Muddled and returning

I've never been very good at keeping friends. Sure, if the strange lines and threads that pass between my life and yours so happen to intersect, we'll be fine, we'll do fine, it'll be fine and fun and dandy. But once those urgent reasons for us to know each other dissipate, so as well will our presence in each other's lives. Because I'm not good at keeping friends. That's the first sentence you read here and I don't know why I tried to elaborate on the point because it isn't even the main focal point of what I'm writing right now. Tangents and word wastage. So yes. I am not good at keeping friends. 

Which is perhaps the reason why my brain and I don't get along very well. The gravity around me, the things that keep your family and friends and job and dreams and life in place, well mine is loose or weak or wonky or wack and I can't hold anything to me, much less get a firm grip on something so slippery as my sanity. 

I feel like I've used a bunch of these sentences before. Rehashing, wrist slashing. It's a party!

Right, so, well, apparently the strength of my spinal cord and nerves is not enough to firmly anchor my head in place. Not that it's rolling on the floor, but it's definitely floating away. It's riding some sinking ship, sinking perhaps because it has an anchor much better at its job than my own, down down down under all the way into the far away and what I thought far buried land of depression again. And it's taking me with it, however I kick and scream and drag behind.

My brain and I used to be friends. I don't know when, my memory is kind of shot on this but I think I have pictures to prove it. In my baby albums, or maybe an ultrasound. We used to get along. Ideas would come and my fingers would create nice little diaries or knit things to give to my little brother or accomplish things that I could tell my parents about and everything would be good. But these sepia tinted memories are just that, long forgotten like my old myspace page. And as far back as needed to look to call this the norm, my brain and I, my moods and I, my mind and I, we have not been on the same page. Heck, we're not even reading the same book. We're in different libraries.

So now when my mind has an idea I let it sit because there is no messenger going from up there to down here and I don't get anything out of it but more disappointment in my own lack of action. Which leads to the action of more inaction and the misadventure of anxiety. Oh the places anxiety takes you. Ive only been out of the country once but I feel like I've lived 5 lifetimes full of worry. 

My body is fine and my life is fine and my world is fine but for some reason my brain didn't get the memo so now I am crying and wishing I was dying and making morbid little rhyming schemes to deflect from the fact that for the first time in years things are dark again and I've actually gone all the way to square one. Like a game of snakes and ladders and you step on that one damn reptile placed on the square right before you win and slide all the way down to the beginning. And I was about to win I was about to be a depression survivor and not I'm just depressed again. I should add it to my calling card. If I could ever fight the anxiety enough to be able to answer my phone when people call.

I don't know where I'm going with this, except maybe to try to say that the monsters are back. In many more words though.

Several endings later

It's a strange concept, love. And I'm calling it a concept because it feels even stranger to accept it as a thing. It's not tangible, though my aching fingertips would argue otherwise. It's not quantifiable, though the stories we have seem to measure it in some way. Is it a collection of memories, or is it a separate entitity to experience? Where do we find it? If we were to take the human life and dissect it like an orange, would it be found? Can we take the scalpel and point to it, teach the students, here we observe love. 

It's stranger still the things it makes you do. I feel like a dog, running in circles, jumping in hoops, all for a treat. A kiss. Affection. Or maybe I feel like the typhoons that so plague this little country of mine. Because what's the point of all this rain? All it does is leak in through my ceiling and make the air moist.

I don't know where I'm going with this. But my father told me I should start writing again, even after failing to finish all my measly attempts at novels and failing to dedicate myself to my even more pathetic attempts at blogging. So I'm going on, without knowing where I'm going. Maybe that's love. Unsure what the next sentence will be, but labor ing over each character anyway, pixels on pixels making some sort of words to eventually make a sentence to let out these ideas in my head. Maybe love is building things from pieces so small that unless you view them macroscopically it's all just jumbled scribbles.

