Basement Chronicles

Persist

"Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know?"

One question at a time.

For a while I've been trying to write about lighter subjects. Stuff that will make people laugh, maybe feel good about themselves. Happy Chronicles, if you will.

This isn't one of those.

For three hours tonight I've sat writing, rewriting, rinsing, and repeating, trying to get this Chronicle to be readable. I'm almost to the point of giving up and ending the Chronicles altogether, letting the last photo I posted of my trip to Pullman serve as a capstone to my series of arbitrary commentary.

I'm caught. Caught between a lot of things, that is. Caught between places, between people, between beliefs. I really just don't know what to think. I can ask people questions, ask for advice, but the best anybody can tell me is that I have to choose for myself.

That I'm on my own. Responsible to nobody.

But really, that just makes me feel alone.

I'm 19. I'm sitting in a dark room behind closed doors and shut blinds. I'm staying with a family of extremely generous people that are gracious enough to house and feed me during the course of the school year. But I'm feeling as if my time is up. Everything feels stressed. Stretched. Tired. Everyone's at the gym, at work, at school. Everyone living in one house, but all having separate lives.

Then I think of home. Me, sitting in my room, or in the office, playing on the computer. My sister in her room, talking on her phone. My parents watching TV. Then I remember that a lot has changed since I've been gone. Everybody's exhausted from work, school. Everybody's got their own car. Their own hobbies. Lives.

Tonight I went to see the grandfather I have down here in Arizona. He lives in an assisted living home with about six other people close to his age, or older. He's been there about a year. I saw him last year around Christmas, at the same get together the house holds for its residents and their families every Holiday season. I hadn't seen him since. This year, two of the people I remember living there with him had passed away. Old age. Cancer.

My great aunt and uncle were there. Fun people, I must say. Sadly, I haven't seen them this entire semester. And they let me know about it. My uncle was diagnosed with diabetes, so he's been having to watch what he eats. He's lost 30lbs or so, and looks to be in great health. They own a cabin about 90 miles north, and have been having fun fighing with the local handymen about getting a new air conditioning and heater system installed. But they've been having problems too. And let me know about me not being around to help.

I called my mother beforehand to get directions. After giving them, she told me that Panda, my Border Collie since forever, has breast cancer. She's going in to get it removed on Wednesday. If their initial X-Rays show that its spread to her lungs then they are going to just let nature take its course.

X-Rays are a band in the electromagnetic spectrum. The spectrum is simply a span of all the frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, or rather, light. X-Rays are special because they can penetrate flesh and tissue, but stop at denser bone structures, allowing for accurate pictures inside of somebody without actually opening them up.

I know this because of college. I know lots of fun things. But none of it really helps at the moment. In ten years I'll have forgotten what it means to be polarized, what Kirchoff's laws are, or why you have to connected voltmeters in parallel. But maybe I'll remember wasting time before my grandfather's party hydroplaning in the Dolt down Adobe Street.

What else won't I remember? What's at the end of the memory queue waiting for garbage collection? Maybe the memory of learning that if I want to transfer to Pullman that it'll cost three times as much as I'm paying for education at the moment. Maybe I'll forget about wondering if that's what I have to do to be happier. Wondering if I could be happy even if I wasn't going to put myself deep in debt.

Thursday night I was asked to talk about myself. I don't remember the last time this happened. Nobody has been genuinely interested, or hasn't already known the story by some other means. What can you tell a stranger about yourself? Why? Why are you even here? I don't remember what all I said, but it wasn't very intriguing or unqiue. I'm 19. And I guess I just feel disconnected. And a bit alone.

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It is now 1:46AM. I've rewritten this Chronicle four times over the course of about a week. "Next.txt" is now filled with pages of garbage that I forced myself to save after deleting multiple pages before even those. Writing these gives me a sort of focus that I can't get just trundling along in my day-to-day. This one needed more work than most.

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It is now 2:19PM. Next day. It was raining all morning, but now the sun is out and shining. Today's a better day. Despite writing my last physics lab...