Consistancy

A girl struggles with her inner thoughts development in complexity and darkness.

She sits at the table eating potato chips. Chips are her favorite to eat at this time, despite how stale they are coming from the school. Actually, she has grown to prefer them this way. Today, the school decided to change up the flavor of the chips from plain potato to sour cream and onion. Along with the mystery meat, or if you are reading the sign above the grey mass, chicken.
The crunching of the stale chips is more than just food for Stella�" it's acts as a blockade from the noise of the surrounding students meaningless chatter. She calls these students her friends but she no longer chooses to engage in their meaning less gossip and jokes. She feels she has outgrown them�" matured significantly within a matter of months for reasons unknown to her.
The chips also act as a buffer. She eats the chips and while doing so, uses her senses the describe the chips has accurate and detailed as she can. Distracting her mind from thinking of anything other than the simplicity of the taste, smell, feeling, look and sounds of the stale sliver of powdered potato she nibbles on. "How do they feel, Stell? Think. They resist breaking but submit under the pressure of my teeth. The flavoring is obviously stronger on one side than the other. The powder piles on my tongue, refusing to moisten for a moment, creating a powerful taste. I rub my tongue on both sides of the chip and let it collect. As I chew, I spread the powder by pressing the roof of my�""
The group around her breaks into laughter and her eyes focus. Blinking rapidly to rid of the glazed over expression, she quickly forced a fake giggle. They continue their meaningless conversation. It seems they have moved from the lunch ladies desperate need for tweezers, to the discomfort of close corners with boys who have yet to discover the wonders of deodorant. She begins to eat again. "The chicken, or whatever this is, is somehow more chewy than yesterday but also mushy." She decided to stick with her stale chips and flavored water.


It is night. Stella survived another day of avoiding her mind and filling it with simple thoughts and work. She walks into her room and exchanges her Africa Arcade uniform for a sports bra and loose fitting boxers. She threw her cheetah print shirt in the pile of other animal themed shirts. Giraffe print for the prize zone. Zebra print of outside activities like the too-slow-for-a-lawsuit GoCarts, rock wall climbing, and batting cages. Supposed lion print (which is just a plain tan t-shirt) for the lions den, the snacking and puke producing area. And then there is her cheetah print shirt, which was both worn and despised the most, for monitoring the children at play to make sure they were behaving. Cheetah shirts were always the busiest. Stella discovered that a child at an arcade loose all manners, empathy, sympathy, and any other humanizing characteristics within a mile radius of this place.
She loathed the shirts. She loathed the noise. She loathed the children, or rather, these children with their puking, snotty noses, and inability to distinguish the difference between the floor and the trashcan. What can she say? It's a job and it pays well (likely due to the fact that it could be more closely defined as torture than a job).
She sat at her desk and plugged in the Christmas lights strung across the wall above doubling as a dim desk lamp. She opened her journal, found the next blank page, and began to write. She allows her mind wonder into the abyss that it had been avoiding all day. She writes of loneliness, of complex wonderings, of realizations she has come to about her life and those outside of her mind. These thoughts are infinite, or it seems because they are fresh and new and have yet to end. She only writes for 5 minutes. She is afraid if the allows herself more, then she will never stop writing and become trapped in her own mind.
She closes the journal, buries it in her bottom drawer, and slumps into her bed. Her body is tired but her mind is awake and running to compensate for being idle and held back by thoughts of chips, school papers, math problems, and arcade rules. She is too tired to contain the thoughts, but as she seeps into a darker place she bolts out of bed. She paces in her room. Suddenly stopping, she listens carefully. The only sound heard is muffled crickets and a tv from another room downstairs. She walks closer to the door. The muffles turn into the sound of a crowd cheering and a man excitedly announcing the great hit from some irrelevant player. But, that's not what she listened for. She held her breath and focused. Beneath the crowd cheering and a man announcing, she heard it�" a faint snore and she knows the source is her father.
She quickly digs out her journal and grabs a pillow. She opens her window and pops the screen out. Her hands practiced and careful not to break it. She wedges the journal between her back and her sports bra. Stepping out onto the window seal two stories up, she flings her pillow onto the roof. She grabs the roof and her foot finds the familiar brick that sticks out slightly further than the rest. She pulls herself on top of her house and walks to the middle of her roof. There is a flat area against a slight incline that she uses to substitute a chair.
Stella positions her pillow so the shingles do not touch her bare back when she leans against it and unhinges her journal from her sports bra. Finding her flashlight stowed away for nights as such, she opens to the first page and begins to read. She thinks of the day she got her journal. It was meant as a gift from her parents so she could write down all the happy and important moments of her senior year. A place to refer to light, joyful memories. At first, it's purpose was such, but as the pages turn, the words reveal a carefree girl morphing into an isolated being. Her concerns and ideas begin to grow in complexity and extend past her house, school, parties, past the town gossip, and the confines of what is physical in this world.


She can't exactly place the moment she began to change, or what caused it. All she can remember is the exact moment she realized she already had. She was laying in bed, writing furiously in her journal. She hadn't moved from the spot in hours and it was very late into the night. Her mind was alive with curiosity. She was enjoying the thoughts and the wonderings within her.  She tore her eyes from her journal and directed them to the clock across the room. 4:37 am flashed in green numbers and she immediately decided it was a mistake but confirmed it with the quick click of her phone.
"How is it this late already? How long have I been writing?" she wondered. She looked for the beginning of her entry and eventually found it 10 pages back. She closed the journal, and questioned why she had this new found desire to write her thoughts. When did her thoughts become so interesting? What would her friends think if she were to share these thoughts with them. They look like the ramblings of a crazy person. She looked to her journal and quickly dismissed the idea that she was crazy. "What am I saying? These thoughts of mine are deep and revealing. Revealing of me, of others, of life. They are the words of a curious person. They resemble words that hide behind a person's passion, music, writings, art, expression." She then decided to allow herself these thoughts she enjoyed so much, but limit her time spent writing to an hour each night.
As the year went on, the enjoyment she found pondering disappeared and was replaced by fear of her own thoughts. She found her mind wonder into deeper and darker thoughts. She explored corners of her mind she didn't wish to see. The time she allowed to write grew shorter in return. The entries now were her most complex yet and somehow the shortest.
She slammed the pages together, enclosing the miles of words she had written. Her eyes adjusted to the dark and she listened to her heart beat in her throat. Her breath echoed through her ears�" fast, shallow, desperate. With each breath, she felt her pulse slow and her breaths get deeper as they gathered in her lungs. Within seconds, the sound of gasps turned into the croaks of frogs in the nearby creek.
She laid back on the rooftop, not realizing she had sat up in the first place. Her back ached as it released its painful position bent over the pages. She breathed in deeply and let the bubbling anxiety gather in the air within her and dissipate with a pleasuring exhale. She drained her thoughts and looked to the stars.
She thinks of how she looked to them as a child. She used to think they were her friends�" that they chose her to be friends with because she was named after them. In that moment, she made the repeating realization they were the only thing that were consistent throughout her entire life. When she moved houses, they came with her. When her grandmother died, they were there to comfort her. When her mother left, they remained permanent in the night sky. As she changed, aged, morphed, they stayed exactly the same. Some nights, they would hide behind clouds but comfort was always built by the confidence that as the clouds part, the stars would be there, waiting.
She wondered about them. Again curiosity struck, but this time, the answers were not within her. She couldn't have a realization that explained space and the stars. They were just there. She wondered and did nothing to find her answers. She, like the stars, wanted the mystery to remain.

Author's Note

thoughts? feedback? too much irrelevant details?