Burn Right Up

You know the feeling, that thrillingly thrilled happy feeling. That feeling when everything is just going great and you're on top of the world. The feeling that (at least for me) often seems to follows a sugar rush or a hilarious moment or an impromptu dance party. You know the feeling I'm talking about. I love that feeling. It's fantastic. I seek it out. And it scares me a little bit.

There's an edge to it, a little bit of a crazy edge like you might just go off the deep end and never come back. Maybe I'm a little too paranoid, a little over-sensitive, or a little melodramatic, but sometimes I have this sense that that feeling is bound to be followed by something so awfully opposite. Like you're going to spin and spin and spin out of control.

That happy feeling comes to me in a wave, good things and good emotions building and building until it breaks and washes all over me and I just ride it. But it's a thrilled and not a content happiness, and that's where the edge of crazy comes in. It's never real, important, sense-making things, but rather small, silly things that appeal to my arrogance or sense of excitement. It's like a mental and emotional high, all these little things making me feel better and better about myself until I'm fueling my own fire, I'm sparkling, I'm flying, and then I think that I might just burn right up in a big fiery END.

Maybe I've let too many plot formulas permeate my perception of how real life should play out, but I can't shake this tiny obsession with tragedy, something I might almost call an actual belief. It's the sense that I am somehow not doomed but rather destined to tragedy. I sort of hate to say it, I sort of hate to put it out there in the universe, but I also sort of feel that it must be articulated. That my whole life has really been incredibly lucky, incredibly wonderful, and that this lucky streak must inevitably conclude in explosive fashion. There's maybe even a certain arrogance to that, in a way: it must come from identifying as the heroine of my own plot, because disaster wouldn't be tragic if it befell a minor character. A fall would only be a drop if it weren't from a great height. Maybe the proverbial pride that comes before a fall is that very specific arrogance that allows you to see yourself as the hero deserving the tragedy, and thus bring it on yourself.