Ashley (aka maddy ashy aka ashoftomorrow)

shaley @ 2009-10-12T13:35:00

2009-10-12T18:05:48Z

When I was in 7th grade, I took the same bus as this kind of creepy, tall, physically imposing guy. He wasn't really traditionally weird, he had a bunch of friends and could pretty easily fit in with the preppy kids at our school but something in his eyes always made me uneasy.

One day I was minding my own business on the bus, listening to music, when he sat next to me and started touching me inappropriately. I asked him to stop and tried to push him away but he was much bigger than I was and he kept on doing it, no matter what I tried to do.

I was beyond frightened. I realized that the only way out was getting off at the bus stop so I resigned myself to waiting for that. When we finally got to my stop he tried to keep me from getting out but I was somehow able to muster up enough strength to push my way out.

I was so relieved. But I was mistaken because he had gotten off at my stop and h started following me home. I sprinted home and locked all the doors. He got there not even 30 seconds after I did and started pounding on the doors and shouting, calling me a slut and telling me to let him in. I was paralyzed with fear but eventually he went away.

I never told anyone what happened but I stopped taking the bus after that and he happened to move away not long afterwards.

Fast foward to 3 nights ago. Seven years later. I pulled up to my neighborhood 7-11 to get a soda and a sandwich. I look over at the car next to mine. It was one of those cop cars that are made to look like a regular car and who do I see? That same creepy guy, in a cops uniform, getting ready to back out of his spot.

I sat in my car and cried and cried.

shaley @ 2009-09-26T20:19:00

2009-09-27T00:41:03Z

I'm having a terrible day today. I guess there hasn't been all that much wrong with my day, in that not really anything has gone badly but I've had almost no human contact all day. The little I had, during an early morning class I'm taking, left me feeling worse rather than better. The complete lack of interaction with basically anyone today has given me a lot of time to question myself and what exactly I'm doing. Where am I going? How do I get what I want out of life? Why do I always feel like everything I want is just out of reach? Why in the fuck don't I have friends anymore?

I'm thinking about taking a shower and going out to see a movie alone or maybe drowning my sorrows in a few beers before I head to sleep for the evening. I don't want to face what a piece of shit I've become.

shaley @ 2009-09-22T16:04:00

2009-09-22T20:49:46Z

I've been feeling so weird lately and I'm pretty sure that's why I've finally started writing in this journal again. I need a place to write down how I feel at a given moment because these feelings are all so fleeting and unfamiliar to me. I don't think that I can actually give a name to most of these sensations and moods but I'm hoping kind of doing the stream of conciousness thing might help me be able to capture the way I'm thinking and feeling, my hopes and fears and secrets. I think my ultimate hope would be to be able to read them again, however long from when I write them and be able to feel the same way.

Who knows, maybe this desire to record everything is just a weird sensation itself and it won't last but I hope it isn't. I've been longing to return to the way I used to feel about certain things/people/situations but those feeling are lost now because other, more painful and far less desirable emotions have taken their places. If I can just maybe put a little of myself into everything I write then that little itty-bitty piece of who I am will survive in text-form even if it doesn't stay the same inside me.

And on the more practical side of this actually-using-livejournal-as-a-journal business, I need to work on my vocabulary. I've had a few compliments lately about my intelligence (not that I didn't before, it was just usually accompanied by a "but ...." ) and it's really called attention, for me at least, to my extremely poor vocabulary. I'll sit and think about all these social and political and personal issues and I'll develop my own philosophies but I can't express them to other people because of the almost disgustingly short range of my vocabulary. So, that's a problem. And it needs to be fixed. With lots of reading and writing and dictionary.com synonym searches.

i don't think i have any more to say. it's amazing how i can write so much while saying so little.

shaley @ 2009-09-22T15:27:00

2009-09-22T19:52:51Z

So. I'm not going to class today. Which, in the long run, is going to suck but GOD, I'm not feeling it today. I'm feeling like sitting at home and drawing and setting up the Wii that I've let sit in the basement since I moved back home at the end of last semester.

I'll probably spend the whole time setting it up wishing it was a PS3 or an Xbox360. Maybe I'll watch a movie. Maybe I'll read a book. Maybe I'll text a friend and we'll have lunch or see a movie or smoke something. Maybe I'll finally work up the courage to actually call the guy I've been pining over. But class, that's a definite no.

shaley @ 2007-02-17T23:18:00

2007-02-18T04:27:14Z

Who knows, maybe this time next year I'll have something real to say about my life.