Through My Eyes: A Journal

By Liz Root

Contact Liz by emailing her at liz@vagrantcafe.com

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3/22/2002
"no more tears will i cry, are my sins...are they forgiven?" - damien jurado

a girl sits on the hardwood floor of her bedroom. she sips her newcastle as she stares out the window. the music plays, and tears drop although she doesn't know why. all is perfect in that moment. rain falls, wind blows, and the tears have already stopped. a moment is never long enough.

a girl lays on her back with her hands at the back of her head. she stares at the white ceiling. a suffocating sense of disconnection blankets her. the music plays, her roommate vacuums. she takes a deep breath and hums.

a girl incoherently voices her frustration only to be met with blank stares. the volcano is about to erupt and they don't even know it. she interrupts herself, creating a stuttering problem. words never come out right these days.

a girl looks in the mirror and wonders if she will never be beautiful. will dreams never come true? will promises never be kept? will intentions never be pure?

a girl falls asleep on a notebook with the pen still between her fingers. "so tired you could sleep with the light on, with the stereo blasting in your ears, you know you're tired when your senses fail." (238) a girl's senses are failing. a girl is forgetting how to remember. a girl is voilently hanging onto hope.


- liz r. - 3/22/2002

3/21/2002
what i've been listening to this week: ben folds - rockin' the suburbs, smashing pumpkins - siamese dream, moby - play, cursive - burst and bloom ep, bright eyes - various mp3's..mostly stuff from fevers and mirrors, 238 - regulate the chemicals, stereolab - sound dust, jeff buckley - grace, t.rex - electric warrior, denison witmer - of joy and sorrow.

i drank too much coffee this morning and now my thoughts are all jumbled and i can't concentrate on anything for longer than about two minutes. there's so much racing through my head, and i doubt very much i'll be able to communicate it.

sometimes i really feel like i shouldn't talk. to put it plainly, i'm basically the most un-eloquent person i know. (un-eloquent probably isn't a word either). i try to say something, and i stumble over my words, usually followed by, "ah, i can't explain it", and then a few moments of stuttering silence while i collect my jumbled thought processes and re-attempt to make them coherent. i'm sure when most people are finished talking to me, they wonder what my deal is. someone i know once went on a talking fast. he didn't speak for two weeks except for when absolutely necessary. he says he learned a lot about himself, and how much that usually comes out of his mouth is total crap.

stuff i think a lot of girls struggle with, and stuff i think that most guys think we're all crazy for thinking. basically...i struggle a lot with self image. whether or not i want to admit it, i'm highly influenced by the media's perception of beauty. i see old navy commercials with skinny models in the perfect capri pants or something, and think, "well, that's the goal." or makeup commercials with milla jovovich (who i think is one of the three most beautiful women ever, the other two being lauryn hill and christy turlington), or hair commercials, or whatever. i want to have the clearest skin, the straightest teeth, the perfectly flat stomach, the shapliest legs, etc. and most times i seriously believe that unless i have all these things, i will remain completely undesireable and unattractive. i should know better than to think this because i see couples all the time who are real, and who have seemed to look beyond the fact that they're not dating models. i really don't know what my problem is. i don't know why i have unattainable ideals, and base this area of insecurity on them.

completely unrelated: i hate waiting. but i guess it's through faith and patience that we inherit the promise, right? or maybe i'm trying to apply it to waiting for what appears promising. i'm sure it's all in my head. i interpret things to mean what they don't. that stavesacre line comes to mind: "keep waiting, i'll be right on time."


- liz r. - 3/21/2002

3/18/2002
i spent the majority of today in a class with about 12 other people. i am a part time secretary type at my church, so i went to take classes on the church software system. the other 12 people were all women, most of them 40 years old and up. i am 21. i was the only one who wore jeans. they were all real prim and proper ladies. so during the lunch break, i tried to find the library, but got lost a bunch of times (the class is in a city about a half hour away that is ultra-confusing to figure out), and almost got in a bunch of accidents, and cussed probably about 20 times. go figure. but i had to laugh. i mean, most days i have a pretty clean mouth, and it would of course be the day that i'm surrounded by church ladies that my mouth runs away with me.

i don't have anything important to say today, other than i literally felt like crying after all the missed turns and cars pulling out in front of me. i'm usually a decently calm and collected driver, but today was just too much. which is usually just a symptom of something else going on inside of me, and it's only a bad day of driving that brings it out. i'm not quite sure what that something is.


- liz r. - 3/18/2002

3/17/2002
what a dreary weekend. yesterday i was so incredibly bored i thought i was going to go insane. seriously. i ended up sitting in the chair in the living room for about an hour and a half staring distraction in the face, choosing not to give in to my desire to medicate whatever issue i was trying to avoid. because it was more than boredom. there was something i was trying to escape from, a rising in my spirit that just wanted to get out and forget about things. yesterday i missed omaha like crazy, because omaha is the perfect place to occupy myself with distraction, all while feeling cultured and productive.

i said i wanted to simplify my life. well, here it is...simplified. and i'm not so sure i enjoy it. i know it's only for a time, but boy...it's one of the more difficult challenges i've faced in awhile. how not to be lazy in the midst of simplicity is one thing i have yet to learn. i thought having the apartment clean every day would protect me, but in the end, it just turned into another distraction. times like this make me think a couple of months getting acquainted with mother nature wouldn't be such a bad idea.

this morning a small ray of hope came down from heaven and gave me enough faith to know i can make it through this...whatever this is. the infamous "desert" maybe? i was riding in the backseat of jessie's car today, thinking for the thousandth time since i've been here, "what am i doing here?" everything feels so far away...i'm having a hard time choosing not to live in the past or the future. the present is boring. help.


- liz r. - 3/17/2002