Dear Diary from McKnight Road
Hey, what are you up to?
It’s not urgent, I’m just being weird. I just feel crazy, you know? I texted my high school creative writing teacher the other day. I was listening to the Magnetic Fields and feeling the looming imposition of masculine lesbian beauty standards and cultural thinness and driving down McKnight Road and I texted my high school creative writing teacher who I haven’t spoken to in more than three years “how have you been?”
…she does not care how I’ve been.
I wonder if it’s normal to feel the overwhelming urge to revisit people from your past and tell them about how you’ve grown. I wonder if that’s something everyone who “used to be” or felt repressed wants to do. I also don’t know if I’m even all that different at all. I feel sick at the thought of what I just did, even though it wasn’t some sort of moral imposition. She doesn’t care, I’m one annoying teenager out of the hundreds she’s seen in her lifetime, and here I am asking her how she is. She probably thinks that I hate college, or that I don’t have a life, and I’m not really sure what possessed me to do that besides a strange feeling of sickening loneliness. I heard a Magnetic Fields song for the first time in her classroom. I used to sit back there during the last two periods of the day because I had a study hall. Her class was watching some movie about David Foster Wallace, and I heard a song that I liked so I looked it up and it was the Magnetic Fields.
I saw them last year, I remember. I remember because it was a great show, sure, and they were my favorite band, sure, and my friend and I cried onto each other the entire show, sure. I remember it because it was the first time I’d ever been “talking” to someone. I saw my favorite band, I went skinny dipping in the ice cold river with my friends, I went to bed, and I didn’t really think anything at all about my high school creative writing teacher, whose classroom was the first place I heard the Magnetic Fields. I did not wonder how she’s been. I did not care how she’s been.
I’m just feeling weird. I just feel crazy. She doesn’t care how I’ve been, what the hell is wrong with me? Jesus Christ, was I always so annoying?