretly want a mansion on a hill or else a simple life. you could say you don't care really. you could be lying. or should you bring up religious fanaticism? you could talk about suicide being the last affirmation of life when everything else has been taken, the last reach at something internal, through something external, the last external posession. you could expound and expound while all the while you really believe it is nothing new, that all of history is someone saying in fire or knives, nobody knows the trouble i've seen, nobody knows but, you could believe in jesus or allah, as artwork, or politicians, or dodgeball teams. you could discuss san francisco's merits to the crowd of hipsters in the corner wearing whatever their avant garde replacement of the dreadfully popular trucker hats (unless embracing them for their mainstream appeal is the new thing). you could note that one thing every city has in common is that there are only so many places you can go. still enough to be more than you could ever put under your belt, but that almost makes those choices less than you - distinction largely time consuming or accidental. you could go outside onto the balcony and think about jumping, and wishing jumping meant going into the stars. and you could ponder whether or not if you were to end yourself in the way you're told you can end yourself, to do it suddenly and destructively like an explosion, or else gradually so as to appear unintended and inevitable, and extension of each day's life, a slow accumulation of miniscule thoughts finally catching up to the vast drowning out of the regular thoughts, let's eat this, see this, say this. like how the civil rights movement started with a slight upturn of the chin, or eye contact extended beyond please and thank you. you still haven't decided yet to say something or nothing to that first girl, let alone her companions in the tableau. you could flip a coin. who would choose randomly between two people? and then is the decision to choose randomly random? our decisions are weighted to values, and dreams, and thoughts on how to get there. so you have to make a distinction between that girl and that girl. why does not choosing though, a choice of its own, feel so much more free? putting it off, trying to wait until the end of time and your god view so you know the difference is what you think you're accomplishing. perhaps if you lump all girls and all boys and all of those choices together, it will be one simple choice. live or don't live. the end point of all science and art. we broke water into atoms, and then atoms into the most elemental thing we can find, yes or no, here or not here. but, even if you decided to not be here, it would reek of the life that led to it, even if you were to jump to the stars, you would only be affirming the geography you traverse and hammer at in your mind. even these choices seem to be pulled out of you like notes from a score, and yet is the listener really the same as that composing god within you who could not possibly be surprised? the faces and what you make of them come to you out of the dark like omens and words at the edges of some cro magnon cave fire. you have already decided to keep your first love's phone number forever. she could've have decided to throw it away. you can pretend you aren't good at lovemaking, but you can't pretend you are a master at chess. it seems the more abilities you have the more choices. unless you have the gracious ability to not choose. it seems an ability more than a lack. you could approach the girl. say you do. "if all endings are happy endings, they are also sad" or something to that effect. she's so achingly beautiful. you have no say in that matter. she looks at you with what seems a heavy sadness. you look at countries you don't live in the same way. where were your choices when you needed them? 040615 ... smurfus rex wow. 040615 ... notme this is beauty. 040615 ... sionnach . 120821 ... gja you can 120822 ... unhinged child_elegance photographic_memory back then it was just whether or not to cry, to pine. those choices lasted well into what most people would have called adulthood. i've always been a late bloomer 120824 what's it to you? who go blather from