Again I woke up for the morning and took off my hat. Green worms lined the insides squirming, squiggling, and worming around. Little green worms the size of my fingernail tips.

I am paralyzed with fear for a bit then jump out of the bed, rushing to my mirror, holding the hat. My hair is covered in the green worms, and I am afraid to touch them, but I turn on my sink and wash them away as fast as I can, tossing the hat into the trash, washing the worms away, away as fast as I can.

I wake up and walk slowly to my mirror. There are no worms.

I only remembered it now because a friend mentioned dreams.. then I remembered I had a dream log here.

But the dream proves one thing: no matter what I do or how hard I try, I can never really completely stop caring about grades.

I listen.

Someone who’s done this for a long time tells me one day about his crush. I give him encouragement. He wants to ask her out; I say “Go for it, man.”

I listened.

I tire of this pattern. I worry about my own thoughts… the same ‘I’-figure that every other person in the world is busy worrying about.

I continue to live in my world, with my own projects. I talk to some of the same people a bit every now and then.

One day, one of them asks me if I am his friend.

I don’t want to respond. I sit silently, look away. After prodding, I say, “No, not really.”

He seems disappointed. I didn’t want to sound so cold, but the truth of the matter was:

It’s possible to be a friend without having a friend.

And yet if I’d set my standards for friendship so high, I’ll never have friends. How could I, one of many in this world, expect any other single person who is too occupied with his own worries to care enough about me to want to… really be my friend?

Once upon a time, I met a person who was interested in knowing me, at least a little, and as I pretended to stare out a window he asked me what I was thinking.

Lack of ambition takes many forms in life. Insecurity takes many forms. The feeling of inadequacy becomes a recurring theme.

I knew I could never have expected anyone to care, yet I don’t give a proper response to this question. I say “I don’t know.”

And for a moment, I didn’t know. Or I knew too much, swarmed with possibilities of ways to respond.

So it’s not as if I didn’t want to make a friend. It’s not as if I wanted to close myself out to the world when all this time I mentally complained about the selfish thoughts of those around me.

But I did. That’s just the way things happen.

A few days ago(around the time when school ended) I got an IM that was something like:
“I asked you a question at the beginning of this semester. Did the answer change?”

This was from the guy who asked if I was his friend.

I never responded.

I can sit there and write a huge post on nothing but that I am writing to waste time, and yet I can be more interested in re-reading this post I wrote than in reading some great author’s old work of literature.

I can stare at my screen and look through all my old poems quickly and at a blink and think “Yeah, I remember why I wrote that. Heh.” And to me it’ll be the best thing in the world, a memory.

And yet I won’t read the things that some other poor adolescent soul shouts out into the world on a blog; I am disinterested in the diaries of those who I do not know, yet I keep my own.

It’s my claim to selfishness that I write about myself, stuck in my own bubble of self, uninterested in others, forever committing self-indulgent acts which do not benefit the better good of humanity.

Nervous wreck can imagine all in her head
If only her daydreams could be read.

Nervous wreck meets truth and runs away
Imagines she’ll try another day.

Nervous wreck dreams of being strong
Wonders why she’s all so wrong.

Nervous wreck can only see
Visions of failure at life.

Where I look and envy those who run with the shoes I wish I wore. And carelessly leave my own laces untied on as I stutter and trip like any airhead.

Through the simplest of paths where even little rocks are scarce. I’d like to run as fast as those around me; I’d like to be the winner of the infinite race.

Where when all the paths I see are plain in sight the path I take myself is none. And I imagine the journeys that I cannot see, the journeys I do not run with the different shoes I do not wear.

The light of the sun is shining on a summer’s day. I hide in the shadow and tie my shoes, contemplating their worth.

I’d like to one day make use of the shoes I have and run the distances I would imagine I could.

And step into a new pair of the same shoes, knowing what I knew before.

No work nor responsibility
And all the lighthearted time
To work for your dreams only
To lay and hear the wind chime

Across that pleasant grassy plain
A brilliant wind-whisked stopover
Where many dreams lie slain
Torn from the fickle mind-rover

Who contemplates in thought
Imagining, feeling time’s edges rot.

Wouldn’t it be sweet to live a dream
With a one-sided cardboard beauty
With not clearly a single visible seam
Flawless life for all the world to see

No dreams nor any future hopes
No greater light to an endless strife
No reason to climb rough-torn ropes
No obligation to live a better life.

I can shirk my duties until
The time of break is done.

But even as I stand so still,
Clock hands know to run.

I open my eyes, finally,
And looking around I see
Marathons of duties I forgot,
That after I left to rot,

Are then again within my care
Leaving me now with much to bear.

That once upon a life,
A person I knew who called
Himself the name of me
Did give his worth to
What I now do see.

I haven’t the reason to care,
None, no reason at all
To worry of happenings
In a cause I left.

But today I have
A Just Cause

To care for the past
I once let go.
To care for those things
I left to waste.

And all those opportunities
I made myself miss with
A Just Cause.

A Just Cause,
Which is a fickle thing
That lends itself to
My moment’s whim

Yet when these whims
Forever shift and change,
Just causes rearrange.

We call her promise.
A promise waiting to be kept,
Meant to last and blossom
To beautiful spring from
When seldom tears are wept.

I stand on my side of
This double-knotted obligation,
Pinkies crossed and hoping
The other endures the duration.

He calls it naivete,
That cynic over there.
I’ll do what I do and hope,
For the everlasting promise
Of fresh new change.

But before forever’s done,
Chances say I’ll be gone,
And in that double knot untied,
The lonely side left is one.