How To Say Goodbye

leaving isn't quite the same, he said to me,
as running away
if you're scared or tired of what you're scared of
well, why should you stay?
he loved to say goodbye
and always counted out the time
until he was free, to get up and leave
to learn how to breath
again


slipping out to have a cigarette with someone else that he'd never met
ask her if by the way would she like to run away
and try to forget?
or just not to stay, to leave without saying why


to get up and go
to catch the last train
to get in some car
and drive out again
to never come back this way....
and have to say....
goodbye

-paul tiernan

the fire's out anyway

I wish that I wasn't so analytical.

My (I guess) ex-best friend has dropped all pretenses of being mad at me and is instead ignoring me. I should be angry, or upset, or something, but I just can't bring myself to care. Because, if I let myself care, I will be utterly useless as a person because I will be thinking of all the many things I've done to deserve this.

I'm not so stubborn that I can't admit that I might have a thing for him. However, I'm notoriously terrible at handling matters of the heart and so, I refuse to discuss it. This refusal, however, doesn't stop my stupid head from thinking.

In the final hour of my last year in high school, I have changed my mind completely about where I want to go to school. I've completely put aside Georgia State and settled on Georgia Southern. The fact that I like rural Statesboro much better than metro Atlanta says alot about myself. What it says, I don't know.

I want everything to work out. I want to avoid a confrontation at all costs. I would prefer if we just never talked about it. That's how friendships end, you know, quietly. Not with a bang, but a whisper. I want to go to prom with the person I want to go to prom with and I want it to be great. Chances are, nothing else about prom is going to be at all perfect, so I'd just like to have this one thing. I want to go to Southern and like it, and never leave there. I want my family to be proud of me and to approve.

I want all these things, and yet, I have no idea how to make them happen. I'm sure I'll figure something out.

Hit me baby. Just one more time.

Tonight I shall fulfill my lifelong dream of seeing Britney Spears in concert. I have wished and hoped for this day throughout most of my childhood. When I was younger, I WORSHIPPED her. I had Britney shirts, Britney hats, Britney CDs, Britney lunchboxes. I was a smaller, much simpler, much happier, version of the person I am now and I wanted to be Britney Spears.

However, I must admit that I was disillusioned. I would rather die than have that kind of pressure on me now. Like Britney, I would positively crack under the pressure. I think this is why I still loved her when she was crazy. I mean, who wouldn't go freaking crazy if you had her life? Really? So what if she went to the bathroom without shoes on? Who hasn't done that? And, I have often found myself wishing that I didn't have hair. So what if Britney actually did it? Two semi-marriages and two children later, she still kicks ass. Everyone makes mistakes people. Seriously.

While on the topic of disillusionment I must also admit to another quite large mistake I have made. I'm going to the concert with a group of friends that I've known for quite a while now. I love them, I really do. Recently, me and (pretty much the only sane one of the group) Callie had a discussion regarding the past and the people we know. I realized that my opinion of those people was based fully and what I believed to be true. Not fact, but my interpretation of events. However, like Britney, I have realized that maybe what I thought was fan-freaking-tastic, really just sucks. Maybe, the people you think you know aren't all that and a bag of Dharma chips. Maybe, they're really not at all anything like someone you would like. And if so, who are the people that I created that have my friend's face but are actually completely different? Do they exist at all? Or did I just pull the blindfold over my eyes and see something that wasn't there at all? In any case, I'm highly disappointed in myself. But hey, people make mistakes.

Anyway, I will be doomed to ponder the answers to these questions whilst speeding through Atlanta traffic trying to find a parking place, and later listening to the sounds of my childhood with entirely too much of Britney's new stuff thrown in. Nothing's ever as good as the origninal, is it?