Beautiful Madness

It’s the second day of 2011. I’ll be 23 in 43 days. I still weigh 115. I still love God. I still want to be a writer. I still hate olives. I predicts that many of the things that happened this past year, and the year before, will repeat themselves: I’ll overflow the sink with water or bubbles, I’ll lock myself out of my apartment, I’ll oversleep on a day that I don’t need to do that, I’ll forget to pay the water bill on time, I’ll cry over something stupid, I’ll break a guitar string…..

My mom is right when she says, “you look older, but you feel the same.” I don’t know how much more I’ll change in the next year. It isn’t so much that I’ll change, I’ll just see more- have my eyes opened a bit more- and I think it’s all the seeing that changes. And I’ve also figured out that once your eyes are opened, they don’t forget…or close.

“When you grow up, your heart dies” -the breakfast club.

This came at the right time in my life, because I’ve come to realize it’s true. The older you get, the more you see the world for what it really is, and it isn’t anything near as beautiful or good as I had hoped it would be….It kind of burst my heart balloon.

I’m not angry about it though, which is strange, I suppose. I guess I thought that if everything I hoped for were ended in an instant, I’d fall apart, but instead I have a newfound love for God. It isn’t that I didn’t love him already; it’s just, I didn’t realize, really, how bad it all was without him. I didn’t really know how “fallen” fallen was. How messed up it all was.

I saw a book in a bookstore off the square a day or two following my revelation, and it was titled “beautiful madness,” and I laughed. Because I don’t think we know really how complete opposites those two words are. Beautiful is all sweet and warm and light, and reminds me of poetry and songs and of the summers spent in the pastures at Repton, and Madness is all insanity, and darkness, and twisted.

Life is beautiful madness, and if my eyes are opened more to the maddness, I guess they open just as much to the beauty. And I'm ok with that