hollow

I'm convinced that we are all living a movie of our own lives.

Character traits used to be something that you gleaned from social interaction.

That delicate touch and go where you test their humor with a joke

ask questions and quietly await their time to share

the battle of determining pecking order that occurs within a handshake

The time that a friendship takes to unfold- the ebb and flow of contact is half the beauty of it 

You begin to treasure those that have withstood the test and trial of time

keeping the count of them like rings on a tree stump

Nowadays you have thousand half friendships

little seedlings that you tend to here and there 

with a birthday post or a direct Tweet.

You have the modes of connection but nothing really happens

Internal reflection has ceased to exist

There are now multiple modes, including this very blog, where you can blast your thoughts

into the wide nothingness that is the web

hoping to catch some attention with your verbal bait

And through these half thoughts we construct the screenplay of our lives

Yes it's nice to look back at that wistful nostalgia at my written and recorded thoughts and desires

when I was sixteen, eighteen, and twenty-one

but I find that those memories are elusive and hard to catch

the culprits either being too many nights of willful drinking 

or some unnamed syndrome where once  you write it down

you allow your brain to not to have to remember

It doesn't take much to get a sense of who I am

I've carefully chosen the bands, TV shows, movies, and activities that indicate the person I am

or at least how I want to be seen

No one needs to know about my childhood love of Animorphs books

or that I bite my cuticles raw

it's not cool to know these things

What you should see is the tastemakers indicating 

that I am a white, young, relatively intelligent female with psuedo-serious taste

We are our own publicists-figuring out our brand and sticking desperately to it

fearful of being found out

And so we walk

bobbing around each other carefully as to not make physical contact

iPod headphones in, oblivious to passersby and the world around

listening to the soundtrack to the film that scores our life story