everyone must belong somewhere…

I am so ready to slip out quietly, quietly, softer than a candle snuffed by two wet fingertips. Take all those pills and fizzle out, or dig a blade in deep. Really how deep would it have to be? not very. at the thin part, my wrists are little more than an inch thick, and arteries are buried in the middle. I held the knife I used to cut a mango with the tip to the skin over my heart. Juliet. Just held it there – no tremors, surprisingly enough. Then I held it to my neck- not the tip but the long sharp blade. The steel is so cold and so frightening.

Frightening.

I am too afraid. My fear is keeping me alive. Fear does that. It keeps us from going into bear caves and things like that. I hate that what keeps us alive is fear. Fear. In Donnie Darko their health teacher says that every emotion sits on a spectrum between fear and love. Shouldn’t love keep us alive, not fear? Although I suppose it does. Where does misery fall? Closer to fear than love, right? But misery doesn’t keep us alive. None of this makes any sense.

The steel is so cold.

ETA I think I am going out tonight, for a long walk in the dark wetness. The cold rain can only do me good. After my parents go to bed, I’ll go out. Maybe even to that post-post-prom. cold rain and friends…this is probably a good idea. i can sneak back in early, or not. wander home and get yelled at. either way i need out, so it doesn’t matter…

stress dreams

Dreamed about my father, sort of. It was very very dark and the whole family and some others were staying in a very noir bed and breakfast. Mother went upstairs to get dad out of the shower. Heard screaming, but only barely – thought it was the television or in my head. Decided it was not, and sure enough, a pen on paper began to write by itself: “HELP ME.” I knew it was her but I didn’t know where or why or how. “Mom? Mom? Where are you?” The pen wrote again: “BATHROOM” but even as it began to write I knew and I ran. Up the stairs and she was crying on the tile floor; father was nowhere to be found. I went downstairs, down to the dark black water, and climbed in a raft-boat-box with a sister – my sister but not my real-life sister – and we floated away in the dark. We landed and crawled onto the sand, and approached a gate. There was light on the other side. We banged on the gate till a skinny man with a stubbly beard and very short hair let us in. He looked like evil-masquerading-as-good. Our father was there, with the man. He said they were office partners, or something. I told him we had to GO. So we went, leaving the man behind. I told my sister and my father that he was bad, but they wouldn’t believe me. We went back to the dark town, to the bed and breakfast, to mother and to friends. Dad slipped out of the boat and I had to save him. I asked him if he could speak, explain, and he couldn’t. I told him it would be okay, and somehow I pushed part of my mind into his and I knew everything. We were connected, the way my mother could use telekinesis to write from far away, I could telepathically understand him. I brought him in and everything was very, very dark still, and we all breathed very heavily, but it was going to be okay.

I woke up and felt like crying. It was the middle of the night still. I couldn’t cry and I was cold and I buried myself in blankets in the fetal position and felt like death. I fell back asleep and dreamed more.

This time I dreamed about school, about the Bazaar and Gym Drill and cherry and the momma cow who was Not Acting Like Herself or A Momma Cow At All. First, though, I was in a beach town, swimming in the ocean, racing a chubby boy in red swim trunks and a white t-shirt. Then the ocean was a carnival game at the bazaar. Then there was cotton candy, and snowballs, and snowball fights. Then I met up with the girls and we had to go to Gym Drill but we needed the bathroom but they kept running away from me. I told them we should use the garrett-annex bathroom so we went in there but somehow they kept escaping, running away into the weird, escher-y reality that is the middle school, laughing at me because I couldn’t keep up. They made it to gym drill and I did not. I stood at the edge of the field and cried because I could see my circle confused and dancing without me. Then the dean of students stopped the music, and said we were starting over, because too many girls had been late. I cried my way onto the field, and danced and danced until I woke up.