The tightening of my chest could be due to the fact that I'm losing weight because everything tastes like cardboard. Or maybe it's a reaction to the lack of air in the room. Since you left the gravity around me has loosened again and now I'm losing things I didn't even know I could lose. Like colors and oxygen. I didn't think these things were mine enough to end up not being. But apparently they are. You learn something new everyday. 

Your pictures are still up on the wall. I never took them down because the burning my palms would feel as I lift them off their hooks would surely be worse than looking at them. I've even moved some frames closer to my bedside so I can see them clearly as I close my eyes, even with my terrible vision.

Perhaps loss would be easier to talk about. So let's try. What I know is losing you the first, oh, half dozen times? Has driven me to the ends of what I thought pain could be felt. I've been through mental facilities and rehab clinics and more emergency rooms for wrist stitches than I can count without my head getting dizzy from self pity, and yet the worst I've ever felt was you leaving. Talk about a lack of air! I've tried to kill myself more than half a dozen times and yet that was the only time I ever felt like I was dying. Because I found out I don't just need food aid sunlight water and shelter to survive, I also need you. And your leaving punched a hole in me so wide that those goddamn dogs could use it as one of their hoops. I've bled out through almost every major vein and artery reasonable reachable using a surgical blade, and yet I never experience losing as much life force as I did with your departure. Hence, the things that transpired after you left that I won't write down here. 

I got my cat Salty because I had rabbits that all died. And I was sad. So my father said the best way to mourn is to pour your love into something new, otherwise it'll spoil like milk left in the sun. So I got a cat. When my cat Salty died, I got my dog. When you left, I tried the same replacement method to stop the bleeding but it didn't work so well this time. Apparently, human relationships don't work the same way as pet ones do. Because nothing could fill the hole. Nothing could plug it up. I was running out of blood and, heck, it was so wide my damn intestines were pouring out into the floor and it was all I could do to just try and scoop everything back into me. So I tried. Because I can't even describe this pain, and I've made myself an expert on writing about depressed shit. 

Basically, I'm writing things down because my heart is broken. And my heart is broken because you're not here. And the absence is filling up with these goddamn scribbles we read, instead of being occupied by your much missed mass. Why is it I can't explain what stupid old love is but I can feel it, and especially its absence as felt through your absence, as if I know what I'm talking about? So now I'm writing things down to try and pick apart all the tangled threads of thoughts that are somehow masquerading as my brain. Whatever is in my skull definitely feels like gray matter.

The end

I tried really hard to write down every day with you. I wish I'd tried harder. Then maybe I'd have more things to post mortem-ly dissect, more words to go over and wonder and pause and bookmark and suspect. Is this the day? Is this the moment? When exactly did you stop loving me? Could this be when the tectonic plates that made 'us' shifted enough for you to go from I will never leave you to I am at the airport. To yes, this is what is want. 'This' being us being over. This being nothing at all.

Honestly, I was happy. What a funny word, honestly. As if something as flimsy as human consciousness could ever produce an absolute truth. But I was happy, is what my flimsy mind is telling me. I was happy, so happy, when it started. It was like here, you are loved you deserve love. Look at this person who you made an impression on who is back now and look how excited he is to see you. Look at what you can do for him, look, you are good. You can be loved and love back. You have that ability, in your pouch of talents. The way you looked at me could shake the earth. The way it felt like a finally, a sigh of relief, of homecoming, the way you held me. It felt like that to me and I believed it felt like that for you as well. Holy high hells it was good. It was the pure excitement of wanting another person, me to you you to me is together. It felt, pardon my French, honest. 

But I fucked up in a lot of ways. Big ways, small ways, in between sizes of mistakes. Somehow, somewhere, you didn't get out of the car to greet me anymore. I reached, you reacted but not so often anymore anything else. It felt lonely. I know why. I didn't help anything, especially with the big mistakes. Distance grew. Between us, when we were once skin to skin, lay all of these things that weren't us. Will she, will he, why won't she just. Why can't she just. Why isn't he. It all built up to put a wall, or a sea, or I don't know, some sort of barrier between us that stopped it from being what it once was. All of the expectations constantly being let down. All of the feelings so sensitive and raw, bristling at any touch. All of the things that weren't us. Because when it was just us, in your car, talking... It was as it was meant to be. Good. But even then, things -and bad things at that- , crept up and settled between us and they never left, I think. They just grew stronger. So strong the wall or the ocean or whatever dumb metaphor became almost physical. I could touch it as easily as hold your hand. It was there. That close. Real.

