Yearbook : 02.16.03 @ 8:16 pm

I suppose there are more important things I could be doing know, but who really does anything [meaning the homework that has piled up all week] on a Sunday night when there is no school the next morning anyway? That's right. School has been canceled, as has the lives of all people currently residing in Northern Virginia. Wimps. I learned to drive in worse weather.

I don't suppose people appreciate me reminding them that this isn't a blizzard, it's just actual snow, so I will cease to do so.

I had some deep thoughts to ponder but I seem to have lost them. I tend to do that a lot, which was why I started to journal in the first place, so I could write them down before I forgot them. No, that's not completely true. Like most sixth grade girls (for I was in sixth grade at the time) I started journaling to bitch and mope about my ass hole of a father and my bitch of a sister.
While times have changed in other aspects of my life, it appears that in that one, it hasn't. I still moan and gripe about those two obnoxious relatives of mine. I wonder how long it will take Jennifer before she reaches the stage where she's not just an extension of Dad.

I finally got my 2002 yearbook this week. I spent a few minutes amusing myself by flipping through the thin book that supposedly chronicled my sophomore year of high school. I'm saddened by the feelings that it stirred - I had forgotten how much hurt was intertwined with the woodwork there, at my old school.

I had forgotten how I used to sit in Outdoor Ed (study of the outdoors, camping and stuff, which I love, but so many took it as a bird course) and whenever the teacher wasn't looking the ass holes in my class would throw things at me. Once, we were doing an activity that involved... well I don't remember... but I got so angry at them that I hit the wall as hard as I could. They were silent, finally, but they never let me forget that one leak of emotion that I let them see.

I had forgotten all those times sitting in Intro to Chem & Phys, contemplating horrible thoughts of self injury and wanting nothing more then to just... well... yes...

I had forgotten having days so horrible that I'd skip class and just hide in the auditorium under the steps, in view yet out of sight. I had forgotten the taunting, the teasing the looks, the rumors...

Sometime, I don't remember when, but I got a pair blinders. I put these invisible blinders on and just plowed through the crowds at school. I was free, people's thoughts and actions didn't affect me because I did not consciously acknowledge them. I went through life being totally raw and open, yet at the same time mentally shielded.

I fell in love which of course opened me even more and soon many people knew that yes, I was a dyke. While I was relatively open to everyone, at the same time I wasn't, not at all. None of these people - except Ryan - knew me. People still don't, yet I think I'm a purer version of myself. Confidence does reside inside of me now, and its closer to the surface then it ever was. The move did some good to me, I suppose.

Funny how we reinvent our beings so many times in a lifetime. We wear so many different masks, so many different roles and we cast them all aside almost monthly. The person you know today won't be the person you know ten years from now. Things happen. People happen. Life happens.

I am not the same awkward girl who at eleven shaved her legs because all of the popular girls were doing so.

Nor am I the girl who created the scars along my skin at fourteen and fifteen.

Nor am I the girl-woman that made out with her first love behind the Sears at the Presque Isle Mall.

Nor am I the girl-woman who nervously waited at the corner of S_____ and B_____ for the bus to take her to her new school for the first time, just four months ago.

Oh but the masks, where do they go once cast off?
Do they get recycled again and again or do they decay silently at the bottom of our pools of tears and sweat?

/A

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