"You know, I probably did meet somebody like that. I probably wasn't paying attention."

When I met you, I started paying attention. Saying that out loud changed my life, and maybe it has been changing other lives too that aren't just mine, people who are close to me and they are close to other people and you are helping in ways you don't know because you don't know them yet. I wonder about what he said to me, that the next boy would be the one I marry, and now that that boy is you, is that still something he believes and what does it say about me that i want his opinion founded in nothing but a gut feeling to be so true? I remember how you stood and you were like a tree and you were so beautiful in a really masculine way and when you showed me pictures of your cats I couldn't believe how I already knew you were going to be mine, even though for weeks and then maybe even a few months, I convinced both of us that wasn't going to be true. How can we be so different inside ourselves at the same time? How can olivia wilde's bra size be a 32B? How am I living in a world where I can find that out?

Why would we give this away?

And, at the same time, what am I supposed to do to make sure I hold on?

Hard sometimes to be able to understand whether I am sad for the inherit sadness of a sad thing or sad because I have, again, of course, failed. Feeling confused more than ever, feeling like I don't understand why I can't make anyone stay, feeling the most sad because I couldn't make you stay. Or maybe I can. I know it's not over yet, but everything leading up to this feels just as bad as everything else.

I guess I just don't know what else I can do.

Just words

Starting over somewhere

maybe, or repeating patterns,

or worrying about losing my job

or doing things wrong

or how all the people in Dolores Park let their dogs run wild around me like how I am always wondering about how other people are waking up every day and if they are bored like how I am bored

or how about bus roars

and that initial crack of a cigarette.

Beginning the fatigue of a good girl

is smelling that cigarette by a pool

and remembering that boys never

love the exact you-- just portraits and

words and how she doesn't do drugs

but how she doesn't care if you do

and she even likes how you used to do too much coke and spend a lot of money on Ikea furniture. 

She is sleeping through panic attacks,

she is tightening her throat,

she is instrumental in you forgetting

the brunette who hated music,

she is reminding you about leaving,

she is choosing words, and she is

somewhere like salt on your cheek.

I am really glad I did not give up.

I've reached a moment in my life where I just have wanted to be alone--- and I don't mean alone like away from other people.. I have wanted to be alone from my own self. I haven't wanted to write, have consciously resisted it. Truth is, I would love to say I know why but I don't. I have barely cried at all since November. I didn't cry more than for a little while the entire time I was driving across the country with Bryan. When I think about that, I wonder about all of this. I wonder why I don't feel sensitive to anything anymore and I hope that it's just a phase like everything else, I hope there's something left, I hope there are always more tears. I don't want to be sad--- I just want to feel something enough to cry over it.

There was a moment in the airport... My mom was drinking dunkin donuts next to me, we're just sitting waiting for two hours to board our plane, and I think of how alone I felt the second you said bye, and it was like my heart just stopped. I remember looking at my mom with wet eyes and her looking at me and she didn't ask me if I was okay... she knew just to let me be. She knew how I felt, somehow, without me saying anything. I think of this and I think of my mom's big blue eyes and I think of how for the first time she was seeing me in the middle of romance as opposed to in between it or somewhere around it- she saw the separating, the part that I had always just dealt with alone. And it was new for both of us. In a good way. Even in the sadness, there was so much undeniable love.

It's hard for me to say what comes next because I don't know. I just know that this time, like every time, I am all in as much as I know how to be. I am just praying that this lack of tears doesn't mean that I've stopped feeling as much or that I've lost my way. I am hoping I am just stronger in new ways. And that when I do finally face myself, I will feel it all and somehow I will be better because of it. Better than what, I don't know. I am not sure what to do other than just keep trying.

There's no way to know for certain, but I think I am happy.

Somewhere between doubt and magic, I am manic for you; yearning

for something more, he tells me. Stimulating commitments, he tells me. It's you, he tells

everyone. It's not his fault. It's the way things work best. It's best, for me, to keep them

far away--- across oceans, across deserts, anywhere but here. Because here, I am sad

or scared, usually. There is always darkness. Sometimes there is fog. And, of course, 

there is happiness. But the hard part is not the change itself, but the changing, the shift, 

the look on my face as my eyes roll to the back of my head and I am fainting into another

place, a place where it is cloudy and soft, and easy to get lost. So, I do my best to keep

my distance, to keep distance, to keep distant-- just enough to be in love and just enough

to destroy everything I love. This is the way of my world, the way things go here, the way

you and I only needed to meet one time for my entire life to change. This is the way things

go in a perfect world. I am still left crying.

It's not that I haven't written anything, it's more like I don't know how to finish writing any of the things I've started to write. I feel good about my life, I feel good about the way things look, I feel strongly that leaving California was the right thing, I feel like I miss the weather there but it wasn't worth my loneliness or mental health, I miss being alone kind of but I am so grateful to see my sister and my best friends all the time and I never have to be alone. I am bored in a lot of ways but also grateful for this time of peace because I think pretty soon my life will be crazy again and really it was crazy for a minute there when I was an elf. I am not interested in giving of myself right now because I can't, because I am still weak, because I am still recovering, and I hope that what comes of this process is good, and maybe important. For now, I am grateful grateful with hands in the air and also extra hands to hold the people who have been holding me and extra hands still to type with and to write with and to make spinach salad with every single day. I have learned how to make coffee, and I've written a poem, and I've accepted a job. And for the first time in so long I feel truly happy to be alive in my body and in my self because of who I am. Being miserable is so confusing when it happens for so long because you begin to wonder if you existed in the first place. And after a very long time, it begins to feel more and more like you never did and you just watch yourself doing all these things and you hear yourself talking to all these people and it feels like nothing. Nothing is still something though and I hope that that somethingnothingness was for something. Okay.