After having time to think, being stuck in my own head and locking myself in a room for three days now, this is probably for the best. Because the best wasn't us. We weren't that for each other. But how I wished and wanted and worked for us to be. I didn't give things up, not really. I just always felt that whatever it was I wanted, you were more. You were just more. More important, more valuable, more. 

So many mistakes, but I always tried to fix them in the end. I'm a growing girl, so I didn't always get it right the first time. But I did eventually. Or tried to. And I'm proud of myself for that. Some shitty consolation prize for being alone now, I guess. We always tried to fix it. The understanding that we are different people, and the understanding I have now that we were fundamentally different people. We don't get the fantasies in our head of how things should go when we're with someone because we don't get to control someone else. How I think you should react is never more important than how you actually do. I tried to see what you thought and react how I could but I guess trying wasn't enough. From your end, I think you did the same. We both did, but it was just not enough everytime to stop the wall or the ocean from growing thicker and taller or deeper or vaster. And now it's so much we have a country between us. Me in my room, you in yours. We tried until you didn't anymore.

One day I will have a happiness just as real, so real I can touch it. One day I will have the safety from anxiety that assured love brings. One day I will have someone who can't stand the thought of not eating breakfast with me every morning. One day I will be looked at like I'm the only thing that matters. One day someone will be so excited to see me, everytime they see me, that they can't stand to have the steps between us take as long as they would for me to walk and they will cross the distance and meet me half way. One day I will have someone excited to hold me and feel excited everytime. One day I will have some one who says fuck it, I love you. One day. Not today. 

Today I'm still not okay. Today I'm still in this room. Today I'm still trying to accept that that person won't be you.

6/29/16

Erasure

I think I missed out on a lesson somewhere, some vital piece of information that was never passed on to me most probably due to my many absences and general disregard for formal education. Am I the only one who doesn't care if someone is on their phone the entire date, if someone has no ambition or doesn't try to make great romantic gestures? All that is secondary in note for me and far behind in importance, in terms of relationships. 

When I love someone, I feel it in my gut. I feel a holy shit I love this person and I blurt it out and we go from there. I don't make a choice to feel it, but I decide to stick with it (occasionally - when you don't feel it anymore, there's nothing you can do). 

Did I miss the lesson which defined love? Because for me it's that. You love someone wit all their flaws, everything about them!, or you don't at all and let them be themselves. So why is it that love seems to be translatable to everyone else ass an opportunity to change someone? I would truly like to feel that, whatever it feels like, to actually feel loved. I don't think anyone ever did that for me. I've felt loved, because of who they can make me into. But is that really the point of it all? Why can't we see people and just dive in, head first, fuck it all! I love you! I want to find out everything about you and I will love it I don't care! Why is it that diving in means finding things you want to change?

For once, I'd really really really like to feel like someone actually loved me and not who they wanted me to be or expected me to be or saw me growing into. Why does everything have to be prefaced with correction? Yes, you didn't mean to get me to stop and change all of a sudden, it was a spur of the moment ultimatum, but you always wanted to change me. And why? I was, relatively, happy. I just wasn't what you pictured.

I mean, I get it. I'm a piece of shit human being and trash and of course no one will love me as I am because I'm awful and don't deserve it. But it would be nice to not have all that affirmated again and again and again.

