Eliza Bennett
August 03, 2012 12:12 AM
I never come here anymore when I'm not using fuzzytime by Eliza Bennett
Eliza wanted to be alone, but it was habit not to spend a moment longer in the dorm room than she had to, and she knew it was better to stay in public anyway. It was what it was, and that meant – here, where anyone could walk up at any time, where there was even less privacy than there was at home, which was really, she thought, saying a lot – she had to hold it together as though this was what she’d meant to do all along.Even though it so totally wasn’t. She sat down on one of the couches and pressed her fingers to her temples before raking them back through her dark hair, which was just falling down around her face and over her shoulders today. Getting up in the morning had been getting harder lately, the closer the things she was nervous about got to her, and this morning had been one of the days when she settled for looking decent rather than fabulous, barely spending forty minutes getting ready. Appropriate, she thought, for a day when she signed up to be a stage hand, working to produce other people’s performances rather than putting on something herself because she couldn’t work up the nerve to go forward with anything she thought of or to ask someone else for ideas, and in doing so conceded a defeat.
Every time, too, it was the same. She didn’t know what was wrong. She was not incompetent, but…she kept being incompetent. She knew what things were, she knew what she needed to do to secure her position and therefore do what she was supposed to do…and yet she never did it. Ever. No matter what, or how badly she needed to do it. She just didn’t have the nerve. All the thoughts about what could go wrong, how it could backfire, how even some small detail that no one would even care about could slip up, and then…she did nothing.
Everyone knew that no risk meant no reward. The only way to get anywhere, to do anything, was to take a risk, to accept that it wasn’t going to go right every now and then, and she couldn’t do that. Why couldn’t she do that? People who never even succeeded at all could do that, sometimes – sometimes to the point where she thought anyone would agree they were being stupid about it – but she couldn’t. Which made no sense whatsoever. She’d been told she could and was to do anything since birth, practically, been taught specifically how to go about getting things, knew what would work….She wasn’t even going to be able to look at her father this summer, assuming he was even willing to let her after this failure.
Picking up a magazine, she pretended to flip through it and go over articles about which second-string socialite had been seen out with which other one, really all tangled up in her private little miserable ball of disgust and self-pity.
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Eliza Bennett
I never come here anymore when I'm not using fuzzytime
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Eliza Bennett
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