Woke up too sick-feeling and depressed-feeling to go to school. No idea what is going on. Too much too much. cooking dinner for the cherry bitch in hopes that she will eat something neither junk food nor diet coke nor salad. calling elena in hopes that she will explain her late-night voicemail. checking email obsessively in hopes that the boy will write back. eating candy in hopes that I will throw up. feel sick. feel overwhelmed. stress = tense muscles, irritable stomach, quiet angry mood. tried to watch buffy last night and just got pissed off because it was a shitty episode. took a bath with something which made it smell like green jello and look kind of like green jello (fabulous). wearing ninjaboy’s shirt because it is my mental health day shirt and comforting. tank top, no bra. feels good, feels like some remnant of control.

hold me tight

I woke up a while ago but I’ve been lying in bed ever since. I am a little bit paralyzed, by some combination of fear and inertia and anger and exhaustion.
I dreamed about the two girls that I love. I dreamed about being on a cruise ship with cherry, and she was wearing sunglasses and sitting by the side of the pool. I tried to sit with her but she wouldn’t let me. She pushed me, I think, and I almost fell in the water. Then I went back down into the ship and found the new york girl, but it wasn’t a cruise ship anymore, it was a ferry. She was coming here to see me, on a ferry. I was asleep-that is, the character of myself in the dream was asleep- but I was watching her too. She was very tired. She looked sad.
Somehow I met her when she got to the harbor and my father drove us home. She went to bed and I did nothing. Then I crawled into bed with her and in her half-awake state I explained to her that I love her and please can that be okay? and it was, then. She held me hand and I wove my limbs around hers, the way I do when I am cold, or loving, or both. I tried to kiss her but she spoke through my lips and told me not now, not here. So we slept instead.
We woke up and it was the future. She was at Columbia and I was at NYU and I had visited her and fallen asleep with her in her bed. The stars, as she said, had aligned. But I realized as soon as I “woke up” that they hadn’t, not quite. That I could never love her the way she wants me to love her and we could never give each other what we want, or need. I need freedom and the ability to exist in gray areas and to love and love and be a little bit irrational. She needs stability and togetherness and the ability to trust in boundaries and promises. I am the revolution (liberte fraternite egalite) and she is the Ming dynasty and neither of these things were all good or all bad, they just were different, vastly different, and entirely incompatible.

So I woke up this morning freaked out. I didn’t want to get out bed. I still haven’t really. I kept feeling like dying or sleeping for a really long time. Like I needed more medication (as if that is relevant). Like I had all these things to do and I just needed to roll over and go back to sleep. This could be “the christmas that she was so messed up that she just didn’t get anyone any gifts, and didn’t come downstairs on christmas.” I wish it could be. But I know it won’t. I know that by 2:30 I will be clean (no more obscenities on my skin) and dressed and functioning, and tomorrow I will go buy gifts, and everything will be okay.

took your life apart, called your failures art.

I am this close to giving up.

I do not know what “giving up” entails, exactly, only that it would probably involve a sudden collapse. A sudden failure to communicate, a sudden bout of even more sleeping than I have been doing, a sudden rash of scab-lines on my skin, a sudden, lengthy fit of tears and screaming.

I do not really want to do this but I don’t know what else to do. Words are so frustrating, useless little implements of nothing. Talking is boring or silly or useless at best, counterproductive and confusing at worst. Writing, lately, is ineffective. I can’t communicate or process, at least not to any useful conclusion, and isn’t that the point?

I take steps to fix things, use words to solve problems, put them together like little puzzle pieces into nice, neat sentences where the edges all fit into place, make pretty pictures of how things are. The explanations are good, the closest I’ve gotten to making sense of this, but they don’t make things better. I want to be SOLVED, the 1000-piece puzzle finally whole. Instead I have fragments, the corners, maybe, or those coincidental bits that fit, the ones you find still stuck together in the bottom of the box or that just catch your eye as you search for edges. I try to push the pieces together and just make messes. Looking through them is difficult.  It just makes things worse. I’m trying to put things together, make me whole, but I end up breaking them apart again. The danger is that I’m not really a jigsaw puzzle, not made out of cardboard. I’m a human being and when I break my skin I bleed.