I don't think anyone will ever feel that way for me and it makes me sad. The me that I am, the me that I hate, apparently you despise and wish to murder, irradiate, alter, banish too. Hell, you don't love me, who I am, at all. Just parts. And people aren't parts. So I'll degrade and crumble, if it will keep you here. Because I really love you, even how you want to destroy me, so I will do what you want. Death is what I've always wanted, and this is just a new form. I may have stopped the cigarettes and the booze but I'm indulging more and more in another bad habit - self loathing. Oh what fun times! Hobbies include: knitting and selfmutilation, physically and emotionally. 

But where was I? Oh yes. Molding and shaping and demanding and pulling and pushing and erasing and ownership (because that's what this is right? Seeing yourself owning someone, the right to their identity and the right to change it) and love. No one will ever look at me, know me, listen to me, and think, wow! She may not be perfect but I'll take it all. No. There must, as the universe commands it to be, be a transaction for all happiness that comes my way. This particular deal is: you can be happy, but you cannot be you. And I accept it.

It's just a shame. But it will never happen. Know how I know? You were my best shot. And you'll never love me for who I actually am and that's okay. I'm awful.

Late realizations, thanks to 4 hour bus rides

I realize now, thank goodness for hindsight!, that I was never in love with J. It was something close to it, but my heart never went thump thump. I made it go thump thump. I forced it to pump pump blood blood, but it never did it on its own accord. People are always surprised to find out that we lasted for two years. Honestly, it would have been much shorter if I hadn't been so lazy. I didn't love him, and I realized that before it even turned 2015. I entered the new year on the premise of a lie and I don't feel guilty about it. All I feel bad about is wasting so much time. I didn't end it sooner because I didn't want to think about the dividing of affairs, the conversations with friends, the arrangement of visitations to see the cats. I didn't want to think about sleeping alone. That was selfish. But I can't help it. Perhaps more than I ever loved him, I loved the idea that someone loved me. That was really selfish. But I'm tinged with greed and I gobbled up all I could and only when I was full did I remember that I wanted an entirely different kind of cuisine.

I didn't love him a bit. It was all a grand orchestrated mimic of what I assumed love was like. And when the deal wasn't held up on his end, the piece falling flat thanks to constantly cancelled plans and mentions of his mother, i lost interest in playing at all. Those two years are arguably some of the most depressed of my life. I grew stagnant and mosquitos laid their larvae in my open mouth.

But now it's over. Thank goodness. Finally, I can be happy, or some other close approximation.

Notes for C, September 13, 9:31 pm

I'm thinking of writing a book. I don't know what about yet. I want it to be about a girl named Suzanne. This is how I'll describe her: Suzanne was the only child of two distant parents, and a mother to none. Well, there would have been four, had she planned her parenthood. But she didn't have time for that nonsense - she could barely keep up with her own personalities. How on earth could she be expected to open up her life to a new creature when there's barely enough room in her head?

Plot ideas - Suzanne leaves town for either a. She is looking for the perfect pair of sunglasses, which is the cure for the horrible affliction she has suddenly become a victim of. The color is draining out of her life. This was fine with her, in the beginning. First it was just food, then people. But now buildings and dogs and street signs and all the things she loves aware becoming desaturated and she knows she's next. OR b. To look for a magic man to exorcize her teenage demons, though 23, she hasn't had a birthday not ending in teen. They just don't come. The day doesn't come. It goes around her, sneaks past her, jumps over her, she can't quite seem to catch it. Hoping to finally begin her adult life, she must find the magic man legend to live deep in the forests of Palawan. She travels exclusively through hitch hiking and long long walks. Of course, she finds him, but that's not the point. The traveling is the point. Unfortunately, she'll get exactly what she asks for and immediately owns forty sharp dress suits.

OR at a party, Suzanne drinks too much (she has to numb the pain of being 23) and wanders into the wrong coat room. She ends up in the land of never afters. Here lay all the infinities and the things that nothing comes after. She is over joyed and goes to find true love, but only death awaits her there. Everything there is just death, but disguised and hidden. If nothing comes after, then it's a sort of death, no matter how you skew it.

