Unfamiliarity in Familiar Places

  Looking for something important lost in a familiar place makes everything seem alien. Everything you see that holds a memory is an enemy as long as it is not what you are looking for. The living room, the basement, the bedroom: all can be ignored until you find what you need. And if everything has changed within those places? It can make one feel like a stranger in his own home sometimes. Chairs, lamps, even rugs; gone. And what you're looking for? Lost forever. It's what I'd imagine searching through rubble might be like, on a much smaller scale. You fear what you might find at the bottom, but you also fear what you won't. You don't want to start removing the unimportant junk in your way because you know what you are looking for isn't at the bottom anyway, but sick guilt tells you to look, compelling you forward just in case. And it's not. And you can feel at ease for just a second knowing if you hadn't looked, it would have meant you would find it somewhere else. Then you realize it's still lost, and it's probably somewhere you won't find.

 During a role-play I was doing for my Crisis Counseling Techniques class I used my house situation. I'm going to move past the whole first world problems via Perks of Being a Wallflower: "I'm not going to tell my children that their problems don't matter just because there are people out there much worse off than they are because their problems are still important." Or something like that. I don't know. I can't find my copy, but that's not what I'm looking for. I'm sure it's in a box somewhere.
 
  Oh the boxes. In an effort to get rid of clutter and make the house nicer, my dad has put everything in boxes. Fucking boxes. He's replaced all of the furniture and took away the rug. The house looks great. Some might say we've moved into upper middle class. I don't know. I just know I've lost my home. This isn't mine anymore, it isn't ours. It's my dad's. And that's great. He's got a home. He deserves something nice, he's been so great to me. But when all is said and done, this is no longer my home. I might call it home out of habit, but it's a way-point. My dorm room isn't my home either. It's certainly not permanent by any stretch of the imagination. I've referred to it as "home" before, but I think I call "home" wherever I'm heading to live for the next amount of time at this point. I could move out, but I can just imagine how drab and impersonal an apartment would be. My dorm room is a good example. As long as you use removable adhesives, you can put up posters. Everyone who comes into my room wonders why the walls are so bare. Last year was even better, because my roommate had all sorts of posters/pictures up, and my side was blank. I had dark brown sheets and pillow case, and a big blank wall. Visitors used to make fun of me, so I put up a world map my sister gave me from Doctors Without Borders. I don't think I ever actually looked at it except for the slogan at the top. It fell down a lot. I think I just used Google Maps anyway.

  The point of mentioning the role-play was that I mentioned how I felt I was losing a lot of my childhood and memories when my dad started transforming the living room where I've grown up for 18 years (he's spent about two years fixing things up). When it was over, one of the girls in the group of 6 told the guy role-playing a counselor, "You did a pretty good job, but I feel like there was something missing. It seems like his mother was in the picture at some point, but now she's not. You might have wanted to try and broach the subject. Now he's smiling, and I right?" And I was smiling. She got it. It's become a game for me at this point. A dark little game I don't want to play but had no say in the matter. How fucking droll. This game I play is called How Long Before Someone Realizes My Mother Is Dead? Haha, you won, that's why that guy seems slightly off-putting! He's got some pretty interesting insights on things! Joke's on you, it's the product of emotional trauma and spending over a year in mental isolation! Gee, you survive pretty well on your own! Boink on the nose for you, it's because I have an awful time trusting people after I had very little support following her death from the people I trusted and now expect people I need to drop out of my life! Whee! And that little grin I can't stop is knowing you're trapped in a corner not knowing what to say other than "I'm sorry" and for some reason it feeds a slightly terrifying sadistic pleasure that's come out of nowhere. Hilarity ensues.

(Thought while writing this an hour ago: A scab won't heal if you keep picking at it. Funny though because either way it leaves a scar.)

  But the sadness is nice sometimes, you know? I write the best when I'm like this, specifically my photocomic, and I enjoy A Softer World exponentially more.

Speaking of which, the banner for the comic when I was getting the link was:

Which is just fucking perfect.

  Wouldn't it be awful if this was just a giant advertisement for my photocomic? I've officially decided to call it A Happier Kind of Sad (you can refer to it as AHKoS so as to seem super cool!). Kind of like how (SPOILER ALERT) Remember Me was a giant plot of family problems, only to be concluded with the main character in one of the twin towers on 9/11. But that's a whole different discussion that I think will get quite messy. But it's okay because that's not what this is. Or at least, I hope not.

  The moral of the story is that I can't find my grandfather's fucking Greek Fisherman hat anywhere and 5 years ago someone told me I looked stupid wearing it without a beard and now I have a beard and I can't find the hat anywhere.

  And now all my friends probably think I'm actually crazy because I read about serial killers looking for their humanity because I've lost my own and I want to know I won't become a monster too. Maybe. I don't know why, but that's the best I got for now.

 This will become that ridiculously emotional post on the blog of some kid that I should delete (the post, not the kid [parallel structure needed!!!]), but it's a reminder that this is who I am underneath and thus it'll stay I suppose.

  At least I feel a bit better now. But it was a really important hat and I miss it.