Dear Journal:

I’m still down. Yeah, my bacterial infections have subsided, however the adversity of depression lingers in the air like the putrid smell of a skunk. It looms over me like a cloud. It seems as though that cloud will never show me a sunny day. It will never show me the happiness of the world around me. It just constantly pours onto me.

All I do is sit around. There is nothing to do in this boring hell hole of a city and all of my friends are gone, busy, or grounded. I haven’t left the house once, except to watch Sean the other day. I just don’t know what to say. It’s like as though I’m amicable with him, yet antagonistic with others. I can be myself and he doesn’t condemn me. His bright, beautiful eyes, the curly blonde hair, the goofy smile and laugh of a child so young and so innocent. I wish life could be that way for me. Where there’s always someone there for me. To catch me when I fall. To play with me when I’m bored. To take me to playgroups to meet new people and explore new things. I never got that as a child. I got concerts here and there, but where was the catching? Where was the playing? Parents working, Grandma sitting for us, there was nothing there. If there was, it was synthetic. Nothing that was created by love, whatever the hell that is, nothing created by generosity.

There is so many times my heart has been broken into. I keep them waiting, in line, but nobody’s heart was true. Every time I gave into love, I’d always lose. I am still waiting a life time for somebody to love me. I keep thinking that I will always be lonely. Menohl hasn’t created a love or a somebody to give me what I have not yet received.

The week has been one big disappointment. Nothing done, time wasted, and depression that’s unexplainable. I dread returning to school. I face my “peers.” They’re not peers. They are pawns and pieces to The Game. Yes, some are friends and even they are pawns. The teachers, the hall guards; everyone… They are all pieces to a complex game that I have mastered at the “aesthetic” age of 17. I find no beauty lurking behind those walls. I see beautiful people, but outside beauty is only so deep. You have to be beautiful on the inside before people will ever understand you and see the real, beautiful you.

Great lengths and far distances people will travel to correct their insecurities they find on the outside of them selves. Sad, yet true all at the same time. I don’t think plastic surgery is a pathetic attempt to make a person beautiful. I just think that the wrong people are getting it. I want it myself, but that’s for reasons of health, according to my insurance company. Who the hell cares? As long as the bill’s paid, it really doesn’t matter, now does it?

Respectfully Yours,

Dustin T. McCauley, Future Doctor of Pharmacology and Internal Medicine