“This morning when I left Mom's parting words were, "Come straight home after school." Wow! Like I'm going to get stoned at 3:30—it doesn't sound so bad at that.”
The Diarist's mother no longer trusts her, and is trying to ensure she knows where the Diarist is at all times. The Diarist is expressing her resentment of the fact, and thinking that perhaps it might be fun or worthwhile to deliberately get "stoned" after school if only because her mother appears concerned that she might do so.
"It's a good thing most people bleed on the inside or this would really be a gory, blood-smeared earth."
The Diarist believes she is "bleeding inside" because she is upset about something. She goes out of her way to avoid, ignore, and minimize contact with her parents, and then blames them for not "listening" to her. She demands freedom, uses it to make immature, self-destructive decisions, and then blames other people for taking action to contain the damage she does to herself and others. She fails to live up to her own expectations of herself and blames others for having standards and expectations of her and for punishing her. In short, she is absolutely devastated at the fact that her negative behavior has negative consequences. Oddly, she believes that most other people also have this problem and attributes the same feelings and problems to others. Yet her apparent flash of empathy does not extend to caring about the damage her drug use does to other people.
“She didn't know whether she was running away from something or running to something, but she admitted that deep in her heart she wanted to go home.”
The Diarist is describing another runaway who, like the Diarist, has left home either in search of something or to avoid something. Like the Diarist, the other young woman secretly wanted to go home.
“They have accepted me as an individual, as a personality, as an entity. I belong! I am important! I am somebody!”
More than anything, the Diarist wants to be important and significant. She does not satisfy this desire in the normal way, which is to do things that are important or significant by way of their utility toward other human beings. She simply wants the recognition. She finds this sense of belonging and recognition in the company of other drug users.
“If only parents would listen! If only they would let us talk instead of forever and eternally and continuously harping and preaching and nagging and correcting and yacking, yacking, yacking! But they won’t listen! They simply won’t or can’t or don’t want to listen, and we kids keep winding up back in the same old frustrating, lost, lonely corner with no one to relate to either verbally or physically.”
The Diarist, who despises her parents and regards them with contempt, goes out of her way to avoid them. The more they try to get their message across, the more determined she is to not listen. She never makes the slightest attempt to state her case or express her feelings, but she blames the adults around her for failing to "listen". She believes her parents actually enjoy the process of controlling or hectoring her, and she feels constantly judged and evaluated by them.
