Also

I feel like every I know has changed. I realize people change. I know this. But it hardly ever seems as if they change for the better. The people I know who I thought were destined for greatness have settled for mediocrity. There is no passion in these people, nothing that consumes them anymore. There are their boring lives in their boring houses in their boring neighborhoods. There are their boring jobs where they don't realize they're just another cog in the machine, expendable and utterly replaceable. There's nothing for me to relate to anymore.

All the dreams, all the passion, all the color is gone from their lives. They live paycheck to paycheck, in hopes of nothing more than to pay their rent or their mortgage, have a place to sleep, food to eat, and more, more, more of their boring existence.

I don't know these people. They are not the people I care about. They're clones of every other human being on the face of the planet, content in their mediocrity, convinced that they need nothing else. No more knowledge, no more real human interaction, no more dreams or vivacity or anything. They've found their bubble, and they've insulated themselves in, and that's it. They care of nothing outside their bubbles, these closed-minded people, and I realize I'm an oddity to them. Something exotic, something mysterious, a dreamer, someone who's still full of the same passion that might've once consumed them.

But to them, there's something wrong with me. If it were an earlier time, I'd be locked away in a nuthouse or even burned at the stake. I am the one who makes them question their shitty existence, if they even have enough mind left that hasn't been numbed by their bleak, gray lives. Otherwise, they think nothing of me. Either way, I am something to be pushed away, to be ground underfoot so that I may become like them, to be reviled, to be hated. All because I want something more than their pathetic existences.

It's hard realizing this. It hurts. It hurts that the people I've known, loved, laughed with, cried with, and treasured are all gone. Now there are only shadows of what they once were, but it seems as if they're all ok with that, at least superficially. They can't carry on a conversation about anything anymore. There are no thoughts in their empty heads. If they thought, they might realize how desperate their situations are, and we can't have that. And so we bump along, close to one another in proximity, but not in anything else. They exist, complacent in their own conformity.

And then there's me. I live. I still see everything in color instead of in shades of gray. There is still a fire that burns inside of me. I lost it for awhile; I almost became complacent like them. But I still have passion within. I still have hopes and dreams. I still want to be surrounded with beauty and dedicate my life to my art. Most of all--and this is a huge distinction--I want to be happy, soaringly, heart-rendingly, deeply, joyfully happy, and not content. People use the words interchangeably, but there is a world of difference between them.

And so for those people, I leave this poem by Clare Rossini, which I've loved since the first time I read it, when I was 16. It's fitting, I think.


Valediction

Your Mozart is not my Mozart anymore.
That hour has passed,
The harmony that thrilled us, the false sun
We warmed to. Your days are yours now
To pile up like dry leaves in your past, from which my past

Has broken off, diverged, gone
Into another woods altogether. No, I cannot make my way over
To you, to touch your face or other parts, not even those whose ache
I can feel at the great distance
That has fallen between us like a world.

I have measured the hours and days since we touched.
Each one healed as I handled it. In them grew this voice, still singing
Out of doubt and longing, a stricken sound.

You are struck from the record. Your hand, absolved
Of my flagrant touch. Dismantle the room
Where we've become marble figures, a white
Sculptured kiss; where we sat listening
To your Mozart, not mine.

Clare Rossini