Insomnia

What keeps me up at night?
What lets me see the dawn's first light?
What is that noise so white?

Clutches me tighter than fright
Blinds me with darkness greater than sunlight
Grows more powerful on an international flight

Darkness signals the battle's beginning
Artificial light is mine enemy
Natural light, my defeat

Every day
Every night
I dream of sleep
But it runs from me, so I weep

There was a Tree

I stepped out of my house into the crisp air precipitated by the cloudy skies and donned my shades. The sound of chirping birds filled the air along with the soft, high-pitched hum of the machines of the water purification plant in the neighbourhood. A soft pattering of sneakers on the asphalt echoed against the neighbour's poorly self-constructed cement-brick wall.

At the bottom of the hill were three trash bins from the day before, waiting, empty, for their owners to reclaim them from the curbside. Several palm trees towered overhead, showing off their looming fronds and pathetically thin trunks. A breeze blows by. There is a rustling sound among the leaves, complementing the constant but soft chirping of birds. An airplane flies overhead in the cloudy domain of the sky, filling the world with its humming engines, a backdrop for nature's music.

Creatures rushed into their havens underneath the brush as I passed by, looking through the leaves of their shelters at the unknown creature walking along the street. It was as though I had wandered into a tropical forest. There were strange plants all along the sidewalk: a plant that possessed a figure comparable to that of an artichoke and another that appeared to be a scrawny mockery of a Christmas tree. As I continued my excursion through this "familiar" neighbourhood, I saw a tree.

There was a tree on the sidewalk. An otherwise ignorable existence except for its awesomeness. Standing in at possibly fifty feet tall, its branches extended many times the diameter of its trunk. How can such a beautiful behemoth of nature be the result of a seed no larger than the size of a pebble? Its rustling leaves an instrument in the orchestra of nature. The knot in its trunk a scar from long ago. The grooves in its trunk the wrinkles of old age.

As I walk on, all nature passes by, and is soon forgotten.

Such a Thing

Something happened on Thursday.

I was talking to a friend with whom I haven't spoken to in a while. She was having problems with a "former friend" of hers. Amidst the conversation, near its conclusion, she said something to me that I do not wish to repeat in its entirety. The gist of it was that she used to think she was a good person, but I inadvertently made her feel like a bad person.

Now what was that? I hadn't said anything to hurt her. I was trying to understand her situation and maybe try to help her deal with it, that's all. I think it was the way I tried to explain to her why I did things the way I did them in a situation quite similar to her's.

It was because I was "too good."

When I first thought of that, the idea puzzled me. How could someone be too good? It didn't make any sense. Was such a thing possible? But I soon realized the truth of it: my being "too good" made others feel something along the lines of inadequate or sub-par. Then I realized something else: I had been doing this to my friends for a long time. I recall a time when I took the May SAT II with another friend. Later, when the scores came out, I asked her what she had scored on her US History SAT II, but she wouldn't tell me. She didn't want to tell me because she thought I would make fun of her score because it was too low. But in reality, I really didn't care about the level at which the score was, I just wanted to know the score.

But, I'm not a good person. I'm nowhere near close to the definition of "good" or "righteous" or "holy." I only have an 80% in my AP Bio class because I'm missing 6 assignments, 5 of which are labs. I only have 93% in AP English when I could have well over 115%, but I don't because I'm missing 13 assignments. I don't know what I have in APUSH, but last time I checked, i had an 80 something percent. I'm lazy and I'm just coasting by on the bare minimum. That is not the definition of a good person. Whenever a person says that I'm good, or in this case, too good, all it does is kill me inside.

It doesn't matter if people say that I am "good," or "too good." Either way, it's not what I am. I will never be "good."