Right Where It Belongs - Nine Inch Nails

"I keep dreaming about you. It's undeniable: you're the star of my nighttime world, the prima donna of my subconscious stage, the headliner of my brain's Broadway. I may choose not to attend any of the events, but I still see your face on the billboards everywhere.

See the animal in his cage that you built
Are you sure what side you're on?
Better not look him too closely in the eye
Are you sure what side of the glass you are on?

"I still care. I'd say that this fact is obvious, but you haven't taken the time out of your life to try to talk to me, have you? The last real contact I got from you was a box of things on my front porch with a letter inside, a letter that hurt me more than everything combined, and a thirty-minute phone-call, a time limit to bear my soul to you. I can't even begin to describe how much the box, the letter, and the time limit broke me, but I still care.

"I can't blame you for feeling hurt. I can't, because I know very well that it's my fault. I can understand that you've been feeling betrayed and hurt and upset, because I broke your trust. What I can't understand though, is how someone as brilliant as you, someone as intelligent and contemplative as you, could not see that I broke too, I've had to face my demons and escape my insecurities; that there could be the slightest possibility that I may have grown as a person, changed my ways, matured.

See the safety of the life you have built
Everything where it belongs
Feel the hollowness inside of your heart
And it's all
Right where it belongs

"I've always said that you're smarter than me. You used to deny it, and tell me 'Babbie, you know you're not stupid', but it's true. Intellectually, you excel, you're on a completely different level from me. I have creativity where you have contemplation, I have art where you have forethought, I have spontaneity where you have rationality. While that may have been your advantage as far as schooling went, where I struggled to do the simplest of classwork and you were blazing through like nobody's business, it is in this case your downfall...

"You told me you were pushing me out of your life because I was a negative influence. That may have been true then, but *insert cliche tone here* I've changed, I swear. Fact of the matter is that I can't prove this to you by simply saying so. You'd have to let me back in to be witness.

"I don't think you know that sometimes the hardest thing to do is let someone back in, but more often than not it yields the most gratifying results. You haven't had your heart broken the way I have, you haven't broken hearts the way I have. Mentally, you're far more mature than I am. Romantically, I have seniority if only for the fact that I've broken and been broken more than you can imagine.

"I hold scars deeper than even you've seen. I let you in further than anyone else in my life, through tentative prying and stepping outside my comfortable box, I let you in; can you imagine how much deeper than that the scars might run? You know nothing of hurt feelings. You know nothing of broken hearts, but I'm learning to heal myself, and all I want to do is share this epiphany with you.

What if everything around you
Isn't quite as it seems?
What if all the world you think you know
Is an elaborate dream?

"I keep dreaming of you. The dreams feel so real to me that when I wake up, I'm not sure if the real world is the one that I've just entered, or the one I just left behind on my pillow..."

As part of the poetry section of my creative writing class, we've been keeping journals and writing observations of the world around us. In a way, it's unlocked us all from a sensory standpoint, allowing us to take in every detail in the blink of an eye and turn it into poetry. My professor has consistently given me perfect marks on my poetry, despite the fact that I hate writing poetry and always have. She keeps writing me little notes on my papers, notes like "I can feel your emotions as if they were my own!" and separating paragraphs of my journal narrative, writing in "this, in itself, is a poem!" Probably the one that struck me the deepest was "I love the way you really take time to think about all this and then just dive in!"

I didn't even realize it, but this class has opened me up both as a writer and as a person. Now, I know exactly why I feel what I feel, instead of just being taken along for the ride. I understand the source of my feelings as much as the feelings themselves, I can observe, analyze, and capture my thoughts and actions as quickly as they come, writing them on paper as if seeing them in slow motion.

This class has made me see what kind of a person I truly am; it's made me dig deep into myself, right down to the deepest core where even I'm afraid to tread, and to drag back my thoughts and feelings by their scruffy tails. It's made me an addict to the written word, an addict to the blank page and the smooth ink of a comfortable pen. It's made me an addict to recording everything I perceive.

And if you look at your reflection
Is it all you want it to be?
What if you could look right through the cracks?
Would you find yourself
Find yourself afraid to see?

