How to Disappear Completely

I just found this on my old Desktop PC from home. I wrote it on June 12, 2005 - the summer following my senior year of high school. I copied and pasted it just as i found it. I don't know who Shawna is, but her fate is most unfortunate.

I’m never quite sure how things turn out the way they do. Try as I might to piece together a path before it is chosen or defined, I’m still stepping forward, without cause or direction, because you can’t get anywhere by standing still.

When I plan things, they tend not to happen. If a friend tells me months in advance about a show, I’ll agree to it, but often back out at the last moment. I don’t know why I do this, but somehow the day of seems much less exciting than the month’s warning. I think my body forces itself against it, because I usually feel ill. I have the frequented problem of headaches.

The body reacts cruelly to the things that are necessary to the mind. It is necessary to experience new things, to continuously alter and expand your state of mind. Stagnance is unhealthy and frightening. I can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all. An artist uses lies to tell the truth. What truth am I telling? If I just tell you what I believe to be true, where is the art? There is none, I am just wrought with pretension and pomposity. You like it, I’m sure. You really like that, don’t you?

Shawna couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Yes, she understood at this point that anything was a possibility, that we are all mixed up and know nothing of our future, or whether it is predetermined or completely random or anything else. She understood that nobody was ever really safe, no matter how aggressively they’d pounded a sense of pretend security into their uneasy brains, that we are all subject to harm and abuse or, as this misfortune had evidenced, death. But that didn’t make the news any less shocking. No human being can properly prepare his or herself for a bloodied head, independent of the body that once carried it, nestled in their lap. Under the circumstances, she reacted exactly the way a big girl would.

Shawna: “F**K!”