OR Suzanne suffers from a case of shrinking. Her hands and skin are contracting, but most startlingly she has been losing her vocabulary. She speaks only in 5 word sentences. It's put a strain on all her relationships, but she can't even have a good long cry about it. So she dugs a tunnel under her bed to try and uncover what she's lost, but instead she falls down to the other side of the world.

Okay thats it so far. It'd be shit but I dunno. I want to write a book.

I'll read your text now, my phone couldn't receive it last night.

I can truly relate to aomames up bringing

I want to help you learn how to feel heat. You know I'm not such a fan of air conditioning and other simulated, artificial environments. I'd much rather feel the wind and the sun and the temperature as the environment has dictated it, if you ever sleep over, you'll get it. You need to feel the heat. On your skin, on your scalp, in your bones. You need to let it sink into you, through you, past all your muscles and cartilage until it finds your center of gravity, of being. I think that's what life is about. Feeling the heat. Otherwise, what type of existence is that? Is a curated life a real one? Otherwise, what on earth are we doing?

I hate not being able to tell you goodnight. I hate it. My greeting is stuck in my throat, like a large clump of bread, and it's meant for you but you're far away and I have no way of getting it out so I guess I'll just have to choke on it and let my fingers roam across this empty bed looking for you, looking for you.

There is something about Wednesday's

In 1974, NASA's Carl Sagan sent a message out into the wonderfully vast and, relatively, empty out there that is space. In 2001, a response came in. 

I have always been amazed that a message direct edge at no one, sent out with no deliberate projection, was able to deliver home a reply. I have, for 20 years now, been sending messages, particular carefully worded snippets of thought, in particular directions, to much closer distances. Objectively speaking. Sometimes the distance between us and Jupiter seems less that that and the rest of the human populace. Especially who ever the message, my message of the day, my daily flavor, is directed towards. That, I would not feel inaccurate likening to Pluto, Humae, Makemake, and Eris and their relationship to our very own sun. I am the frozen dwarves. 

Close to giving up, hell, it took only 21 years for NASA to do it and here I am at 20, one more year to go down, the last domino! I was close to giving up. I am always there, dangling my feet off the edge of trying and not and feeling the sweet feeling of nothing below to catch me. It's a nice spot. A favorite spot. A mental hangout I hold an exclusive membership card to. 

But then something interesting happened. 

While my linguistic skills are lacking and mostly based on modern English, I have tried my best to decipher what this is, what I have received. I won't attempt to write it down. It isn't possible, and not just because of my limited vocabulary. It's more, oh shit, this is hard, it's more - it's a feeling in your finger tips that can't seem to be pressed down to paper, a presence that cannot be expelled through your layers of dermal tissue and adipose. No matter how your lymph nodes try to shove it out, much like the bubonic plague (though not deadly in that particular way, rather, it is rather pleasant), it won't work and eventually it just seeps into you and your organs and becomes part of you and sometimes you taste it in your mouth a bit. This is what I have now.

And it's a package that comes with freebies. Opening the box, the envelope, the telegram, ripping apart the container, I found not only a warmth under my skin, but a place to rest my skin. It's a wonderful place. Perhaps I'll even apply for membership, just like on my cliff. A dual citizen of the cold and hot. It's a place between his shoulders and his neck and that is where I breathe easy. I'm not the biggest fan of this strange exercise of breathing, but there, I find myself understanding the hype. I love the scent of blood, pulsing, living, rushing, hidden but right there, and it's his blood and it's warm and it lulls me to sleep. There have been recent expansions to this property. Here, a hand on a wide expanse of chest, legs mashed together to form a tangled mess a mad scientist would be proud of, other hand plunging deep into his thoracic cavity to find what on earth he possesses inside him that is awakening all my sleeping dragons and making me want to crawl inside and hang myself with his guts. It's a lovely place. Would definitely recommend to a friend. If you're visiting the area, be sure to check this out!

