What is my life? Why am I this way? My skin it peels at the calloused edges of my fingers, it's hard and inflamed and tainted with pencil lead or hues of smudged color, muddy texture, underneath the fingernails dirt and charcoal excess, dust and grease.

Why do I stare out of windows, watch the funeral procession go by, the classy cars and then the rusty old cars. Why do I look up into windows, what is it that I want to know? Why do I spend much time doing nothing, just staring at my books, wanting to read them, but for some reason do not. Can I really hop from book to book like I envision myself doing? Why do I come home from school and work in the mid afternoon, spend some brief time with my family, then climb the stairs to my cave in the attic, to be there the rest of the night? Why are we all so busy, our palms so sweaty, fingers so tight on our pen or pencil, marking grades, writing essays, balancing the check book? The television is on, their favorite programs, the murder mystery, the game show, the latest reality flick. Where is time going? What are we doing with it? Waitressing at a restaurant. Sleeping on a ripped couch, cushions on the toy scattered floor. Folding clothes in the basement, wet and cold, thinking someone is behind you in the dark and feeling of fear.

I often fight between what I need to do and what I want to do on impulse. My room can tell you that. How does one use their time given to them, for it is given to us, isn't it? The other day, a little child ran out onto a highway and just like that her life was finished. What was the babysitter doing with her time? What happened? With everything there is an effect, a result will always come about. Maybe this is why I feel like I feel, when I think of my shortcomings, but maybe in them their is purpose and learning, for this is why we have memory, we can not delete them, they will always live in us, and maybe see something like on a bill board, or in a song, or on a license place, or in a baby's face, something that makes us remember that person or that time or that family gathering or that painting or that performance or that person we saw the other day on the other side of the train tracks or in the bus. Life is it like how the Celts interwove their intricate sacred patterns?

I know so little. I try to feel so much. I feel like I cannot keep up all the time with the life around me. Maybe this is why I didn't finish top ten in my class in high school, or maybe why I didn't become the all star athlete my family and coaches expected of me. And the artist in high school, he wasn't the same as he is now, and what I am now, I am not so sure what to think about it.