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.

fourth period.

In class with boys I always end up staring. Their skin is different- a softer, doughier white, or a harder, drier deep-brown tan. Their fingers are thick and sturdy and I imagine putting them in my mouth, grasping one big solid brown hand with my two small white ones and slipping a finger or two between my lips, between my teeth and my tongue. I want to be explored and in my wooden chair I practically feel cool bitter-salty fingers probing the smoothness of my cheeks and the wetness of the bumpy soft flesh under my tongue. I want to draw them in till fingertips reach the back of my throat, tickle and force. I want to see the look in their eyes when I push their hands back out with my tongue and my lips. I want the stubbly scruff on their faces under my hands and my cheeks and I want to tangle my fingers in silky brown curls or grasp short dark hair. I want muscles covered in golden skin and hair surrounding me. I want fingers, tongues, penises in my mouth, muscles moving in their own ways, curling or thrusting or throbbing as I clench when he comes and I can feel the desperate pushing out into the dark deep parts of me.

This is what coeducation does to me – awakens this wild animal passion for what my body thinks I need but I don’t really want.

tonight.

I am hopelessly lonely, and not in the usual way. I miss the days of the cherry bitch and her freshman devotee. I was sitting under the tree at school the other day, and I realized how strange it was to be a junior, and how new and naive and foreign and childlike the freshmen seemed.  My friends, a junior and a sophomore, both made it clear they wanted the freshmen to stay away from us. I told them I didn’t mind, but…they did. And I realized how strange it would be to develop a friendship or affection for one of these awkward childish beings in ill-fitting uniforms and clean shoes. And I wondered how that happened, and that pondering hasn’t left my mind since. How did that happen? I know, of course, exactly how that happened. But I wonder what possessed her to let me into her life, so much so that now we text everyday, sometimes talk, it’s been only two weeks or less and we’re crazy with missing each other.

Earlier this evening I was walking the dog down the street, and it was chilly and misty and the streetlights glowed yellow and the air was full of damp ghosts and memories.

I feel possessed by the past tonight.

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?