sick to my stomach.

maybe i should consult a book. the internet is useless when it comes to the important things. yes... a book. preferably a heavy leather-bound one, the kind that has nothing but etchings on the cover, and all the hand-drawn diagrams inside make your head spin along with the smell of mothballs.

maybe i should see a psychic. maybe i should not see a psychic. maybe i should see a shrink. maybe i should see a friend. not a friend. a stranger. a priest. maybe i should throw some coins in a wishing well. maybe i should get really, really high and speak in tongues and keep a tape recorder nearby. maybe i should sleep for a week straight.

maybe i should pack my bags and say my goodbyes quickly, brazenly and forever. maybe i should flush my phone down the toilet. maybe i should maybe i should maybe i should i don't know.

i'm watching everything much too carefully, like some old gypsy lady trying to read postcards from the universe. if only something - anything, really anything - could tell me what to do with my stupid heart.
i just can't catch a break......

doubt, i want to do

away with you. quit following me around. seriously, you're like that annoying little sibling who's hanging off your leg making faces while you're trying to work.

today's just one of those days when everything is eating me, all at once. why can i not find the time to e-mail my folks and make sure they haven't forgotten i love them? why do i let my people-pleasing tendencies torture me so much and turn me into a liar? why can i not be different, better; why can i not be so talented that the world forgives me for everything i do wrong, and good fortune rains on me out of a clear blue sky. why do i work so hard and always feel like i deserve so little??

i am trying to tell myself these are just pre-show nerves, but i don't know that it's ever been this bad before. certainly there is more responsibility involved in this one, but shouldn't my confidence be rising to the task? i worry about this so much it's kind of ridiculous. i worry that i've been blindsighted by my own ambition and don't at all have the skill set necessary to pull it off, and that nobody will tell me i did a poor job out of sympathy. argh. argh. ARGH.

i hate everything right now. including the fact that i'm letting myself talk about it. i honestly just don't know what else to do... this message will self-destruct.

in three. two. one...

hi, there. long time.

it's hard to think of what to say to the internet these days.

the truth is, most of what i want to say is nothing that can be adequately expressed in writing. it'll come out bleak and flat. just watch.

i'm pretty fucking tired. tired right now, and tired in general. i'm tired of being worried, and in doubt, and constantly fighting to stay motivated. i would like to be able to go home. just for a few days, to be around people who love me unconditionally and want to take care of me. i'm twenty-seven and i have never missed my mom more.

that's just what i want. i need a lot of other things, which are equally as far out of reach right now. i tell myself, as always, that there's no point in focusing on those... that there's a lot i can do with where i'm at, and that's all i should be concerning myself with. a lot has been going well for me lately, after all.

i really hope i'm not lying. i feel especially small and vulnerable right now.

snap out of it, sister. this, too, shall pass.
i'll have better stories soon. right? right.

"down here, we all float"

i look at my last post and i'm like, eye-ruh-neeee.

maybe i'm a low-level psychic or something. things have happened this way before - little echoes of the future, causing a stir in my mind that i can't understand or place. it's confusing, but also comforting somehow. almost like i already dealt with the fallout of this, before "this" became a fact.

stephen called to see how i was doing, for the fourth time. this was directly after i had summoned the courage to face my account balances. it had been a very grave and gruelling fifteen minutes.
"i don't have any money. none at all. i have negative-money. i don't own a cent."
"it's a good thing you have a me, then."
"i suppose i'm not going to die, am i."
"nope. you're not going to die."

then he said he was taking me out for dinner and i said, maybe i should lose my job more often. then i laughed the laugh of the temporarily insane.

well, hopefully the temporarily insane.

imagery:
i'm alone in the middle of a winter landscape which suddenly turns out to be a gigantic sno-globe. i only know it's not real because someone on the outside is shaking it. i'm weightless and tiny and bouncing off the glass, and the world is a flurry of plastic snow.

but sometimes, like say

right now, i just want a real life. a real job, with real people. who read real books. this false glamour of living in a world entirely made up of concepts and ideas gets so old.

i look at my hands, they've aged; they're these strange foreign objects now. my fingers scream of years spent in the service industry. not that there's anything wrong with that. my hands are so unpretentious, they've never even heard of nail polish or any of that cuticle cream jazz. i don't mind that. who gives a shit about cuticle cream??

i don't mind my hands, but i'd like to get to know them again. there has to be a new chapter around the corner somewhere, there has to... these days, my mind is always either on hold or in overdrive, and it can't be healthy and it doesn't feel good. it hurts, actually. all the time.

how did this take me so long to realize? i think some part of me honestly believed that i was living the dream. or a dream, anyway. well, i don't want it anymore. i want things to start being real.

i want that so bad it makes me cry.

it was a good end to the night, but i took

the last conversation to bed with me, and it fermented in my sleep. when i woke up i could feel it: a hot, tight ball of compact rage in my belly. poisonous. deadly. if i make any sudden moves, it could mean absolute disaster.

i have to learn little by little, and cautiously. i thought, for a time, that it would be possible to snap right back like none of it ever happened. it seemed possible. i could just refuse to be angry. life goes on, all that happy horseshit.

it's most terrifying when it happens like that, for no reason. all of a sudden out of a clear blue sky there's a downpour of words i should have said, things i should have done. ways i should have protected myself. blame. guilt. hate. i failed myself, i really did, and no matter how nice people are being about it, i know that's the case. and i feel stupid and weak and broken and nothing can make any of it better.

then. then, the anger comes. it's so ugly and so relentless. i control it, with my mind, and it makes my stomach hurt. i'm sick with fear that i can't contain anger this big, that it's going to eventually unravel in my gut and pour out of me like radioactive lava, destroying the precarious threads of confidence that keep me in one piece. destroying everything.

that it's going to happen when i least expect it. that is, perhaps, my biggest fear.

i build myself on rationality, or at least the aspiration to rationality. i love logic. i love intellectualizing the world into submission. right now, right this second, all that is is a house of cards in a draughty room. how am i supposed to go about not knowing if i'm going to fall off the hinges at any given time? how could this even have happened to me in the first place?

quicksand. no real ground. just a whole bunch of ridiculous notions about the sturdiness of human character and the power of self-assurance.




i want my two years back. i want it all back. i am so fucking angry and i want it all fucking back and i can never win this one.

reference of the day

which pretty much no one reading this is likely to get:

i feel like i'm walking through the dreams of the city, chasing shimmery people in shadowed buildings, and nothing i do seems quite right.

i wish i could flip a switch in my head and just. go. to. sleep.

when i look at my face in the mirror sometimes,

i don't see my face. i see scattered elements of my mother's face from years back, superimposed. and my mind fills in the blanks like some fucked-up connect-the-dots image, and then all i can see is her. i get trapped in her face.

i know i'm under there, somewhere. i squint, i unfocus, like people do when they look at a 3d picture. but try as i might, i just can't... see... me.

sometimes this happens for a week straight and i actually forget what i look like. then i catch a glimpse of myself one day, walking by a mirror or a window. usually by accident. and suddenly, there i am... me. really, really me! this whole separate, fresh new person.

it's a terrifying experience each time. what if i disappear and never come back? seriously. how is it possible to know who you are, if you're not what you see? when it first happened years ago, it gave me a full-blown panic attack. or maybe the panic attack is why it happened in the first place. who knows? everything reflects itself endlessly.

be okay with that, be okay with that, be okay with that. okay?