He does not bark, and he knows the secrets of the deep

I'm not sure that I know how to be alone with myself anymore. I mean, I do, and I always have, but it's getting increasingly harder. I want to be alone all the time but when I am alone I don't want it anymore. The terrifying intimacy with a crowd of strangers unknown to you. I guess the city changes faster than the human heart. 

There have been moments where I wait until I can be completely alone, and in that silence I cry. It's almost as if I can't stop, that if something or some thought didn't stop me I would cry forever until my body became some dry, waterless husk. I cry about everything and nothing in particular. 

The thing they don't tell you about becoming more independent is that you have to actually face yourself. You have to know your eccentricities and particularities and when that becomes too much, the release just pours back into you, like how every time the tide goes out, it must come back in because it has nowhere else to go. 

On the other hand, I don't worry about myself often enough. I've gotten comfortable and when I get comfortable I worry about every person in my life and that's worse than being alone with yourself because the feelings that you allow to latch onto you are agonizing. You try to fix someone else's falling apart and the more pieces you hold up, the more it turns into ruins. You make it worse by pretending it's yourself. 

I wish it was simpler. I wish I could practice empathy less dangerously. I wish I could find the reason why I cry. 

You can swim in the crowd and its peculiarities, but at the end of the day everyone always goes home to an empty apartment. 

Fire drills are just drills, anyway

Today I decided to take my daily shower a little earlier than I usually do, just after dinner. As I was rinsing the shampoo out of my hair, an alarm started going off. For a moment I stopped and wondered what the heck it could be. Residences don't have fire drills very often and I couldn't imagine what else they would need an alarm for. After a few seconds of wondering whether it would be truly worth it to put on my clothes and skip my moisturizing routine (which, in this dry winter season, is very important), I made a somewhat safe assumption that if it was a real emergency, someone would check the bathroom. I continued my shower and the alarm eventually stopped. My roommate later told me that it was in fact a fire drill and everyone was thinking, "McKenzie must be freaking the fuck out", meanwhile I was peacefully rinsing soap suds off my body.

Live and let live, I suppose.

Halifornia doesn't really deserve its nickname right now because it's been really shite weather lately, cold and snowy and wet. To make matters worse, Rhys is in Arizona right now for a shooting competition and I guess it's cool and all that he's so talented and whatever but I'm just really fucking pissed that he's enjoying 25 degree weather and beautiful sunsets and I'm over here trying not to slip on the slush and mud that's now the quad. But I digress. Knock em dead, baby.

As I'm nearing the end of my first year of university, I'm starting to feel more authentically independent. I have a distinct and unwavering feeling that this will just get stronger as time goes by, and this is when I want to document it. When I'm throwing myself into the world and slowly cutting all the strings that weren't truly me. The time is now.

In other news, I'm sick with a cold that's not bad enough to warrant any whining (although I still do). I've been popping those halls vitamin c lozenges like it's no tomorrow, even though they're like 90% sugar and 0% menthol. They just taste good. Let me live.