[Hello. So as of now, there are eight parts to the story of 'The Glade,' the one there with Ernest and his two kids and how he tries to avoid reality at all costs, etc etc. This part is one I re-read recently and thought was interesting, so out of completely nowhere, here is part IV of the Glade.]
‘Your eyes have become my darkest reserve.’
Julie lies on her bed, writing this same statement over and over in her notebook, trying to breed some sense of understanding of her situation of life. Truly, at the age of fifteen, she knew she was much too young to completely understand life and all its melancholy complexities, yet she still strived to, though inferior to the older family members, who would scoff at her irritable adolescent psychobabble. What her older cousins would disregard though was her overachieved IQ level for a girl at the age of fifteen, and her ability to articulate her thoughts clearly enough for them to be understood. And at the age of fifteen, Julie had been under the impression for quite awhile now that not only her life, but that life itself is overrated. That, and that she was a genius.
‘The drugs, the relationships, the heartbreaks, the drama, the soundtracks, the booze, the sex, the love… It’s all overrated. It’s all a fucking joke. Everything glorified in books and movies, thrown at the youth… It’s, these people. They obsess over every detail and want to know about the glamour of being famous, of being on the edge of life at all times and never ever falling off. Of swinging mid-air from a noose, burning out rather than fading away. But they’re just human, we’re all humans, and just because they’re pretty doesn’t mean that people should treat them like Gods. I can’t fucking stand it.’
Julie wrote in her notebook. It was a moleskin black notebook bought from a local corner store. She bought it because she felt like she had things to say, and because the pages felt prettier and softer than most other notebooks. She felt that the things she had to say would one day be studied in colleges, as thematic masterpieces for the generation of alienated high school drop outs and acidic, self-mind obsessed digital addicts. But an issue with her journal, or, depending on the perspective, the genius of it was that there was no string attaching thoughts. It was merely a thought after a thought after a thought, with no clarification or moment of relief. It was pure emotion, and it was true, but at the same time, she wrote with the implications of someone, someday, reading her thoughts and thinking of her as some kind of abstract teenage genius. Did this fact itself plague her thoughts, or did they articulate them in the clearest sense? Twenty years from now, that very same question boils over between Julie’s fans and her critics, but at the time, she wrote what she felt was right.
Her journal began like this:
‘It’s the first day of summer and I already miss Winter. Just goes to prove that I can only love what I don’t have. This nuclear family, someone should really bomb it. I’m morally ambiguous, but so is the church, but no one seems tell the church that they’re dressed inappropriately at the dinner table. Somehow, everyone my age seems to rebel against their upbringing, against their religious mother and businessman-like father. Like it’s a norm to hate what you are bound to become. The slight problem with this scenario is that I was never born into religion. I was never born with pre-disposed business in my blood.
My parents were non-religious artists. My dad, a genius and failed writer, and my mom, rest her soul, a painter who painted with such wide strokes it was hard not to cry at the audacity of her work.
But where does this leave me? How do I make artistic parents proud? Everything has already been written before, and I mean everything. Every combination of words and phrases, it’s all been written. Whether it was written by Shakespeare to confuse the fuck out of high school students, or written by any of your local writers, it’s all been done. So it makes it hard to be original. Is that what they want?’
Julie’s hostilities were normal for an over-intelligent fifteen year old girl to have; her loss of place and identity, her relationship with her father and brother, but most influential, her inability to cope with the loss of her mother, and thus, the displacement of any source of loss toward her.
So, Julie wrote. And she wrote with her unknowing father worrying about her lack of self-esteem, disavowing any attention to his own.
Julie lies on her bed, writing this same statement over and over in her notebook, trying to breed some sense of understanding of her situation of life. Truly, at the age of fifteen, she knew she was much too young to completely understand life and all its melancholy complexities, yet she still strived to, though inferior to the older family members, who would scoff at her irritable adolescent psychobabble. What her older cousins would disregard though was her overachieved IQ level for a girl at the age of fifteen, and her ability to articulate her thoughts clearly enough for them to be understood. And at the age of fifteen, Julie had been under the impression for quite awhile now that not only her life, but that life itself is overrated. That, and that she was a genius.
‘The drugs, the relationships, the heartbreaks, the drama, the soundtracks, the booze, the sex, the love… It’s all overrated. It’s all a fucking joke. Everything glorified in books and movies, thrown at the youth… It’s, these people. They obsess over every detail and want to know about the glamour of being famous, of being on the edge of life at all times and never ever falling off. Of swinging mid-air from a noose, burning out rather than fading away. But they’re just human, we’re all humans, and just because they’re pretty doesn’t mean that people should treat them like Gods. I can’t fucking stand it.’
Julie wrote in her notebook. It was a moleskin black notebook bought from a local corner store. She bought it because she felt like she had things to say, and because the pages felt prettier and softer than most other notebooks. She felt that the things she had to say would one day be studied in colleges, as thematic masterpieces for the generation of alienated high school drop outs and acidic, self-mind obsessed digital addicts. But an issue with her journal, or, depending on the perspective, the genius of it was that there was no string attaching thoughts. It was merely a thought after a thought after a thought, with no clarification or moment of relief. It was pure emotion, and it was true, but at the same time, she wrote with the implications of someone, someday, reading her thoughts and thinking of her as some kind of abstract teenage genius. Did this fact itself plague her thoughts, or did they articulate them in the clearest sense? Twenty years from now, that very same question boils over between Julie’s fans and her critics, but at the time, she wrote what she felt was right.
Her journal began like this:
‘It’s the first day of summer and I already miss Winter. Just goes to prove that I can only love what I don’t have. This nuclear family, someone should really bomb it. I’m morally ambiguous, but so is the church, but no one seems tell the church that they’re dressed inappropriately at the dinner table. Somehow, everyone my age seems to rebel against their upbringing, against their religious mother and businessman-like father. Like it’s a norm to hate what you are bound to become. The slight problem with this scenario is that I was never born into religion. I was never born with pre-disposed business in my blood.
My parents were non-religious artists. My dad, a genius and failed writer, and my mom, rest her soul, a painter who painted with such wide strokes it was hard not to cry at the audacity of her work.
But where does this leave me? How do I make artistic parents proud? Everything has already been written before, and I mean everything. Every combination of words and phrases, it’s all been written. Whether it was written by Shakespeare to confuse the fuck out of high school students, or written by any of your local writers, it’s all been done. So it makes it hard to be original. Is that what they want?’
Julie’s hostilities were normal for an over-intelligent fifteen year old girl to have; her loss of place and identity, her relationship with her father and brother, but most influential, her inability to cope with the loss of her mother, and thus, the displacement of any source of loss toward her.
So, Julie wrote. And she wrote with her unknowing father worrying about her lack of self-esteem, disavowing any attention to his own.
2 comments:
This sounds familiar. Am I crazy? Whatever. I love it :)
I really like the developments of all the different characters in this piece, how you didn't just focus on Ernest but elaborated on who Julie was as well. And even though she's an angsty teenager, I didn't find it was juvenile how she was portrayed, which is really difficult to do but you nailed it completely.
And I really found myself relating to the paragraph about how to impress two artist parents. Actually, it was eerie how much like my family they are, and even how I am since I write (creepy!!). It was good. Really good.
Yeah, it sounds like it was read to us over the summer. In the library?
I like it. But now that I see it written out, I can tell it's so...Jordano voice, posted over a little girl? I don't know, maybe it's because I just can't imagine a fifteen year old girl thinking like this. I mean, what the hell has she gone through at such a young age that has matured her so thoroughly?
Anyway. I still do like it. But maybe not the right outlet?
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