It's hard to get to how I feel about things because this whole thing isn't about how I feel so much as how I am. You see, for once, not based in emotions, but based in a state of things, the way things are, the way we are, the way I am, the way I have been my whole life but so very out of context. Do I have the nerve to just say it?

I need help.

It's without a doubt one of the most confusing things to say out loud because things are fine. Everything seems fine. I go home and my house is here and it's good and things are fine and we have running water and I feel selfish for sleeping for 14 hours but it just is what is happening. And I'm not eating or I'm eating too much. Or I don't know. In the middle of all of this, I have just been hiding from it. It wouldn't have been easier two months ago and it won't be easier two months from now-- sometimes things just are. And sometimes things are at the risk of what you need. And I see potential for a downward slope and so I do what I can to be stronger than I have been in my life. I don't know. It helps to know it's not anyone else's business and in some ways it helps just not to talk about it, helps to know I know I am doing the right thing, helps to know I am headed to safety, helps to hear that it will all be over soon, helps to know I am not alone. Helps to not be alone.

I have to keep my mouth shut.

[I prefer you]

The question is not

did we make a mistake?

the question is not
at all, more like I have a
question
in general, but i don't know what that means.

I guess we are like that, soft
usually. I guess I forgot some things though,
like the way that feels or how it can be
to trust
a human.

But the way you are is like the way your throat feels better after you drink tea when you are sick, even when you are the person who does not like tea, like we don't. Something between what things usually are like. But I remember and I know differently. But this does not change

how it feels
when humans love.

Folk Tales

I once heard a story about a girl who felt sadness and she wasn't a sad girl but she felt sadness and she had blue all inside her so when she cried for the first time ever she cried blue and couldn't stop. She cried so much it made all the oceans and turned them blue. She cried so much the oceans got full so the water turned to vapor and fell into the sky and turned the sky blue. She cried so much that when she stopped, she had no more tears left ever again. But when she went to the ocean and she looked at the sky, she remembered sadness and remembered being blue and felt warm again, knowing if nothing else, her sadness filled the whole world with something it needed.

In the beginning, there was excitement.

There was also doubt.

There has been along the way so much more to fill the anxiety, to make it rest, to help it along, to cultivate goodness, to tell our story. But somehow, I know how it will end, and somehow it ended just this way, and somehow I look back into words you probably never read and see myself as a broken sketch, a worry mark, a little girl singing "this little light of mine" holding a single candle and crying, and as many time as I say things, I never say much at all. And I haven't thought of you much, more thought just of the absence of you and curious about the absence of me. There is very little sadness. But there is a lot that is more than this.

In the beginning, there was excitement.

There was also doubt.

And when the doubt grew bigger, my excitement grew smaller, and now here I am and I know what I have to do but I fear desperately what comes next and I fear pretty badly how to reshape my life again and I fear all these things but not enough to keep me from doing them. I am like this, you know. Fear is only ever half hearted. I always know I am being taken care of, looked after, that the song inside me is just God's voice helping me along, that I would not make a choice that wasn't exactly the right one. I know there is not much here for you, but I have to keep some things to myself, I have to keep myself, I have to keep, I just have to.

I hope that when you look back on your life and when you were where I am now once again, you will remember me. And we will be holding hands and smiling somewhere, and we will have been a memory for you that shines forever, never fades with hatred like most people do. I hope that when you look back, you see it for what it was in the good times, for the good.

I just truly have nothing else to say.

Arguably, we could argue about this for days, go in circles with circular language about what roundness feels like, what it is to walk in circles, what it is to blow smoke rings and cry out about sad songs rather than let ourselves understand them, even just for a minute. I have been avoiding you in the darkness, have just been bumping around into other thoughts, knowing you were back there with that song about doing your best and out of all the times I've heard it, I remember sitting with you in the parking garage near the end most of all. It's hard to know what to say anymore.

Shut off from being shut down, I am back somewhere good. Self-judgment being at the root of why I haven't done something about all of this yet---- or is it loyalty or is it something else. I just refuse to let it be fear, I refuse to cripple, refuse to hinge, refuse to refuse, just feelings as they come.

Dreams and things...

Let's face it.

I haven't been writing because I can't/don't want to deal with thinking about the things I need to really think about and maybe part of that is a lack of ability to do that on my own anymore. I can't deal with all of it on my own anymore. A word that comes up when I mention things I need to talk about is "strong," when really I feel like the strongest thing I've done the last few days is say "maybe this is not something I can handle on my own." I have been having crazy memorable dreams about deleting my livejournal, frying eggs in the living room, having some teenage boys stab silver polished knives through my front door, and most recently a dream about having a lucid dream about my teeth falling out. I am talking to myself all the time and it's exhausting me.

I feel as I write this that it lacks authenticity, like even now I am writing with a shield, hoping to keep myself safe from saying too much, from too much self judgment, too much of things I shouldn't worry about when I write but that I always do. I am not feeling 'poetic' lately... I just feel super human. Not like SUPER HUMAN. But like I am hyper aware of how human I am and I am working really hard to reconcile this.



Anywhere I Lay My Head...