Tiny Metal Bars

[illusionofjoy]

Last night, around 1:00AM, I noticed Darkling online. I sent her an IM, asking if she wanted to meet me downtown. She said that she'd like that and we agreed to meet at The Bagelry. Though the sign out front states that the store is open until 2:00AM, they decided to close early; allegedly upon seeing us walk towards the door.

I'm fully aware that I shouldn't be spending money, as I've yet to find a source of income and I have a big move coming up in ten days. However, I just wanted a fucking cup of coffee - and I don't think that's too much to ask for! With The Bagelry closed for the night, Darkling and I made our way to Potsdam's only 24-hour convenience store/gas station. I got my coffee and Darkling and I settled in to converse for a couple of hours.

The two of us actually sat in that store for quite a while. The time that my coffee cup was empty grew to outnumber the time it had spent full and the night clerk began eyeing us. It was a look that I rarely see from store clerks, as most of them don't seem to want to make direct eye-contact.

This one, however, seemed to be calculating in what manner would be best to ask the two of us to leave. Considering the low traffic that any shop open at that time of night in Potsdam receives, to ask us to leave would have been asinine at best. It was not like we were taking potential seats away from paying customers. There were no other paying customers, save a random truck driver every forty minutes or so.

Not in the mood to consume any more shit for the night, the Darkling and I departed before the clerk could shift from looking to hovering ever closer, in further attempts at non-verbal communication. I didn't feel like going home last night, so I followed Darkling back to the campus to hang out in her dorm for a while.

As it were, I ended up crashing there. Despite hating SUNY Potsdam with nearly every fibre of my being, I somehow keep ending up back at the place. Granted, there are few other places to go when I have a friend who is attended. Aside from that, I think they just don't want to release their grip on me. It is as if they didn't make me miserable enough while I was a student there. I still get both traditional mail and email from the place. The email tells me that I should update my student webpage so that "the school looks good." Meanwhile, the letter I received today is another reminder that they expect me to repay my student loans. Can these stuffed suits not wait for six fucking months to start harassing me? Bah! If anything, they should have paid me to go to that blasted school!

As of late, I've reached levels of frustration that, if metered, would surely be in the red. Living with my family does not help this at all - particularly since my mother is the type of person who likes to poke at open sores. Nearly everything she says to me has a discouraging undertone of "how could you disappoint me," "you're not good enough," "everything bad in your life is your own fault," or "if it's not done my way, it isn't being done the right way." Apparently her idea of "helping" is to aid me in stumbling down the long, jagged path towards severe mental illness.

I have seriously considered denying her a forwarding address. While it's true that her inability to drive for long periods of time combined with the fact that Pittsburgh is nine hours from Potsdam makes the potential for surprise visits highly unlikely, I'm of the mind that I may want to go above and beyond the call of duty to keep her from meddling in my affairs once I've departed from what she so vehemently refers to as her house. When I get a place of my own, I want it to truly be my own (at least as much as possible).

Yesterday masochistmonkey looked at two apartments for me in Pittsburgh. He'll be looking at a third sometime today and hopefully a fourth before the week is out. Of the two he's viewed thus far, they both seem like nice places, though I am leaning more towards one than the other (per his advice). Time will tell where I actually end up, however.

I have this lingering fear that I am setting myself up to be the prime contestant in a cruel game. I call this game "trading cages." To me, Potsdam has become a cage of approximately four square miles. I can walk anywhere inside of this cage, but moving outside of it is a sentence for unpleasantness. If I borrow a car, the cage gets a little larger - perhaps as large as the distance to the next town over.

The point is this: no matter where I go, my resources will be limited and if I get trapped somewhere by my inability to transcend the conventions of society, then where I live becomes my personal prison. I can move about inside of it within reason, but I can forget about ever moving outside of it. In this school of thought, it's not so much the municipality itself that is the cage, but the socio-economic status of the prisoner. For me, Potsdam is a metaphor for being towards the lower end of that ladder; the cage is smaller.

One could say that there is no such thing as escape. It may just be that some cages are so much nicer and larger than others that one forgets about captivity.