The excerpt above was taken from my journal, a place that before starting my creative writing class, was a sparse collection of miscellaneous days, events that were few and far between. Since beginning the class, my journal has filled to almost the halfway point, a huge conglomeration of words and feelings and believe it or not, poetry.

Despite the rather large collection of poems I have hidden in the back of my closet, I actually despise writing poetry. I hate it to no end. I'd much rather be writing prose than poetry, yet consistently people compliment my poems, relate, and I have no idea why, because I spent every second of scrawling them out loathing the fact that I had to write them in the first place. My journal has become a playground of poetry, and my English professor has given me the contact information to some small publishers to send my poems in to. She's that confident in my work.

Through the writing process in this class, I've turned myself inside out emotionally, dragged up the best and worst of my memories and my personalities, sifted through all the repressed emotions of the last five years and pulled out gleaming gems, little bits of profound thought straight from my core. From this soul search, I've found something...

What if all the world's inside of your head
Just creations of your own?
Your devils and your gods
All the living and the dead
And you're really all alone?

I'm burying the best of myself within the pain of myself over the worst parts of myself.

Allow me to explain:

Before: I used to sleep for a dozen hours a day, relishing my dreams for their whimsical quality. I filled my life  with art and music and laughter, and spent hours with some of my closest friends. I did what I wanted when I wanted, because I felt like I wanted to. I didn't have much going for me, but I was damn happy with where I was.

Now: I sleep an average of three hours a day, because my dreams have driven me to the brink of insanity. I've filled my life with a full-time love-hate minimum-wage job, a full-time school schedule, hours and hours of studying for upper division classes I barely understand, high levels of involvement in extra-curricular activities (such as the six clubs I'm currently active in), and any extra time I get is dedicated to finding something new to distract myself with (i.e., the four languages I'm trying to pick up on, the twelve different personal reading books I'm currently reading, the list is ever-growing). I do what I can with the time that I have when it isn't filled with something else. I now have almost everything going for me, and I couldn't hate my life (or myself) more.

You can live in this illusion
You can choose to believe
You keep looking but you can't find the woods
While you're hiding in the trees

 I can't stop moving or distracting myself for more than an hour because that puts me at high risk of complete emotional crisis.

I have to schedule in little things like showers and eating.

The little shadows under my eyes have become a permanent feature.

All my days are blurring together in a conglomeration of names, numbers, and faces. I can't tell Tuesday from Friday and vice versa, the product of my lack of sleep.

I feel like a horrible friend, because the amount of time I have free for friends dwindles more every day, as does my capacity to prioritize them.

I see my family very little; usually I get to see my parents for all of twenty minutes in the mornings, and lately I  only get to see my sisters on the weekends. I live with these people.

I'm the shittiest sister/daughter, but I'm the optimum student, working at full mental capacity as much as possible to get through as much work as possible with the most comprehensive answers using the least research necessary. I'm so dedicated to studying that I'm willing to risk permanent spinal damage if it means I'll have my textbooks with me to study at every opportunity.

I've shocked myself with my own capacity for dedication to school. My whole first year of college was spent with the boyfriend convincing me every evening to do my homework, and convincing me to spend an hour studying for class, and convincing me to wake up to go to class. I was thoroughly convinced upon beginning this semester that I would crash and burn because I lacked the kick-in-the-pants person to motivate me to study.

Despite all this, it doesn't change the base reason behind my full-time distraction lifestyle.

What if everything around you
Isn't quite as it seems?
What if all the world you used to know
Is an elaborate dream?

This doesn't change the fact that I know exactly why I can't say no to a club activity, or ask for a day off at work, or turn down a study group on campus, or simply go home before ten in the evening.

It doesn't change my frustrations over his stubbornness. It doesn't change that I'm here becoming the very best I could be, ridding myself of all the behaviors that caused my breakup in the first place, and his pride is getting in the way.

It doesn't change the fact that my heart is still broken, and all my self-improvement counts for nothing toward changing that.

It doesn't change the fact that I'm losing myself in my so-called "healthy, productive lifestyle". It doesn't change the fact that everything in my life is Right Where It Belongs, and I've never felt so lost.

And if you look at your reflection
Is it all you want it to be?
What if you could look right through the cracks
Would you find yourself
Find yourself afraid to see?

It doesn't change the fact that I still care.