Sometimes the only thing between me and suicide is the fact that  I don’t want my parents or friends to come up here looking for me and see the squalor in which I’ve been living the past few weeks. Dirty clothes everywhere, mixed in with schoolwork and a travel mug and all sorts of shit. Sheets that haven’t been changed since late July with blood and marker stains.

Other times the only thing between me and suicide is sheer laziness: I am too lazy to go and get pills from other parts of the house or too lazy to cross the room and find sharps hard enough to dig in deep or too lazy to find a way to describe the particular dress in which I’d like to be buried.

Other times the only thing between me and suicide is vanity. I don’t want anyone to see my skin in its current state, and I doubt that it’s easy to put makeup on a corpse.

Other times the only thing between me and suicide is the fear of failure. I don’t want to go back to the hospital and if I do it wrong that’s where I’ll end up.

Very occasionally but honestly less often than all the above the only thing between me and suicide is the image of Leah or Emily crying, after. I can’t imagine Anna or Mary or my parents or sister, though. They’d all be fine eventually, anyway.

i dreamed i knew the secret code.

Dry mouth, dry lips and the water seems to make me dryer. I don’t know what this is [panic anxiety depression] but I don’t like it. I’m riding it out with water and music but this is giving me a headache, sharp jabbing pains in the brain. I don’t know why she worries. She’s allowed to go off in an almost-panic with a simple “i need to go lie down and take deep breaths” but i’m not? Just because I almost killed myself once does not invalidate my needs to be by myself sometimes, semi-healthy needs. Sometimes I don’t feel well and even the woman I love is not what I need and she needs to deal with that. Love is no panacea. My eyes and legs are tired, my mouth and skin are dry. Everything is hot. Drink more water. It’s not cold enough but for really cold water I need to go downstairs, or have it be winter. It’s still summer, or at least the ground still holds the summer’s heat, and the pipes are still full of just-cool-not-cold water. “on the last day of jimi hendrix’s life he poured himself a glass of water. He put four ice cubes into the glass. There is nothing like cold water, there is nothing like cold water.”

My stomach is full of room-temperature water and I still feel dry and dull and a little bit– wrong. Talking would make me want to hurl [vomit, throw things] and so I am not talking. Input from the outside when I am in certain moods is always incorrect. I have to stay inside myself and my bubble. My music and my words and my body and my bed. My is a term I use loosely. I did not pay for these things or find them or make them (with the exception of the arrangement of the words) but they are mine nonetheless. “Something can be fact and be an absolute lie, and something can be made up and be truer than the truth.” So too with the concept of possesion, of ownership.

My eyes and legs are so tired. My words are so tired. The skin on my hands is oddly dry, a fact of which I become acutely aware when I bend them to type, especially my left hand. My teeth embed themselves in my lip when I write and because I am dry they stick when I open my mouth. I think at this point gallons of water could not cure me. I think I am a human desert – but the most beautiful thing about the desert, after all, is that somewhere, hidden in it, there is a well. Where’s the well?

pink and salty.

I lick my lips and feel the split place they bled earlier (she was here, she was here!).  I shift my body and the residual moistness between my legs makes the fabric stick (she was there, too). My eyelids droop from waking up in the night and chomping as efficiently as possible on granola bars (shh, she’s here) and I think about koosh-ball trees and shallow clear cool oceans and old women wishing and little girls blowing bubbles and soft butterfly kisses on every inch of my skin (oh, oh, she’s here…).

Now I’m at my mother’s computer and my dog is snuffling for a walk and my sister is watching TV and she’s not here anymore.

the weirdest thing about doctor’s offices is the composition of those robes they make you wear: paper-plastic-paper.

Today at therapy I cried. I told her about the hospital thing and she said it wasn’t a big deal, and I didn’t need to do anything rash, and though she wasn’t recommending it, if that was what I needed, well, it takes five minutes to get admitted to the hospital, and a few days can do so much good. Constant observation means everything happens faster- new meds, etc. You don’t have to be alone and you don’t have to agonize about hurting yourself, because you can’t. There’s still the pain of wanting to, but not the responsibility of guilting yourself into staying alive. And a break, from work and stress and parents and junk food and judgement.

It’s tempting.

For now, though, I am holding out. With a call to the school to keep them from breathing down my neck too much.

But if this keeps up…I’m giving in. Because sometimes I just don’t have the willpower to keep up this stupid war in my head, between the forces of sanity and the armies of my “genetic predisposition to depression.” Sanity knows I shouldn’t cut myself up or kill myself or sit around doing nothing. Depression wants me to do these things. And if it were just one it would be easy. But they’re both in there, duking it out. And they’re both me. And I always think there’s enough of me to go around…but maybe even though this is all happening in the compact space between my ears, I am being spread too thin.

one of those days.

i told my father that i was sick. he got my mother and i told her the truth: “i can’t go to school because i haven’t done my work because i feel like shit all the time and can’t focus.” so she called my therapist who made an emergecy appointment and recommended that i not be left alone, as i told her on the phone that i had been self-injurious and suicidal “only all the time.” so my father is staying home from work with me, and i’m not allowed to stay in my room, i have to stay on the couch. he’s watching t.v. in the kitchen and being genial, but i can sort of tell that the not-exactly-resentment has been seeded inside him, and is slowly growing. if i keep this up it will be bad. i want to feel okay again, not like i’m using all my energy for the sole purpose of convincing myself that i do not want to be dead and that it is bad to hurt myself. i hate that this is eating me up.

cherry and i talked once the other day about how sometimes it seems like it would be so much easier to do something drastic and rash, and be put in the hospital, and get a break from it all, instead of constantly feeling shitty and having to deal with real life, too. either way it fucks your future. either you’re out of school, or your parents think you’re too unhealthy to go away to college, or whatever, or you are too much a mess to focus. i know for a fact this is bringing my grades down, and all my drive to do well, or care. i know for a fact this is ruining my friendships.  i wish i believed in god enough to think some solution might miraculously appear if i prayed hard enough, suffered long enough.

and since i am stuck in the living room, i cannot listen to conor, he who understands the painful subtleties of my life…>.<

we have built this ship in a wine bottle.

I am this close to crying every second. I haven’t been eating much and I’m not hungry, either. Today I have eaten: lucky charms, one swedish fish. I don’t know what to do because I can’t focus long enough to read half a page. I certainly can’t write and I spend too much time talking to Leah as it is (it’s so easy) and I’ve been “cleaning” all day which is code for “not doing anything.” and I got a tumblr but I feel guilty angsting too much over there because … I just do. So I’m back here and I keep having trouble thinking because all I can think is “iwishiweredeadiwishiweredeadiwishiweredead” which isn’t the same thing as being suicidal which isn’t the same thing as not having anything sharp in my shower-hour and being sad about it.

I just keep curling back up underneath the blankets because it’s safe there.

“I wanna be the surgeon that cuts you open, and fixes all of life’s mistakes; I wanna be the house that you were raised in, the only place that you feel safe; I wanna be your shower in the morning, that wakes you up and makes you clean.”