Music is a driving force for her, and certain songs and lyrics resonate with different parts of her being: with things she wishes were not real and some things she wishes would come to be true, regardless of their implausibility.
This is the song that slammed her in the face as she was walking up the stairs to her room at her home-stay after painstakingly finishing her home work in the main room of the house with a T.V. distracting her the whole time (...she really does not care for T.V. what-so-ever....):
("What You Own" from RENT)Since the text for the lyrics if far too long and not the main focus of the post this time, the main parts will just get broken down individually. She's obviously in Japan, and not America, but use your imagination (just like when you read a book with no pictures in it~).
"Don't breathe too deep/ Don't think all day/ Dive into work/ Drive the other way/ That drip of hurt/ That pint of shame/ goes away, just play the game""Just getting through today", and "take it one day at a time", or even "don't worry about tomorrow, it will worry about itself" are great mottos and are probably really helpful when traversing the really trying days in life; but when they become the sole functioning program wired into a person's brain (AKA Autopilot) the person stops really living. She feels like she's so busy just trying to get through life that she's not actually living it. At the moment, it sort of just seems like all she has to show for three years and a summer of college is a case of anxiety and a shattered self-image. Not that she'd rather be full of herself or boastful, but having relatively no self-confidence (or even self-respect, a lot of the time) doesn't really seem like it's the right way to being living and cherishing the time and blessings she's been given.
"So I own not a notion/ I escape and gape, content/ I don't own emotion- I rent"This shouldn't be taken to mean that she doesn't enjoy things or the people in her life: she dearly loves her friends and family and wouldn't want them to be anything but themselves. And yet, she feels that she is completely helpless in her life and the direction it's going in. She knows that she can rely on God's strength and the assurance that He has our paths laid straight before our feet. And as she loves a good intrigue, she wouldn't want to be told the punch line or any key plot elements of her story before it was time for them to be revealed (you DO NOT mess with the Tim-Space Continuum! Spoilers always lead to more unnecessary wibbly-wombly, timey-wimey non-sense...), but she can't help but feel that she's wasting everyone's (God's and her own, included) time just being as she is now. She can strike up a spark of real heart felt emotion sometimes, but more and more that emotion isn't contentedness, joy, or even hope: it's part crippling guilt, part uncalled for frustration, and part despair. And she's not a fool. she knows that "fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering" and that's the path to the Dark Side. In their attempt to help her cope with these violent mood plunges, her friends have taken to giving those moments a new persona that can be blamed outside of herself, "affectionately" called "Dark Ashley" or "Black Ashley" (hmmmmmm, wonder what the Dark Side would think of their new padawan....)
"We're dying in America/ To come into our own"Okay, so she's not dead yet! And there is nothing in her life that she can complain about considering that she has far too much for any one person to be thankful for, and she doesn't for a second want to make it sound like she's bemoaning her circumstances at all. In the words of one of her favorite characters, Edmond Dantes, from the 2002 film "The Count of Monte Cristo" :
Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. You must look into that storm and shout as you did in Rome. Do your worst, for I will do mine! Then the fates will know you as we know you: as Albert Mondego, the man!(obviously substitute out at the appropriate places. But you understand, I'm sure.)
She doesn't want a life filled with sunshine and rainbows and unicorns (ignoring the fact that for it to truly be her perfect world, there would be thunderous clouds billowing across the sky and pouring down rain as she sat inside with a cat on her lap, a book in her hand, and a cup of tea close by...). She wants to be able to say that she's weathered the storm, and that it's made her who she is. She hopes that she can one day become a person at least a little bit like who she wants to be. And in order to change and grow and to become that person (she knows it doesn't magically happen overnight), decisions have to be made, battles have to be fought, and sacrifices have to be given up. She knows. She just feels that all she's doing is fighting (with herself, school, the world's expectations...) and all she's doing is losing (any self-respect she ever had, time, opportunities...). In "dying to come into her own", she feels as if she's completely lost herself--she doesn't know who "she" is (hello, veiled explanation for third-person streams of consciousness). And unfortunately, all that leaves is the ideal "Ashley"--a young women she desperately wants to be but could never even hope to even scratch the surface. And with only an ideal, well, nothing she ever does measures up. Even if the storm decided to "do its worst", she would only be able to scramble about, believing that there is nothing she can do, for the best or the worst. And just surviving isn't living; it's a mockery of what a life could and should be.
This isn't meant to sound depressing; she just finds it very hard to articulate correctly what she means most of the time, and hates lying by always saying "I'm fine" or "I'm doing okay". She's not but she is. It isn't anything new, merely an attempt at making a concise observation.
