Feeling: detached
Listening to: Matt Caplan, Wither
Reading/Watching: Michael Cunningham, The Hours

Do you ever feel like you are not actually in your world, merely of it?

On certain days, there's this detachment I feel. It's more than "Is this my life?", it's "are these my hands" "is that my voice" etc. I'll look in the mirror and wonder when "me" became that creature there, with the small, dark eyes and the wide cheekbones.

I find myself so intensely idle, waiting for the school year to begin, that I spend far too much time examining everything around me, like watching a movie I saw thousands of times as a child, and then re-visiting it ten years later, hearing the sounds like d�ja vu but deriving entirely new meaning from the words.

It's like looking at a picture book I haven't touched since I was three, and realizing that the little black bugs at the bottom have been words all along.

Except this feels like twenty years of illiteracy, twenty years where I didn't truly speak the language. I look into the mirror and still honestly expect to have that feathered style with the bangs from when I was eight. I open my closet and look for the purple Easter dress that I know my mom gave away to the church clothing drive twelve years ago.

I suppose it comes from living in this house, where our childhood grins are on the walls, and the most recent photo they have of me is my highschool graduation picture.

In the long evenings, when I can't stand it in the house, I walk around the neighborhood until my calf muscles ache, taking in all the new houses, noting which ones have changed color, realizing the little dog that terrorized me when I was a brownie girl scout selling cookies is long gone. And still, the memories are so strong that I look at my own silhouette on the pavement and glance behind me to see whose it is.

It doesn't help that I'm reading a book which comments on three women's lives in such a distant manner. They are in their bodies, and yet part of their consciousness is leaning back, following it like a documentary. Their lips say what should be said in the proper situation, instead of what they're truly thinking, which is somewhere far distant from that chair, in that room, in that city. They play their own lives like actresses, because they don't think their true selves could manage it like everyone expects them to.

I've found myself falling under the sway of it, especially when anyone from my present life calls, tugging me back toward the face in the mirror instead of the girl in the photos. I mouth banalities, talking about everything without saying anything at all, and at times fall silent because the role of Katie is exhausting.

I begin to wonder if all my friendships are even friendships at all, whether they're people I truly love to be with, or whether it's a sense of obligation because obviously, one must have friends, right?

I have nothing interesting to say. And unless I script myself into being a fascinating person, unless I imagine my life's events bigger than they are, projecting them on a movie screen, I will never have anything interesting to say.

Today I woke up, showered, watched TV, talked to my "boyfriend," and played on the internet. That was my life today. No wonder I keep hoping I've been transplanted here by some mistake.

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