There is something about this person and I like it very much. I think it's the way he says words like actually and surprisingly, words I should know but somehow his tongue and lips translate to something foreign. I think it's the spaces. These little spaces he leaves, as if the vowels and consonants shouldn't touch, like mashed potatoes and green peas. Or maybe they're spaces to grow, for the aaaa's to expand and have room to breathe. I don't know. But I adore it and I would listen to every actual thing that's ever happened to him, anything and everything that has taken him by surprise.

-

I'm finding it hard to find the proper way to end this. Maybe it's all the murakami I've been shoving into my brain. Maybe it's the way this whole thing feels like a murakami book - real but not real, just two steps away from what my brain can accept. I've known him forever and yet now, I cannot comprehend two things - how I have not held his hand this entire time and that I now am. Updates to follow, as my processor continues to digest this new information, these wonderful feelings, this delicious boy who I love very much.

On flaws and change

September 4 2015-

If I'd written this a few days, no, a few hours ago, perhaps the words you're reading would've been spelled differently. Isn't that the difference, a few letters, scribbles, consonants and vowels , change what I'm saying? No, not really. Letters, scribbles, chicken scratch, sounds, all they do is serve to translate and transcribe the drums in my head into something coherent. And compared to a few hours ago, my mental drumbeat is entirely different. It's a new composition. Perhaps they fired the conductor, perhaps they finished playing the previous piece.

It's become a fact of my life - to be with someone I must change. It's been drilled into my head by every boy, every lover, every one, all the time. I, as I am, am not good enough. I'm flawed and wrong and that's wrong and. No one wants flaws. It's like throwing a ball of steel wool at a toddler and rubbing it raw. No one wants their innocence scrubbed away, not by my mass of angry, violent, ever shifting never still entropy. So I have to change. And I always consent. It's a bit strange, considering how hard headed I can be. Ask me to do something, and I'll most probably do the opposite. I'd hold my breath til death do us part of someone commanded me to breathe. But, what with my minuscule sense of self and ridiculous self-esteem deficit, any time a boy I like bats an eyelash at me or leaks out a kind word, or -heaven help me- touches me like he cares, I am useless. I will do whatever you want, don't leave me! And of course I'm flawed, yes, I am, I'll fix it just stay, love me, I'll fix it I'll change I'm sorry I'm me, I really am, I can't apologize enough.

For once though, it would be nice to be with someone who wanted to be with me, and not this idea in their head of what I could be. It would be nice for someone to see my steel wool soul and think hey, that's cool.or even, I could live with that. But that's never going to happen. It's a slow suicide, being me, and anyone who wouldn't mind that would be perfect to fall into oblivion with me. I have never met anyone so ready to collapse inwards as me before. I suppose relationships are full of promises, the biggest one is of a future together and my current state barely guarantees a tomorrow. I like it that way, I'm comfortable that way, I'm comfortable being me, and my way is that way. But I understand how no one else can stand it. I understand it's wrong and flawed and of course, so genuinely me (therefore I am as well. Of course. No surprise. I knew that already. I'm sorry).

But I'll settle for second best. And that's not to say I'm settling in any way for what I have now. I phrased that wrong. I did something wrong again. The wall is getting full of chalk marks to account for all my misdoings. 

For the first time, someone asked nicely. And then felt guilty for asking. And I am all turned around like licorice inside since this has never happened before. There has never been a doubt or a smidge of anything but sureness in anyone who has asked me to change. Because! Look at me! I'm a mess. Of course I need to change. I need to change who I am, I need to change what I enjoy, I need to change what I do because it's all WRONG WRONG WRONG I am essentially wrong I am a huge mistake, a miscalculated bomb that didn't go off when it was supposed to so now I'm just a shell waiting for an explosion, something to blast me out of the water and initiate my end. 

