All I Ever Knew Was Your Name [Nick Robinson]

ONE

sunroof by courtship.

Consistency.

It can be a good thing. Consistently being on time for work, school, and other priorities is nothing less than respectable. Consistently supporting your friends and family is a beautiful and selfless act. Consistently holding the trust of others and remaining honest in tough situations is merely admirable. Consistently taking care of loved ones and making sure they feel said love is unbelievably humble. Catch my drift?

While the term "consistency" is typically paired with only positive terminology, there is an ugly side to consistency, just like with many other things. Consistently being an awful, arrogant person in the life of even one person is cowardly. Consistently hating yourself for the most discrete flaws, either physical or action based, is degrading. Consistently feeding into toxic, morose energy is just horrific, and can truly put a damper on character.

See? Where there's a positive, there's also a negative. Morbid? Maybe. But it's true. And if I'm the first to break the news, I'm not sorry.

So, where am I getting at with this little vocabulary lesson? Well, I think consistency is a great thing— in moderation. However, my entire life is saturated with the constant fluidity of everything, and it always feels like I'm listening to a song on loop. As secure and stable as it may sound, it's actually quite draining.

I wake up in the morning, shower, brush my teeth, change, eat breakfast, go to school, come home, do homework (if I feel like it), go to bed, and repeat. It is a cycle that makes my life appear so balanced from the outside, but on the inside I feel so frantic and unsure of myself. After all, it's only one month until graduation, and I am stuck in an endless repeat of this dreadfully boring nightmare that is my life.

Rarely do I ever go anywhere other than school and home. It's not that I'm socially awkward or inept, I just prefer being by myself. I have friends at school, but they're the kind that I'm friends with strictly at school. We don't hang out; we group up for projects when necessary and sit together at lunch. We know just about everything about each other, but we don't hang out. None of us do. Except for Tyra and Katherine, but that's only because they're dating.

Again, my life is a goddamn dreaded nightmare.

I often compare to my life of the restless reruns of Law and Order that play on television day in and day out. Is the show any good? Sure. Except, the episodes are not as good when you've seen every single one at least three times. There's no shock factor anymore; there's no shock factor even when Olivia Benson is kidnapped by William Lewis. It's all the same. All the time.

It's May. I'm sitting outside doing my homework for U.S. History, and that's my way of mixing it up a little bit. Instead of being inside and hearing the soft roar of the air conditioner throughout my house while staring at the ugly white walls, I figure I'll listen to the birds chirping and cars driving by instead. It's an attempt at a change in routine, and for some reason it makes me feel better about the rest of the dreaded stagnancy.

"Mary?" a voice calls from the back door that led to the deck where I sit. I turn my head in response, seeing my excessively run down mother who is probably on her way to work a double shift at the hospital. "What are you doing out here?" she asks.

I shrug, feeling her look over my shoulder to see what I was doing exactly. I don't know why she even asks, considering the answer is always one of three options: homework, writing, or drawing. I know she thinks the same when I hear a sigh fall from her lips. She often asks me why I can't be a "normal teenager" like every stereotype in a movie. You know, drinking and doing drugs, partying, sneaking out, having lots of sex— all things a fifty year old woman should want her daughter to engage in, right?