FINLEY

Today's word is FINLEY.

Finley

Surname
Gender: Boy
Origin: Gaelic
Meaning: Fair Warrior
Pronounced: FINlee
Form of: Fionnlagh

Finley was born last night at 10:58 pm. I have a brother. He is exactly seventeen years and eleven months younger than me. I will be eighteen in less than a month. I can buy porn, vote, make my own decisions. I wonder if Finley would be up for switching places...

I set my alarm at 3:30 this morning so that I can get up and go to the hospital early before work. At seven I feel like gouging my eyes out with a melon-baller. It's the kind of tired that makes your face ache. I have to wake up. Wake up! Finley's here. I feel unloving. I feel like I need five more minutes.

An hour later I get up and phone the father. I lie and say I'm ready to go and he shows up shortly after. I scramble to assemble myself and we drive to the hospital. He looks more haggard than I do. I'm scared I'll have to pretend he's not the ugliest thing I've ever seen. I'm scared I'll have to stop myself from gawking at his splotchy red cone head.

Finley's sleeping in a plastic bin like the kind we store nacho chips in at the cinema. He's swaddled in a sexist blue blanket from the hospital, a knitted cap on his head. He's beautiful, unbiased and unaffected by the world around him. I want to hold him. But I'll drop him. I'll be a shit sister. He won't even know my name when I come over to visit. He is the kind of thing I imagine I must have been. It's sad to think what the world can do to something so pure and beautiful. You don't even need poverty or AIDS or cancer to poison a baby. All you need is puberty. He won't be cute forever.

I hold him for a while until it's time to be nursed (he, not I). He's the most boring, yet captivating thing I've ever laid eyes on. I wonder if he's more entertaining sleeping, or if I should teach him a few acrobatics. In the cafeteria I practice calling him "he" instead of "it."

"It" is real now.
It can breathe and make little chirpy noises.
He is Finley.

I go to work. It's the local acting school. I assist with the summer camps and edit the camp videos. It's the same mediocre kids doing the same commercials, same scenes from the same movies, same slates. I find myself getting jealous over a ten-year-old's waist. I mentally slap myself. I am so pathetic. I am jealous of a child. I am the girl who should never have been let out of the womb.

Finley had it right when he tried to strangle himself with the umbilical cord. It doesn't get any better out in the real world.

INTERMISSION

Somewhere between utter boredom, overwhelming solitude, and a crashed server I resume my blog-worthy thoughts. It's been a few days. I've thought about killing myself, skipped a few meals, cried myself to sleep, wished I was someone else. Nothing special. Nothing new.

All I can hear now is the sound of a baby crying, muffled by the whirring of my weary hard drive. I'm burning CDs. I bought a discman at Value Village for twenty five bucks. Two lost iPods in two months. I am as wasteful as the money I throw away on the things I can never keep in tact.

I am the girl who has to pretend discmans are retro. Has to — like I'm poor, or something. I'm not poor. I'm just another middle class spoiled brat who doesn't know the value of money and has been raised to financially fail in the adult world.

I am an adult in 22 days.
I feel like it will take 22 years before I am grown up.

I am scared of growing up. I am scared of responsibility, failure, mortgages, family. I am scared I'll die old and bitter or young and stupid. I can't decide which is worse. I'm not looking for everything to make sense, but at what point does it all sink in? I've been alive for almost 18 years and all I have to do is look at a stop light and think so, this is how far we've come...

But for what?

What is a stop light? A laptop? A banana? A squirrel? A human being? A god? ANYTHING?
It scares me to think of how short life is and how there are no second chances. It scares me to think it's all for nothing. But it's not for nothing. It's for something. People who love life love it because it's all for something, but I don't have that something. Where's my something? And I don't mean stamp collecting or bee keeping or ballet or hockey. A real something. That thaws your soul.

So I'm scared. Always have been.

When I was younger, after 9/11, I was so paranoid of EVERYTHING that I couldn't sleep. I'd cry because I could really feel it in my bones. That was the night I would die. Then the next night. And the next night. And the... I'd hear the cat thumping about outside my door, piss myself thinking it was a burglar. Every night I thought I was going to die.

I cannot function. I am paralyzed between unripe cynicism and catastrophic uncertainty.
I am my own worst migraine. I wish I could turn my brain off.

Blip.

Off. Done. Mute. But, my dreams are no vacation. My thoughts will never rest.

"Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much"
Sir Francis Bacon.

My head if full of questions, yet I feel empty. I have retained nothing but the fear that clings to my mind and the fat that clings to my body.

I am nowhere.
I am nothing.