Last Monday

Tell me, am I being selfish? My mum died yesterday and there are so many things that I want. I want her amber ring, her orange scarf, her diamond necklace. I want to help plan the funeral, to have a say in things, and to be informed as to what the heck is going on. I am eighteen. I am her eldest daughter. I am her firstborn child. I am so frustrated with my family. I asked my dad about the ring and he said he would think about it, my grandmum decided that we are going to display her in the scarf I so dearly love, and the necklace—I really have no problem if my dad wants to keep it. That one I truly understand. I want a closed casket because I do not want the last image of my mother to be cold, sick, and dead. I want people to look at the photos and laugh and remember how beautiful and vibrant she was when she was healthy. Everything my dad plans, though, revolves around what is expected, what other people will want.


I am being selfish. I look at that last paragraph and see myself in every sentence. I have answered my own question. But I do not understand why my grandmother is insisting on displaying my mother in the scarf I so dearly love. I do not understand why no one listens to my voice. I do not understand why my dad feels this pressure to be defined by convention. Open casket hours are typical, but I do not see why we have to be typical. The idea of my mum being on display in a box makes my stomach turn. She was sick when she died. Her hair was wispy and cut short. Her face was all sunken in. I hated it. I want to look back and back at the old photographs where her hair was long and styled and she was laughing. I miss my mum’s laughter. I hate convention.


Everyone strives to be the same and then everyone complains that things are boring. We judge people because of their differences. As much as we hate to admit it, we do. I have always been a person who hates being usual, who is unpredictable. I am not ordinary. I am glad that I am not ordinary. I think that life is more beautiful to those few of us who have discovered freedom from the realm of society and are willing to take the chance and risk the judgment that will be passed on us by the more shallow and insignificant. I think that society itself is eventually thankful for those of us who are not ordinary. From us comes art, music, laughter, philosophy. We are the thinkers, the artists, we are freedom in society. To me there is constant beauty in life, and so much beauty in people. Sometimes I spend so much time looking for good, that I forget to see anything bad. This gets out of hand because it gives me an unrealistic view of things.


I hide things. We learn how to hide as children. My sister hid in a cupboard once and got stuck. No one found her until she started crying for help. She was panicked because she might not be found and everyone else was panicked because they could not find her. You would think that instances like this would teach us that hiding is a bad thing. However, my sister continued to love to hide. I always loved games like hide and go seek or sardines, but my greatest fear was not being found because then I had two choices, I could go on hiding forever until someone found me or I died of starvation or old age or I could show myself and lose the game and my pride. Pride causes us to hide things. To a certain extent an amount of pride is healthy…perhaps I am confusing pride with self respect. I think that these things are often confused. Personally, I hide things out of a mixture of fear and pride. I was so open with so many people until I was hurt by rumors, lies, and the way people began to treat me and then I became afraid.


I should not be afraid of people. I should not be afraid of horses either. There is no reason to fear horses. However, I am afraid of horses and the truth is that most people are deathly afraid of each other. I became afraid of people because of the cruelty of a small group of girls. It made me hide things because I did not want to experience that again. We talked about this in psych class. When people withdraw like that. Faye called it a defense mechanism which she implied is typically a bad thing. Somedays I swear that I am a walking contradiction. I do not conform to the realm of convention. I am different. You can see it in the way I dress, the things I draw, the art I have scattered over the walls of my dorm room. It is evident when I speak, what I think about, in the things I do--I am not ordinary. I have a distain for ceremony. I do not care what people think about how I do things so long as they are not Biblically wrong. I have no fear of what they think...yet I am afraid to share myself with them. This is not cool, my friend. Not cool at all.


I don’t know if I accomplished anything with this rambling of thoughts, though I feel a little bit better now. I know that I should go trawling through my Bible to look for scripture to back up or negate my words, but it is late and I am distraught. When I come back here on a someday perhaps I will finish this but not now. My thoughts are all there. The things I have learned are all scrawled across this page...these pages by now I guess. Maybe I will come back and make them beautiful sometime but I think that for now they will remain in their raw state of idea.