Paint by numbers.

Sometimes, I become so utterly devoted to an idea that I frame my whole consciousness around it. Not purposely, of course. It's like when you read a really good book. While you're reading it you just can't help but see the rest of the "real world" through that vane. The shade of the narrative voice echos in your own, it casts a new kind of light on the things you see around you.

Of course, you eventually finish the book. Maybe the coloration lingers for a little while, but you eventually forget. The world reverts back to its old ways and the only voice you hear is your own (unless, you know, you're crazy). It's kind of like that with ideas, too. When I say that I am an idealist, I don't mean that I have this overly optimistic view of the world, because i don't. I am an idealist in that when an idea pops into my head I become attached to it. it colors my world just like a really good book does. The only difference is, that the loss of this new form of sight isn't mutual.

The idea of a book might turn away from you, but you also turn away from it. You close the book, put it on the shelf, and leave it for someone else to read. With ideas, it's never that simple, and I'm starting to feel some ideas I've held onto for the past couple of months pull away from me. They are siphoning their color from my world before I've remembered how to see in my own shades. And even if this reality is forcing my to kill the ideal of the idea, I just can't bring myself to kill the sentimentality associated with it. And I can't stand the idea that someday someone might pick it up and read it for themselves.

I have this weird little quirk.

Well, I have many quirks, but there is one in particular that's been on my mind lately.

I am fundamentally inept at letting the people who are important to me know how important they really are. I think it has something to do with not wanting to come off too enthusiastic, or being afraid that these feelings wont be reciprocated, of not knowing how to show it, or of just coming across as "emotional".

Because, the people who are most important to me are the obvious ones, but they are also some of the people you would never guess. People I don't talk to everyday, or don't know the best. These people may never realize how much they mean to me, and that's a shame.

But that doesn't mean that they stop being important, and that doesn't mean that I don't wish everyday that I could come up with a way of letting them know.

Coping

Yesterday, I found out that someone I went to high school with killed himself. I was never super close with him, but he was always in my classes and was in general a pretty cool, talented guy. Although, to be honest, I haven't paid him much thought in a while.

But now, he's all I can think about. How long he's wanted to do it. How he did it. What things would have been like if we had been close in high school. What his friends and family must feel. How I would feel. What I would do if it were someone really close to me.

And it's messing me up.

For some reasons that I don't understand, and for some that I don't feel like talking about here.

But it's hanging over me.