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2003-04-05 - 12:12 p.m. the other day i was sitting in the kitchen, watching my brother eat ramen noodles. we sat quietly--he wasn't paying any attention to me except the occasional comment & i just kept looking at him. he was wearing his glasses although he's normally a contact-wearer, and we looked even more alike than ever. he has full red lips & moves gracefully, gratefully. i was looking at him and i was very glad to know him. sometimes i feel like a cute teenage boy; sometimes not. he told me that he was going to join the army if "we" get bombed again. meaning america. i can understand dying for new york, almost, but not this country. the idea of him shaving his head & being trained to kill makes me put my head in in my hands and keep it there for long periods of time, not looking up. i don't know if he'd really do it; he makes dramatic statements all the time & never goes through with it. like me. been obsessing over mixtapes lately. i found one that a friend had made for me in eighth grade, from a cd that she'd gotten for free from contempo casuals, of all places. her stereo was so bad, the guitars are so tinny & abrasive on every song. this is awful! my mom would always yell, and i would defend this tape to the death, screaming. it was so important. there's this one song by the poster children, about a boy who sees another boy at the beach and falls in love with him, gets through high school simply by the fact that he knows the boy is going to be at the beach, every week. a stranger. "i am on the beach/looking for the feet that stole my heart from under me". half of me was convinced that nobody was ever going to fall in love with me, even when i was older & my skin wasn't quite so oily, and the other half was utterly convinced. i would listen to it every day. i am listening to it now, now that no song can ever be enough, not like it was in junior high when i could feel it seeping into every pore in me, feeling like i could float away on it. running through the streets of manhattan listening to it the other day i realized that the first line is "looking for the THIEF that stole my heart from under me", not FEET as i had always thought. that makes me like it less, but maybe it's just because i'm older now, because i am in love, because my mom doesn't even live with me, because my skin is still oily but i don't ever retreat to my room & listen to songs, only getting up to hit rewind over and over and over again as i stare at the wall & wish she would notice that i was alive.
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