So when C came over when I was sick and sad and he listened to me and he asked if I wanted to change, which no one has ever done before I wasn't even aware there was anything but ultimatums at the start of relationships, I melted. My eyes, already molten from the fever, sank back and dripped into my skull and my brain has lost all its wrinkles because of the heat. I lie pathologically so I started a new one - one so convincing I'll even hoodwink myself! - yes. Yes yes yes I'll change I want to change I'll do it for you, it's not because you asked, but because I want to enjoy this, enjoy us, enjoy kissing you and I know you don't like the taste of smoke. I've repeated it enough I believe it and it's no longer a lie, it's the truth. I've suppressed any bad thoughts, I'm very good at that, at burying the dead and the bad and the irrelevant, I'm very handy with the mental shovel. So it's true now. And I'm not lying when I say it. Anymore. I want this. I really do. And if it means killing who I am, well, aren't I suicidal to begin with?

I'll make this work. Even if the 'me' I'm talking about here is still up for debate. 'I'll' figure it out.'I' really, really, really, want this.

On being depressed and being in love (2)

So maybe my strategy was wrong, maybe my plan was flawed, maybe the guy was wrong (ding ding ding we have a winner in the most boring lottery ever, come up the stage to claim your prize or continue to lounge in sweat pants). 

Being depressed and being in love is hard enough the first time. Where do I focus my what why when how? Here is a tip for the young and naive and silly and brave explorer of these artic waters of the soul - love is not losing. Love is, especially, not losing your voice. Speak! Shout! Cry, scream, cry, beat your chest, yell, bellow, cry cry cry. Remember what the vibration of your vocal cords feels like, so you can remember anything at all besides what their palm and their skin and their hair and their kisses taste like. Because other people turn to ash, eventually, either by your doing or their doing or by your minds doing and then you will have nothing and be a mute.

2 years I wasted not writing. So when the police find my body, or if they had found my body, if I had been successful - a better brighter stronger girl with sharper tools - they would have no clue as to the events, imaginary and otherwise (what's the word - real?), that led to my untimely perfectly scheduled demise. And now that I have missed my train to the Great Whatever Else, I too have no clue what was happening in my mind. How am I supposed to stop history from repeating itself when no one bothered to write anything down for future generations?

So here, now, I am getting back on the metaphorical horse, ready to gush out the blood that is, I have found through scientific experiments and multiple runs with fixed and fluid variables, very definitely there in my veins. My attempts, however, to find out if my organs are really cradled by a greater omentum, have been thwarted by the limitations of the blade I chose. But I'm digressing and digesting and getting fat and sinning. Back on track.

So yes, back in the saddle, after the last equestrian adventure led me to desperately try to fling myself off a mad running speeding jumping horse and forcing the damn thing to buck me off but then it, being a beast, reigned up and shattered my legs or my pelvis or something there in the lower two quadrants of my symmetrical human form, shattered the bones in 60 or 70 places and little fragments pierced the muscles and the muscles turned to jelly and the skin could no longer be skin, at most be Japanese paper, and can you imagine the hospital bills?

But! Through the miracle of prayer and coffee, here I am. Ready for round two. All suited up and ready to go. What happened to being a Dragon Hearted Lady? The DHL club will definitely excommunicate me after this tryst, which I want to be more than a tryst. My four chambered heart is meant to efficiently pump blood and no chambers are intended to house feelings but I fear some informal settlers have, well, settled. This inefficiency will surely lead to a lack of proper blood flow and my orthostatic hypotension will get so bad the blood will pool at my feet and my calves downwards will turn a shocking! Gasp! Purple! And they'll amputate them and the DHL club, having accepted me back after my last folly only because of the magnificent way I got rid of that stupid boy and ended that stupid thing, will definitely expel me from their ranks now!

Don't leave me legless and clawless and clanless. In fact, for the first time in a long time, I haven't wanted to be alone, so maybe, if it's at all possible, don't leave me at all.

Digested by the cold

 Forget spiders - here's a real thriller horror movie special! Here is comes, are you ready kiddos? The truth! The cold hard truth. But that's not all! Oh no, no, if you've paid the entrance fee and the toll then you my dear love, are getting your money's worth. There's nothing terrible about the truth, otherwise science and math courses would be R rated. 