I was so fine, even though I wasn’t. I was dealing, through paint and excessive sleep, but I knew it wouldn’t last. Ironically the decision to actually utilize the whole “therapy” thing, to actually attempt to ‘fess up and face things, was the last straw. Four weeks, five, months, I don’t know (not counting a couple moments of “oooooh sharp!” with art-supply-objects) but I hate this feeling of having failed. I am not giving in yet but it feels like I have given in to something.

I really want to paint or write poems or stories or be productive in some way but all I do is sleep and scream silently. It doesn’t do anything, it really doesn’t. My hands are cold.

bubble gum

We wandered the field today, and the streets. We sat in the grass by the stream at the back and we talked. I made grass-babies because I couldn’t say the words that were sitting on the tip of my tongue. I just wanted to apologize to her, to say “I’m sorry for being terrible, I’m sorry I never made sense,” but I couldn’t. I couldn’t deal with what she’d say and I couldn’t find a way to begin that conversation so I didn’t. We walked and talked and worried about our friends (is everyone around me being ripped and torn and cut apart? If they are why on earth haven’t I heard their screams?). We ate lunch. She played me a song on my broken guitar. I told her over and over there was something important to say, but I couldn’t remember; why do I lie like that? She hugged me awkwardly once when I was cold, and once to say goodbye, and we will never be best friends again and we will never be anything else, either, except this, two people united by a lot of craziness and a lot of caring and divided by the same things.  I suppose that’s fine.

“she said…

“…my love is a fever
Come on touch my skin.
They think I’m easy, I’m easy,
’cause I let them win…”

Lots of thoughts about being a whore are floating around in my head today. Because I am one, or am called one. Because I act like one, and that makes me one? Or maybe because I am one but only sort of act like it? I’m not too clear on the concept. I know that I am technically the girl with whom the cherry bitch cheated on her boyfriend and this makes me feel whore-y. I know that no matter how lightly she touches me I writhe or gasp. I also know that I am a “physical person” who wraps her body around anyone who will stand still. I hold on, arms and legs, to my friends in the pool – but only to the ones that are attractive and kind of gay. I know that my ex-technically-girlfriend still likes me and I never liked her, not really, I was just charmed, but I am also not entirely opposed to “hanging out with her this summer” and doing who-knows-what if she’s brave and crazy enough (which, judging by her flirting, she is). I know that my admittedly slutty friends say they have taught me well, that my body does things without telling me that are sexy or sexual or attractive or something. I know that people (or maybe just cherry? but it feels like more) think I should just jump my crazy long-time full-time friend because everyone seems to have this idea that we should be part-time lovers. And really we have this strange history and strange chemistry and I don’t know what to do about that. She is going to read this and make this face: O_o. Except I don’t know what that signifies in real life, dear, so if you want to accompany that with some words, or not actually make that little emoticon at all, that would be nice.

Do these things add up to make me a whore? I’m not against it as a word; it isn’t that I think it’s rude or mean. It’s just that I am uncomfortable with myself, and honestly, frankly, if I am a whore, why am I not getting “legit ass!”?

But if I’m not then what am I? I think that I am human, that’s all, but mostly humans have some minute amount of self-restraint that I just don’t have. Whatever restraint I have comes from fear and lately I’ve been finding ways around that. I thought I would be too scared to kiss her so it would never be a problem and we could just stick by her ridiculous rule (even though realistically we bypassed it miles ago). I used to think I’d be too scared to hurt the silly skinny “ex” but now I am not so sure. I used to think I could get over the beautiful crazy best friend creature girl and just not be scared of what I wished but I am still scared but I am not scared, really, just wishful still, and hardly even that. I used to think that I would be too scared to let cherry’s hands or mine dance where they do, let alone where they’re dancing around but clearly that’s not true. So fear just isn’t being a barrier anymore and I don’t have any self-control and something bad will probably come of this and maybe I am a whore, because of that, and there’s the rub with the negative connotations: it has them because bad things happen when whore-y girls get involved.

So I’m just going to sit here, ambivalent and biting my lip. I want to do a lot of things and there’s almost nothing stopping me except this tiny fear that everything will go to shit and also my lack of knowing-what-I’m-doing. Maybe I’m a whore. Maybe not. Maybe that’s bad. Maybe not. I kind of give up.