Here's the whole thing, the Gordy details, the big picture: it is the most frightening thing to have the truth line up with your anxieties.

Yes! Remember that old player, that old fool, that individual once thought to be in retirement but was in actuality training to get bigger better and strong? Remember him? I do. And what does fear have to do with anxiety? Everything, my dear, my darling, my Watson, old chap! Anxiety/fear/frost urn starts in your toes. Or your fingertips. Or the ends of your ears. Extremities, that's where the pain starts. Perhaps the sickness has been sitting in your belly this whole time and now it's taken long cross-body road trips to exotic places where nails and wax grow. But yes, it starts there. Why? My anxiety ridden comrades and peers, you know as well as I that once you are sure that everyone hates you and no one wants you there and your presence is a burden and no one wants you no one wants you no one wants you there, then your bodily awareness is heightened to Everest-ian heights. 

This is air you are not meant to displace, area you are not meant to occupy, you are blocking visible light when it has a purpose and you do not. So you grow small, you hunch your shoulders, you breathe in deep. You shrink in every way, you think smaller, you shut the fuck up. You feel sea sick when you catch your own stupid reflection, why oh why did they polish these car windows so well? 

This is where Anxiety, enter stage right good friend, comes in to help in its I'll natured well meant way. Start at the ends, fold inwards. Like a long carpet or a blanket or a scarf or a ridiculous piece of paper or a streamer, do I have to keep listing more or do you understand me? Fold inwards, until you hit joints. Bend there, continue to compact, shrink, shrink, push yourself against a wall, inch your way to the door, no one will notice when you leave, except maybe they will but obviously all they will do is exhale, finally, that sigh of relief that has been building in their stomach since they first saw your ugly mug. By this point, you should be small and aerodynamic enough to fly home on the back of a breeze or a bird. Go home, crawl into bed, or just stand by the door or collapse onto cold tiles and let everything explode. Unravel! Unravel yourself with a violent explosion of terrible feelings!

Welcome home, let's review all you did and said that was wrong and annoying and why everyone 100% hates you. Just like you do.

This is what happens with anxiety. This is why I take took enjoy so many little pills. This is the routine of self hate that plants me into loam and prays nothing but a shell grows out. The rest is used as fertilizer. Or used to feed worms.

Here is the horrible part - when someone tells you your fears were right. When you think you were having a good time but really they hated every second, every trip, every loop, every word you dared escape the cage of your teeth. When kisses were bad business contracts. When memories rot like fruit. When your voice, or one of the voices, in your head starts laughing and laughing and the I told you so's are on an infinite loop and there it is again! The cold is back, but this time it's not the bite of a herbivore, it's the bite of a wolf. A shark. Rows of crooked teeth ripping apart all the things and progress you though you had made. You should have been more anxious, you shouldn't have divorced yourself from its protective embrace. Anxiety keeps you from being too much. Anxiety knows that even a drop of you is too much. Anxiety keeps you locked in your room, where you deserve to be, because that way you can't bother anyone (which you surely would do the second you step out of the door and exit the shadows and hell even the Sun will want to spit on you for blocking it's rays that is how terrible you are).

So here you are now, in this present moment, this very second, the correct time and date of the now now now - here is the scene. You are on your stomach, compressing your stomach because all the gas that was in your skull as hot air has descended because your body, under the wise and knowing guidance of Anxiety p, has directed it all to your stomach to be boiled and melted and corroded away with acids. This isn't possible with gases, but it is giving you a horrible stomach ache so you lie down and apply pressure to the wound and try to keep your torso from bursting open like a party popper and you relive the last few days all the days and wonder what everything was and why you are such an idiot and you lost all feeling in your hands and your feet again and the cold is here. Again. To stay?

The familiarity of this is startling. Love me don't leave me I hate me and now!! With w new twist - you hate me too. I know you do I know it I know it I knew it you said it. What do I do with this, what type of glove must I wear to be able to handle this situation?

Maybe sometimes it's better to just lie.